Fröbel, Friedrich

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, an enthusiast of the Pestalozzian method, which he 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 their children, he finally opened at Blakenburg (1837) his first "kindergarten" for children from 3 to 7 years of age. However, this type of school, although carried on with enthusiasm and supported by press conferences, subscriptions, etc., failed financially; but through the efforts of Baroness Berta Marenholtz-Bulow, an enthusiast of Fröbel's idea, it was reopened in the Castle of Marienthal, granted by the Duke of Saxony. On Fröbel's death, the duchess, whom he had called "mother of the idea," succeeded him in the direction; and to her is due the multiplication and spread of the "kindergartens" throughout Europe and in America.

It is not easy to grasp the philosophical presuppositions of Fröbel's pedagogy, because he did not elaborate them organically; they can nevertheless be reconstructed from his writings. His pedagogy is founded on mystical-aesthetic premises, derived from Romanticism and especially from Schelling, and which smack of immanentistic and dialectical monism: nature as a whole is a single principle, God the creator who is confounded with it, and which it manifests through the harmony of the most varied forms, the more complex the higher one ascends from inanimate to living nature. Now the manifestation of the divine in man takes place through the impulse to creative activity, by means of which man reproduces, does, as far as he can, the work of God. Education therefore must not set up some external model to which to conform, but rather second, so to speak, the internal model, God, the active creator, and watch over the development of man's spontaneous tendency to make; in other words, there is required, while still watching over it, free self-education and self-formation. And since the divine that is in man is also at the bottom of all nature, which surrounds him, this nature must not only be considered in its physical materiality, but rather be penetrated in its intimate life so as to grasp in it the symbol of a spiritual idea. Here too education does not impose, but watches over the tendency in the child to spiritualize nature, and to attain it with his imagination.

Now the divine in the child, the spontaneous tendency to creative activity, manifests itself essentially in play, considered not only as distraction or amusement, but also and more as work, inasmuch as it imitates and reproduces some fact or object (the movement of the peasant who sows the grain, the train that puffs, the horse that trots). And since the earth exercises a powerful attraction on the child, let play-work be carried out by putting him in contact with it, making him dig, sow, cultivate herbs and flowers. He will learn to love the products of nature, the physical effort to obtain them, the beauty and greatness of God who created nature. For this play-work, with the value of symbol and appeal, Fröbel devised a series of six gifts (the ball, the sphere, the cube and the cylinder, the cube divided into eight small and equal cubes, the cube divided horizontally into eight bricks, the cube divided into equal small cubes, but some cut along one or two diagonals; the cube divided into equal bricks, but some subdivided lengthwise; whence the ideas of equality, of movement, of geometric figures, etc.; to these are added little wooden sticks, small rods, strips of suitable paper, intertwining in various ways, and producing the most varied objects). One then passes to the so-called "occupations": reproducing drawings and decorative ornaments with cardboards and strips; forming figures with little beads, buttons, pieces of cloth; working in various ways with sand; making tunnels, forming puppets, etc.).

The Fröbelian method corresponds admirably to child psychology: it seconds, in fact, the three tendencies so alive in the infant and the child: the pleasure of observing, the need for activity, the sense of personality, and this by favoring their tendency, not substituting itself for them. For Fröbel the center of the school is not the teacher, but the pupil; a maxim, now, common at least in pedagogical theories; but at that time misunderstood and derided. He can be reproached for an excessive geometrism in the formation of the gifts, an erroneous religious and philosophical conception; but since the method in its application does not necessarily require these presuppositions, it can find much nourishment in the facts of Scripture and of the lives of the saints, and can be applied admirably not so much in the material execution as and more in the spirit that animates it, so one must recognize in Fröbel's idea something quite felicitous, which has everywhere exercised a vast and well-merited influence and is even in our days a source of splendid successes, for one who knows how to carry it out well; indeed, several applications of activism (v.) have drawn inspiration from it.

Fröbel wrote among other things: 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).

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