Early Years Pioneers: Friedrich Froebel

'Come let us live with our children' Friedrich Froebel, founder of the Kindergarten

The name of the German educationalist Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) is indissolubly linked with the kindergarten - literally, the children's garden. This was his name for the system of education for young children he devised that incorporated what was then, in the early 19th century, the revolutionary idea that children learn best through play.

The use of play for learning had occurred to several other writers on education before him, notably the English philosopher John Locke, but no one had developed it to the extent that Froebel did. Not only did he invent objects for children to play with, which were called the Gifts and the Occupations, but he also justified their use by drawing upon philosophical ideas associated with German Romanticism and Idealism.

The ideas of these movements were at the centre of his thought on education whose point of departure was a conception of an absolute that he conventionally referred to as God. His conception of God was far from orthodox, as his deeply-held mystical religious beliefs have more in common with today's New Age religious movements than mainstream Christianity.

God for him was within nature, just as for the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Like Wordsworth, Froebel thought that God could be known through contact with nature and moral lessons could be learned from it. This accounts for the importance Froebel ascribed to the study of nature and children's care for plants and animals in the kindergarten.

Unlike some of today's postmodernist thinkers who celebrate difference, Froebel sought to unite disparate things. This search motivated his studies of nature and mineralogy and for a while he worked in a museum of minerals.

He also strove for unity between God, the child and nature, and criticised much of his own education as disconnected knowledge.

Believing that children were originally good but sometimes became bad through inappropriate education, Froebel saw the main purpose of education as one of protecting children from being treated in ways that interfered with their natural development and caused them to become deviant, so that they could come to know God and their relation to nature and humanity.

Developmental stages

Froebel's thinking had a utopian element, as he thought that by means of the right kind of education, both individually and collectively in a new society, humans could be made perfect. This was the context in which he invested so much significance and importance in the early years of life. He viewed these years developmentally as consisting of distinct stages, each of which a child had to complete before commencing the next one.

He gave several names to the stages, but the ones he used most were earliest infancy and earliest childhood. In this stage a child is educated in its family. He called the second stage boyhood (he rarely wrote of girls), and in this stage the school provides education. For each of these stages he prescribed forms of education that he thought were the most suitable to the needs of the child.

In his book, Mother's Songs, Games and Stories, first published in 1844, Froebel provided pictures and music, songs, movements and finger plays to accompany them, so mothers could use them in their play with their babies.

The book was also to be used in the kindergarten, which he thought of as linking home and school so that the child's experience was one of continuity and the kindergarten and family were jointly involved in children's education.

In school, children were also to play and engage in free activity, with a strong emphasis on construction of various kinds, and were to be introduced to the 'subjects of instruction'. Froebel laid great stress on learning through self-activity, which in earliest childhood was achieved through play. He wrote that 'the plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life'. Whatever we become in later life has its origin in our play in childhood, which, he said, was 'not trivial' but 'highly serious and of deep significance'. Play in boyhood was to be accompanied by work, mainly domestic in nature, so that in conjunction with school knowledge the child attained all-sided development.

Views of women

As might be expected, much of Froebel's thought was rooted in the context of the times he lived in and now seems a little archaic. One example of this was his view of women. He came to believe that the future of society lay in women's hands as mothers and educators. This, for him, was their 'mission' in a society that had a fairly rigid sexual division of labour.

He thought, somewhat inconsistently, that mothers instinctively care for and educate their babies and children, but that this was not enough. These practices should be made conscious. His notion was that early years education should have a knowledge base and this implied that all in early years should be trained in that knowledge.

If many of his ideas, like the significance and necessity of play, do not seem exceptional today, this is because they have entered the common sense of early years practice. They have done this because they corresponded with the experience of early years practitioners. Even our nursery schools are descended from the free kindergartens begun in England by Froebel's followers. This is because when nursery schools received state funding after 1918, the majority had been free kindergartens.

While play materials of many different sorts have replaced the Gifts and Occupations, Froebel's fundamental emphasis on creative expression and his reverence for childhood continue to resonate, even though our world is very different from his. This suggests that his ideas are both timeless and universal.

What were Froebel's main messages?

• Education should be aimed principally at moral and spiritual development
• Children pass through developmental stages
• Education should take account of the characteristics of those stages
• Education in the early years is of vital importance to the child's later life
• Learning takes place best through self-activity
• Play is the best activity for children in their early years
• A high value should be placed on creative expression
• All involved in the education of young children should be highly trained.

Professor Kevin J Brehony is Froebel Professor of Early Childhood Studies, Froebel College at Roehampton University

Suggested reading

• Brehony, K J and Froebel, F (2001) The origins of nursery education: Friedrich Froebel and the English system. London, Routledge (6 vols)
• Liebschner, J (1991) Foundations of progressive education. Cambridge, Lutterworth Press
• Liebschner, J (1992) A child's work : freedom and play in Froebel's educational theory and practice. Cambridge, Lutterworth
• Froebel Educational Institute, www.froebel.org.uk
• www.froebeltrust.org.uk