The Genesis of Kindergarten: A Historical Exploration
The kindergarten is ubiquitous, but how many of its former pupils really know how it came about and what philosophies it is based upon? This article delves into the origins and evolution of this influential educational concept, tracing its roots back to the visionary German educator Friedrich Fröbel.
Friedrich Fröbel: The Founder of Kindergarten
Fröbel was the founder of the kindergarten. Friedrich Froebel (born April 21, 1782, Oberweissbach, Thuringia, Ernestine Saxony [now in Germany]-died June 21, 1852, Marienthal, near Bad Liebenstein, Thuringia) was a German educator who was the founder of the kindergarten and one of the most influential educational reformers of the 19th century. Invented in the 1830s by German educator Friedrich Froebel, kindergarten was designed to teach young children about art, design, mathematics, and natural history.
Fröbel's early life experiences profoundly shaped his educational philosophy. The son of a Lutheran minister, he experienced a childhood marked by loneliness and neglect, fostering a deep connection with nature that later evolved into a spiritual reverence. This kinship with nature, combined with influences from educators like Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Christian Weiss, laid the foundation for his innovative approach to early childhood education.
The Core Principles of Fröbel's Kindergarten
Froebel declared the child to be essentially good by nature, a bundle of possibilities at the beginning of life. As a result of these ideas, Froebel and his followers developed a new theory of childhood education - symbolic education. This advanced the idea that the child's thoughts pre-existed as feelings and emotions, but that these could not be cultivated directly, only through the strenuous training of intellectual faculties were these feelings given general form thus/allowing them to become ideas. Froebel's major contribution was to divide the process of early education between birth and the age of six, into distinct stages of physical and mental development - infancy, early childhood, and childhood. For each of these stages he developed distinct educational tasks.
Fröbel's kindergarten was rooted in several key principles:
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Self-Activity: Self-activity set the direction for childrens' development and enabled them to be actively creative and social participants. Froebel believed in "self-activity" and play as essential factors in child education. The teacher’s role was not to drill or indoctrinate the children but rather to encourage their self-expression through play, both individually and in group activities.
Play-Based Learning: Kindergarten has always included singing and dancing, as well as observation of the workings of nature-the growth of plants, the symmetries of crystals and seashells. One’s teacher was usually a woman and she led the class in activities that would have been considered play outside the school. Froebel insisted that improvement of infant education was a vital preliminary to comprehensive educational and social reform. Froebel devised circles, spheres, and other toys-all of which he referred to as “gifts” or “occupations”-that were designed to stimulate learning through play activities accompanied by songs and music.
Unity and Interconnectedness: Underlying this argument is the fact that Fröbel pedagogy was transformed into a modern form with the help of Elsa Köhler, an Austrian educational researcher, who worked together with Ellen and Maria Moberg. He began to perceive “transforming, developing energy” in the smallest fixed forms of nature’s infinite palate and learned to recognize people, plants, and crystals as equivalent consequences stemming from the same laws of growth: “And thereafter my rocks and crystals served me as a mirror wherein I might descry mankind, and man’s development and history. … Nature and Man now seemed to me mutually to explain each other, through all their numberless various stages of development.
Symbolic Education: Froebel and his followers developed a new theory of childhood education - symbolic education. In short sessions of directed play, the geometric gifts were used to create pictures or structures that fit loosely into each of three fundamental categories-forms of Nature (or Life), forms of Knowledge (or Science), and forms of Beauty (or Art). The life forms were tangible: chairs, trees, people; the knowledge forms mathematical: 2×4=8, 4+4=8; the beauty forms were usually symmetrical patterns, as Fröbel felt symmetry was most comprehensible as beauty to little children. For four-, five-, and six-year-olds, transforming the very same materials into something new each day, as the class shifted from gift to gift and from realm to realm, the ultimate lesson of kindergarten was straightforward. In slightly different guise, the world, mathematics, and art were interchangeable, and their perceived borders were misleading, artificial constructs. A chair might become numbers, numbers art, and art either or both.
The "Gifts" and "Occupations"
Froebel’s kindergarten was filled with objects for children to play with. He developed a set of gifts and occupations. The traditional educational activity of drawing was greatly emphasized at Yverdon, as Pestalozzi considered it of primary importance in the teaching of writing and comprehension of form. Recognizing that children manifested a natural “taste for drawing,” and just as commonly, an aversion to the study of letters, Pestalozzi developed techniques that incorporated a combination of both. In their joint publication of 1803, ABC der Anschauung, his assistant Johannes Buss went so far as to construct an experimental “alphabet” of form consisting of various segments of lines drawn in the squares of a gridded matrix.
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Froebel designed physical tools (models of natural crystals, or the gifts) that he theorized would lead to its comprehension. He simultaneously created a methodology that when properly utilized, provided children with an infinite number of conceptual links between the two-exercises in what were usually called the “Three Realms.”
These were designed to help children recognize and appreciate patterns in nature and introduce them to basic concepts of science, geometry and architecture. These “gifts” or “occupations” were designed to stimulate learning through play activities accompanied by songs and music.
The Spread of the Kindergarten Movement
The original kindergarten spread successfully around the world in the decades after Fröbel’s death in 1852. It was particularly popular in Holland, Italy, France, Switzerland, Great Britain, Japan (the first school opened in 1876), Canada, and the United States. One of Froebel’s most enthusiastic disciples, the Baroness of Marenholtz-Bülow, was largely responsible for bringing his ideas to the notice of educators in England, France, and the Netherlands. Later they were introduced into other countries, including the United States, where the Froebelian movement achieved its greatest success. There John Dewey adopted Froebel’s principles in his experimental school at the University of Chicago.
United States: The kindergarten idea was first introduced into the United States in the late 1840s, but it was not until after the 1876 Centennial Exposition, where the advocates of the kindergarten had presented an exhibition of their methods, that Froebel's ideas become popular. Applying Friedrich Froebel's theories, she opened the United States' first successful public kindergarten at St. Louis' Des Peres School in 1873. Blow taught children in the morning and teachers in the afternoon. By 1883 every St. Louis public school had a kindergarten, making the city a model for the nation. Elizabeth Peabody founded the first English-language kindergarten in the US in 1860. The first free kindergarten in the US was founded in 1870 by Conrad Poppenhusen, a German industrialist and philanthropist, who also established the Poppenhusen Institute.
Sweden: The first Swedish Kindergarten teachers were trained by Schrader-Breymann at Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Haus in Berlin. Anna Warburg was the founder of the Swedish Fröbel Foundation in 1918. The Fröbel-Institute was one of the first training institutes in Sweden, and started during the first years of this century. It was founded by the sisters Ellen and Maria Moberg. They also controlled the Swedish Fröbel Foundation and its journal until 1939.
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Other Countries: Canada's first private kindergarten was opened by the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in 1870. The Australian kindergarten movement emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth century as both a philanthropic and educational endeavour.
Kindergarten as a Social Tool
With the establishment of free kindergartens in working-class neighborhoods in the 1870s, the advocates of kindergartens began to suggest that the proper training of these children might eventually lead to the elimination of urban poverty. For they believed that not only could they socialize the slum child in the habits of cleanliness and discipline but, through evening classes, educate working class mothers in the principles of Froebelian child nurture. Thus, through the child and his now educated mother, the family could be taught 'proper', that is middle-class, ideals of family life.
The Influence on Art and Architecture
By connecting the gift plays to an abstract mode of expression, the early kindergarten pedagogues in effect created an enormous international program designed specifically to alter the vision of the general populace. While focusing on kindergarten’s many educational and social benefits, they overlooked a potentially radical outcome of their efforts that is obvious in retrospect-kindergarten taught abstraction. In its explicit equivalency of ideas and things it taught abstract thinking, and in its repetitive use of geometric form it taught a new way of seeing that was utterly unfamiliar to the preceding generation.
Norman Brosterman lovingly and meticulously studies the background of this 19th century invention, spurned by conservatives, embraced by those who wanted child-centered education for their young children, and which influenced 20th century painters and architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Kandinsky, Paul Klee and many others. Through carefully written text and rich photographs of actual educational games ("Gaben" in German) by Kiyoshi Tagashi, he explains the goal of each "Gabe", its aesthetic value and then illustrates for the reader how these influenced a generation of artists who had been schooled with them.
Criticisms and Transformations
Not school. Not instruction. Prior to this, education was broadcast only. Memorise the information and trot it out on request. underlying this argument is the fact that Fröbel pedagogy was transformed into a modern form with the help of Elsa Köhler, an Austrian educational researcher, who worked together with Ellen and Maria Moberg. In 1934 Carin Ulin started The YWCA Institute in Stockholm, under the direct inspiration from Vienna, where she had studied in the late 1920´s. Her intention was to give a scientific alternative to Fröbel pedagogy. In 1936 Alva Myrdal started her Social-Pedagogical Seminar, also in conflict with the Fröbelians. But if one analyzes this conflict it becomes clear that all three institutes stayed inside a general Fröbel tradition.
Kindergarten Today
Kindergarten in the United States is a program generally for 5-year-olds, but sometimes includes 4-to-6-year-olds, that offers developmentally appropriate learning opportunities to build the child’s social and academic skills and to prepare them for the transition into first grade, and for school in general. SOS Kindergartens are established in areas in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa with insufficient kindergartens or pre-school facilities. They help to integrate the facilities into the neighbourhood and are also open to local children.
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