Froebel, Friedrich
fro'bel, Friedrich (1782-1852), the founder of kindergartens. He was born in the rural quiet of a village parsonage in Thuringia, April 21, 1782. At the age of one year he lost his mother. Although a stepmother took her place he grew up a shy, wandering, lonely child, with the feeling that he was neglected,--that no one cared for him. The worthy pastor was not a man of means, but he sent his son to the University of Jena, aiming, with little success, to fit him for an official position in the department of agriculture or of forestry.
Left by the death of his father to rely on his own efforts, Froebel became a tutor, but carried on studies with a view to architecture. At the suggestion of the director he became an instructor in a Frankfurt school. One summer Froebel took his pupils on a fourteen day tramp, each boy carrying his own knapsack, to visit Pestalozzi at Yverdon, a Swiss village beyond Berne. The boys studied geology, birds, and flowers. The two men formed an acquaintance that has linked their names for all time. In 1807 Froebel accompanied two lads to Yverdon in the capacity of tutor and with them became an inmate of Pestalozzi's school. In 1811 he went to the University of Gottingen, and later to Berlin to fill in certain gaps, of which he felt conscious, in his education.
In 1813 he joined the army enlisted to free Germany from the domination of Napoleon. At the conclusion of field service he was placed in a comfortable position in the royal mineralogical museum of Berlin, but an eagerness to engage in the work of teaching, to him a mission, drove him out into a life of narrow want and privation. Several years were spent in various schools in Germany and in Switzerland. With friends he undertook the establishment of a school to carry out his ideas, but it was not a success. He was employed by the canton of Berne as director of a cantonal orphan's home, but his wife's health was such, it is said, that she could not endure the effects of mountain air.
Finally, in 1837, he made arrangements to open a school in Blankenburg, in which to carry out his peculiar ideas of education. Here the name "kindergarten" occurred to him while taking a walk. The first actual kindergarten, says Lindner, was opened June 24, 1840, the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of printing.
Other kindergartens were established. Froebel was hopeful, when suddenly a bolt fell from the sky. The Prussian minister of education, such was his authority, in 1851 sent forth an order that "on account of their close connection with the destructive tendencies in church and state" all kindergartens should be discontinued. To cap the sum of his miseries, Froebel's faithful wife, the sharer of his poverty, died. He gave the rest of his life to raising the ban placed on his work. A progressive minister came into power, Diesterweg of local renown, and after ten years kindergartens were permitted to reopen.
The seventieth anniversary of Froebel's birthday was made an occasion of rejoicing. After a long waiting, light began to appear. Educators began to realize that he stood for an idea. It is pleasant to relate that, on entering a schoolmasters' meeting at Gotha, those present rose to greet the old man and hailed him with a threefold "hoch." Tears of joy, it is said, streamed down his face at this recognition. He was indifferent seemingly to money and position, but he, like the true schoolmaster, coveted the esteem of his fellow men. He died June 21, 1852.
Froebel's writings are not easily understood. His ideas may be gathered more readily from the writings of his successors. His work is not to be measured by the kindergarten alone, but rather by the impulse he gave to gentle methods and kindly intercourse in the schoolroom. His ideas of primary education were taken up by a lady of social standing, wealth, and education,--the Baroness von Marenholz-Buelow of Berlin. She became the apostle of the kindergarten. She established kindergartens at Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, and elsewhere, and she saw to it that the attention of the world was gained by an attractive kindergarten exhibit at the World's Fair held in London in 1854.
Froebel's birth was obscure, his life was one of struggle, his death was unnoticed; but the hundredth anniversary of his birth was celebrated in a manner befitting the memory of one whose ideas have encircled the globe. In childhood he was called "that moonstruck child," and in advanced years an "old fool," but he never gave up an idea. Even on his deathbed he exclaimed, "A truth cannot die." In Thuringia, among the green hills where he was born, the seven letters
FROEBEL
are cut deep in the face of an overhanging rock. There is no other inscription. None is needed. The world knows Froebel.
See Kindergarten; Pestalozzi