Froebel’s Work Goes On

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, Issue 201, 9 August 1927, Page 6

Froebel’s Work Goes On

75 YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH. FOUNDER OF KINDERGARTEN. Seventy-five years ago last month, in a German village, Friedrich Froebel died, a defeated old man. Apostles, to be sure, still clustered around him. But the kindergarten, his new educational creation, had been banned by the Prussian Government as something socialistic and subversive of the state. To-day, by the ironical turn of time’s wheels, that dangerous innovation is an educational commonplace throughout the civilised world (states the Vancouver Province). It is even referred to a little indulgently as “ the old-fashioned kindergarten..” In its place in the line of fire stands that still freer venture for still younger children, the nursery school. NAME A HOUSEHOLD WORD. As for Friedrich Froebel, who during his life remained almost unknown outside of Germany, he stands in the popular mind to-day as probably the best known schoolmaster of all time. No other modern educational thinker has become so completely a household word. What usually happens through the changing judgments of centuries has occurred in the space of a single lifetime, within seventy-five years Froebel has run the gamut—as fool, martyr, prophet, saint and out-moded doctrinaire.

It was he who first took the prison atmosphere out of the infant classroom. “ The silent child was allowed to sing and talk," says Professor Hill, ** the suppressed child to work and play.” Instead of looking at children, as did the dlder schools, as replete with original sin, Froebel believed them to be full of /budding virtue, which needed only' warmth and freedom to come to blossom.

” 1 see in every child," he said, "the possibility of a perfect man." The first impressions a young child receives are stronger and more lasting than those in later life," he said. ” Losses that have taken place in the first stage of life in which the germ leaves of the whole being unfold are never made up. If I pierce the young leaf of the shoot of a plant with the finest needle, the prick forms a knot which grows with the leaf, becomes harder and harder, and prevents it from obtaining its perfectly complete form. Something similar takes place after wounds which touch the tender germ of the human soul. ... A gesture, a look, a sound is often sufficient to inflict such wounds.

" People think the child is only seeking amusement when it plays. That is a great error. Play is the first means of development of the human mind, its first effort to make acquaintance with the outward world, to collect original experiences fiom things ’ f --•« to exercise the powers of body and mind." COLLEGES'STUDY SYSTEM.

The latest triumph of the Froebelian spirit is the adoption in thi* colleges of serious courses in child study and training. In the United States eighteen colleges have such courses, ten have nursery schools and twenty have summer courses for parents. A group of earnest Ph.D.’s watching the nursery class at play is now a-commonplace. Froebel was 55 before he had the idea of the kindergarten, and 65 before he had brought it into general attention even in Germany. Yet it seems as if the mainspring of his action must have been a kind of emotional compensation for the sufferings of his own early childhood. For his mother had died in his infancy, and he had actual experience with the fairy-tale bugaboo, a cruel stepmother; while" his father, a stern, preoccupied clergyman, had given him no companionship.