His institute in the castle of Yverdon (Canton of Vaud) was an important centre for 20 years, from 1805 to 1825, which attracted observers from many countries to witness Pestalozzi's theories in practice. It was Pestalozzi who first developed educational concepts like teacher training and curriculum innovations like group work, field trips, grade levels, ability grouping, and allowing for individual differences. He had a profound influence on many others in educational theory, including Friedrich Froebel, the German inventor of the kindergarten.
Pestalozzi took up Rousseau's ideas and explored how they might be developed and implemented. He opposed memorization learning and strict discipline, and pioneered in the use of tactile objects in the teaching of natural science.
of Friedrich Froebel, 1782-1852 stresses the respect with which the individuality and ability of each child should be treated; the importance of creating a happy, harmonious environment in which he or she can grow; and the value of self-activity and play as a foundation on which the integrated development of the whole person can be built.
Freidrich Froebel was a Ferman eductionalist. He was known best for the founding of kindergarten. Froebel was born in 1782 in the village of Oberwebach in Thuringia, Germany. His childhood was difficult because his mother died when he was a baby and his father abandoned him. Froebel was given to his uncles care, who had a son that died at the age of ten. Frobel never showed much interest in school except for the field of mathmatics. Despite his many hardships, he had a strong christian faith and a love for nature. This is what was said to be central to his thinking as an educationalist. After several attempts of trying to attent the University, he was finally allowed. This is when he got into debt from tuition payments and was thrown in prison.
After Froebel's college years, he got a job in the forestry department at Bamberg. After this, he got a teaching job at Frankfort. His strong christian faith led him to the field of education. Froebel later married a woman who shared his beliefs and values. She died in 1836 and he remarried in 1851. Two months after Froebel's 70th birthday, he died.
Froebel first came into teaching through a school run along Pestalozzian lines. He believed that humans are essentially productive and creative, and that fulfillment comes through developing these in harmony with God and the world. His vision was to stimulate an appreciation and love for children, to provide a new but small world for children to play with their age group and experience their first gentle taste of independence. His kindergarten system consisted of games and songs, construction, and gifts and occupations. The play materials were what he called gifts and the activities were occupations. His system allowed children to compare, test, and explore. His philosophy also consisted of four basic components which were free self-activity, creativity, social participation, and motor expression. Froebel's kindergarten system grew internationally as an educational movement. It is a well established part of the American school system as well as many other parts of the world.
Froebel's ideas with respect to the earliest education from the cradle up are quite different from those of Pestalozzi. They are founded on a new theory of the child's nature, even if they do not contradict Pestalozzi's, but the practical means to carry out his ideas are offered by Froebel not Pestalozzi; for by Froebel the instinct and educational intuition of the mother are first elevated to an intelligent mode of action, and the right means for this are presented to them....education has also to do with the soul. Froebel teaches the right way to deal with the child's soul as it gradually awakes from unconsciousness, and he can do it because he understands clearly the relation between the unconcious condition of childhood and the conciousness of the mature mind...that is one thing; but in another direction he goes beyond Pestalozzi. Instead of the principle of observation on which Pestalozzi rests, Froebel combines doing with observing. Then he lets children represent their observations objectively and certainly, not only by imitation but freely by remembrance, which thereby prepares for inventive activity. In this way only is Pestalozzi's demand, that of combining power of action (Koennen) with knowledge, fully realized....the using of labor as a means of education was limited by Pestalozzi to mechanical work and cultivation of the ground. Froebel's method proposes to banish all that is merely mechanical, and offers the means of methodically exercising the limbs and senses in every productive work...children are thereby elevated to productive activity in the full sense of the word, and artistic conception will be prepared for wherever the inborn capacity for it exists.
"This then is the house of the prophet," said someone in our party, as we entered the great courtyard of the Marienthal* house, which stood back, two stories high, with a front of eleven windows, looking more like a dwelling-house of a farm than a castle, but pleasant and homelike in the midst of the old green trees that surrounded it...on one side were very beautiful old lindens, which in flowering time spread their fragrance far and wide.....
Froebel attended the training institute run by John Pestalozzi at Yverdon from 1808 to 1810. Froebel left the institution accepting the basic principles of Pestalozzi's theory: permissive school atmosphere, emphasis on nature, and the object lesson. Froebel, however, was a strong idealist whose view of education was closely related to religion. He believed that everything in this world was developed according to the plan of God. He felt that something was missing in Pestalozzi's theory: the "spiritual mechanism" that, according to Froebel, was the foundation of early learning. "Pestalozzi takes man existing only in appearance on earth," he said, "but I take man in his eternal being, in his eternal existence." Froebel's philosophy of education rested on four basic ideas: free self expression, creativity, social participation, and motor expression.
Kindergarten is a classroom program that consists of children ages three to seven years of age. The programs range from half days to full days of school depending on the availability of the school system. For most children this is the first step towards developing social skills in a group setting without the assistance of mom or dad. Most kindergartens share the objectives of teaching social skills, self-esteem and developing a child's academic ability.
The first kindergarten was founded by a man named Friedrich Froebel. Friedrich Froebel was known as the "Father of Kindergarten" because he developed the first kindergarten in Germany in 1837 (Colliers). His kindergarten developed theories and practices that are still being used today in kindergarten classrooms. His ideas were that children need to have play time in order to learn. Kindergarten should be a place for children to grow and learn from their social interaction with other children.
The first kindergarten was established to help children of poverty and who had special needs. "Many nurseries at this time would coincide with the kindergartens which were run by the philanthropically minded women in order to serve the families of the poor" (Cremin). These nurseries/kindergartens would stress the systematic play of Froebel's philosophy. Through systematic play the children are able to learn to discriminate, analyze, share and solve problems.
Through the efforts of many people the kindergarten has worked its way into many schools, private and public.
Froebel's kindergarten was a school for the psychological training of little children by means of play and occupations. The kindergarten method as defined by Froebel is based upon a series of geometrical gifts and a system of categories. In the kindergarten, the child plays with one of the gifts at a time to discover its properties and possibilites for design. The gifts were presented to the child in sequence and the child was allowed to play with them freely. Whenever the child ran out of ideas for play, the mother or teacher can invoke one or more of the categories to suggest another way to play. The child is thus encouraged to think about certain kinds of designs that can be made with the gifts.
Other gifts consisted of slats, sticks, rings, strings and points, colored tablets, colored papers to cut and fold, clay and sand, pencils and paints.
The wooden blocks, gifts two to six are available from The Froebel Gallery
For details of makers of the original gifts and occupations around the world, send email to froebelweb@yahoo.com