FRÖBEL, FRIEDRICH. – Pedagogue, founder of the modern “kindergartens,” b. at Oberweissbach (Thuringia) on 21 April 1782; d. at Marienthal (St.-Meiningen) on 21 June 1852. The son of a Protestant pastor and an enthusiast of the Pestalozzian method, which he had observed several times at Yverdon, after several unsuccessful attempts to carry out his plan of instructing German women and girls in the art of educating children, he finally opened his first “kindergarten” at Blakenburg (1837), for children from three to seven years of age. This type of school, however, although pursued with enthusiasm and supported by press conferences, subscriptions, etc., failed financially; but through the efforts of Baroness Berta Marenholtz-Bulow, an enthusiastic supporter of the Froebelian idea, it was reopened in Marienthal Castle, made available by the Duke of Saxony. At F.’s death, the duchess, whom he had called the “mother of the idea,” succeeded him as director; and to her is owed the multiplication and spread of the “kindergartens” throughout Europe and in America.
It is not easy to grasp the philosophical presuppositions of F.’s pedagogy, because he did not work them out systematically; they can nevertheless be reconstructed from his writings. His pedagogy rests on mystical-aesthetic premises, derived from Romanticism and especially from Schelling, and bearing the mark of immanentist and dialectical monism: all nature is a single principle, the creator God who merges with it and whom it manifests through the harmony of its most varied forms, which become increasingly complex as one rises from inanimate nature to living beings. Now, the manifestation of the divine in man takes place through the impulse toward creative activity, by means of which man reproduces, and insofar as he can carries out, the work of God. Education, therefore, must not impose some external model to which one must conform, but should, so to speak, foster the internal model, God, the active creator, and watch over the development of man’s spontaneous tendency to create; in other words, free self-education and self-formation are required, while being carefully supervised. And since the divine that is in man is also, ultimately, in all nature surrounding him, this nature must not be considered merely in its physical materiality, but rather penetrated in its inner life, in order to grasp in it the symbol of a spiritual idea. Here too education does not impose anything, but watches over the child’s tendency to spiritualize nature and to animate it through his imagination.
Now, the divine in the child, the spontaneous tendency toward creative activity, manifests itself essentially in play, considered not merely as distraction or amusement, but also, and more importantly, as work, insofar as it imitates and reproduces some action or object (the movement of the peasant sowing grain, the puffing train, the trotting horse). And since the earth exerts a powerful attraction on the child, play-work should be carried out by placing him in contact with it, having him dig, sow, and cultivate herbs and flowers. He will learn to love the products of nature, the physical effort required to obtain them, and the beauty and greatness of God, who created nature. For this play-work, with its symbolic and evocative value, F. devised a series of six gifts (the ball, the sphere, the cube and the cylinder, the cube divided into eight small equal cubes, the cube divided horizontally into eight bricks, the cube divided into equal cubes, some of them cut along one or two diagonals; the cube divided into equal bricks, some of them subdivided lengthwise; hence the ideas of equality, movement, geometrical figures, etc.; these are supplemented by wooden tablets, sticks, and suitable strips of paper, which, by being variously interwoven, can produce the most varied objects). One then proceeds to the so-called “occupations”: reproducing designs and decorative ornaments with cardboard and strips; forming figures with beads, buttons, and pieces of cloth; working in various ways with sand; digging tunnels, forming dolls, etc.
The Froebelian method corresponds admirably to child psychology: it answers, in fact, to the three tendencies so lively in the child—the pleasure of observing, the need for activity, and the sense of personality—by fostering these tendencies rather than replacing them. For F., the center of the school is not the teacher but the pupil; a principle now common, at least in pedagogical theory, but at that time misunderstood and derided. He may be reproached for excessive geometrism in the construction of the gifts and for an erroneous religious and philosophical conception; but since the method, in its application, does not necessarily require these presuppositions, it can find ample nourishment in the facts of Scripture and the lives of the saints, and can be applied admirably not so much in its material execution as, and even more, in the spirit that animates II. Thus one must recognize in the Froebelian idea something highly felicitous, which has everywhere exerted a broad and well-deserved influence and even in our own day is a source of splendid successes for anyone who knows how to put it properly into practice; activism (v.) have in fact been inspired by II.
Among other works, F. wrote: Die Menschenreichung (Keilhasz 1826; Italian trans. with writings and notes by A. Salani, Turin 1929; by M. Brivio Claretta, Padua 1937); Familien, die erziehernden, Wechenblatt für Selbstfindung und Bildung Anderer (Leipzig 1826); Mutter-un-Keschleder, Ein Familienbuch (Blakenburg 1843); G. Pahn, Der Mensch, Denker und Erzieher, Selbstzeugnisse (ibid. 1940).
FROBEN, JOHANN (Frobenius). – German printer and publisher, b. at Hammelburg (a small town in Lower Franconia, Bavaria) in 1460, d. at Basel in 1537.
Having worked as a proofreader in the printing house of Giovanni Amerbach, he began his own printing activity with the publication of a Biblia integra dated Basel, 27 June 1491. Numerous other biblical, patristic, and miscellaneous works followed, including works in Greek and Hebrew, highly renowned for the beauty of their editions and the accuracy of their texts, which earned him the title of “princeps typographiae Basiliensis.” He was on friendly terms with Giovanni Hausschein, known in Latin as Oecolompadion, and even more so with Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose various works he printed, including the Adagia (1513) and his extremely rare first edition of the New Testament in Greek (1516). For the copious illustrations included in his editions, he employed the work of Urs Graf and Hans Holbein. After his death, the printing activity was continued by his son Hieronymus (1501–63)
and by his son-in-law Nikolaus Bischoff, known as Episkopius (1501–1564).