The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

537. The Kindergartens.—The master conception of Frœbel, the creation of the Kindergarten, was only slowly developed in his mind. It was only in 1840 that he invented the term. Of course, given the imagination of Frœbel, and his tendency to symbolism, children’s garden ought to be taken in its allegorical sense. The child is a plant, the school a garden, and Frœbel calls teachers “gardeners of children.”[225]

But before giving a name to his school for early childhood, Frœbel had long cherished the idea of it. In 1835, at Burgdorf, he attempted to realize it; in 1837, at Blankenburg, near Rudolstadt, he founded his first infant school.

538. Origin of the Kindergarten.—Without wishing to belittle the originality of Frœbel’s creation, it is right to say that it was suggested to him in part by Comenius. The philosopher Krause had pointed out to him the importance of the writings of the Slavic educator. He studied them, and the Kindergarten certainly has some relations of parenthood with the schola materni gremii. There is, however, one essential difference between the idea of Comenius and that of Frœbel,—the first confided to the mother the cares which the second relegates to the teachers of the children’s gardens.

It is said that it was from seeing a child playing at ball that Frœbel conceived the first idea of his system. We know what importance he attached to the spherical form and to play. The first principle of his Kindergarten was then that the child ought to play, and to play at ball.

But Frœbel enveloped the simplest ideas in prolix and whimsical theories. If he recommends the ball, it is not for positive reasons, nor because it is an inoffensive play, very appropriate to the need of movement which characterizes the child. It is because the ball is the symbol of unity. The cube, which was to succeed the ball, represents diversity in unity. It is also because the word ball is a symbolic word, formed from letters borrowed from the German words Bild von all, picture of the whole.

Frœbel came to attribute an occult meaning to the different letters of words. He thought he found in the figures of the year 1836, the date of his first conception of the Kindergarten, the proof that that year was to open to humanity a new era, and he expressed his views in an essay entitled: The Year 1836 requires a Renovation of Life. In this we read such things as these: “The word marriage (German Ehe) represents by its two vowels e-e, life; these two vowels are united by the consonant h, thus symbolizing a double life which the spirit unites; again, the two halves thus united are similar and equal each to each: e-h-e.” And farther on: “What does the word German (Deutsch) signify? It is derived from the word deuten (signifying to manifest), which designates the act by which self-conscious thought is clearly manifested outwardly.... To be a German is then to raise one’s self as an individual and as a whole, by a clear manifestation of one’s self, to a clear consciousness of self.”

539. The Gifts of Frœbel.—Under the graceful name of gifts, Frœbel presents to the child a certain number of objects which are to serve as material for his exercises. The five gifts are contained in a box from which they are taken in succession, as the children are in a condition to receive them. In the original plan of Frœbel, these gifts were: 1. the ball; 2. the sphere and the cube; 3. the cube divided into eight equal parts; 4. the cube divided into eight rectangular parallelopipeds, in the form of building-bricks, which the child will use as material for little constructions; 5. the cube divided in each of its dimensions, that is, cut into twenty-seven equal cubes; three of them are subdivided into two prisms, and three others into four prisms, by means of an oblique section, single or double.[226] And to these gifts Frœbel added other objects, such as thin strips of wood and little sticks for constructing figures; and bits of paper for braiding, folding, dotting, etc.

The conception of Frœbel does not rest, as one might think, on the adaptation of the objects which he chooses in succession, to the faculties of the child. It is not this at all which interests him. The order which he has adopted is derived from another principle. According to him, the form of bodies has an intimate relation with the general laws of the universe. There is, consequently, a methodical gradation to be observed, according to the intrinsic character of the objects themselves, for the purpose of initiating the child into the laws of the divine thought symbolized in the sphere, in the cube, in the cylinder, etc. Frœbel was greatly irritated at those of his scholars who misunderstood the philosophical import of his “gifts,” and who saw in them only plays. “If my material for instruction possesses some utility,” he said, “it does not owe it to its exterior appearance, which has nothing striking and offers no novelty. It owes it simply to the way in which I use it, that is, to my method and to the philosophical law on which it is founded. The justification of my system of education is entirely in this law; according as this law is rejected or admitted, the system falls or continues with it. All the rest is but material without any value of its own.”

It is this “material,” however, which for Frœbel had no value, that his admirers have above all preserved of his method, without longer caring for the allegorical sense which he attached to it.

540. Appeal to the Instincts of the Child.—That which makes, notwithstanding so much that is whimsical, the lasting merit of Frœbel’s work, that which justifies in part the admiration which it has excited, is that he organized the salle d’asile, the infant school, and that he realized for it that which Pestalozzi had attempted for the elementary school. He knew how to make an appeal to the instincts of the youngest child, to combine a system of exercises for the training of the hand, for the education of the senses, to satisfy the need of movement and activity which develops itself from the first day of life, and, finally, to make of the child a creator, a little artist always at work.