Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/829

F R E B E L 793 model school. In this school Froebcl worked for two years with remarkable success, but he then retired and undertook the education of three lads of one family. In this ho could not satisfy himself, and he obtained the parents con sent to his taking the boys to Yverdon, near Neuchatel, and there forming with them a part of the celebrated institution of Pestalozzi. Thus from 1807 till 1809 Froebel was drinking in Pestaloz/ianism at the fountain head, and qualifying himself to carry on the work which Pestalozzi Ivid begun. For the science of education had to deduce from Pestalozzi s experience principles which Pestalozzi himself could not deduce. And " Froebel, the pupil of Pestalozzi, and a genius like his master, completed the re former s system ; taking the results at which Pestalozzi had arrived through the necessities of his position, Froebel de veloped the ideas involved in them, not by further experi ence but by deduction from the nature of man, and thus he attained to the conception of true human development and to the requirements of true education" (Schmidt s GeschicMe der Pddagogik). Holding that man and nature, inasmuch as they proceed from the same source, must be governed by the same laws, Froebcl longed for more knowledge of natural science. Even Pestalozzi seemed to him not to " honour science in her divinity." He therefore determined to continue the uni versity course which had been so rudely interrupted eleven years before, and in 1811 he began studying at Gottingen, whence he proceeded to Berlin. But again his studies wore interrupted, this time by the king of Prussia s cele brated call "to my people." Though not a Prussian, Froebel was heart and soul a German. He therefore responded to the call, enlisted in Liitzow s corps, and went through the campaign of 1813. But his military ardour did not take his mind off education. " Everywhere," he writes, "as far as the fatigues I underwent allowed, I car ried in my thoughts my future calling as educator ; yes, even in the few engagements in which I had to take part. Even in these I could gather experience for the task I proposed to myself." Froebel s soldiering showed him the value of discipline and united action, how the individual belongs not to himself but to the whole body, and how the whole body supports the individual. Froebel was rewarded for his patriotism by the friendship of two men whose names will always be associated with his, Langethal and Middendorff. These young men, ten years younger than Froebel, became attached to him in the fijld, and were ever afterwards his devoted, followers, sacrificing all their prospects in life for the sake of carrying out his ideas. At the peace of Fontainebleau (signed in May 1814) Froebel returned to Berlin, and became curator of the museum of mineralogy under Professor Weiss. In accept ing this appointment from the Government he seemed to turn aside from his work as educator ; but if not teaching he was learning. More and more the thought possessed him that the one thing needful for man was unity of develop ment, perfect evolution in accordance with the laws of his being, such evolution as science discovers in the other organisms of nature. He at first intended to become a teacher of natural science, but before long wider views dawned upon him. Langethal and Middendorf were in Berlin, engaged in tuition. Froebel gave them regular in struction in his theory, and at length, counting on their support, he resolved to set about realizing his ov, r n idea of "the new education." This was in 1816. Three years before one of his brothers, a clergyman, had died of fever caught from the French prisoners. His widow was still Hving in the parsonage at Griesheim, a village on the Ilm. Froebel gave up his post, and set out for Griesheim on foot, spending his very last groschen on the way for bread. Here he undertook the education of his orphan niece and nephews, and also of two more nephews sent him by another brother. With these he opened a school and wrote to Middendorf and Langethal to come and help in the experi ment. Middendorf came at once, Langethal a year or two later, when the school had been moved to Keilhau, another of the Thuringiau villages, which became the Mecca of the new faith. In Keilhau Froebel, Langethal, Middendorff, and Barop, a relation of Middendorff s, all married and formed an educational community. Such zeal could not be fruitless, and the school gradually increased, though for many years its teachers, with Froebel at their head, were in the greatest straits for money, and at times even for food. After 1 4 years experience he determined to start other insti tutions to work in connexion with the parent institution at Keilhau, and being offered by a private friend the use of a castle on the Wartensee, in the canton of Lucerne, he left Keilhau under the direction of Barop, and with Langethal he opened the Swiss institution. The ground, however, was very ill chosen. The Catholic clergy resisted what they considered as a Protestant invasion, and the experiment on the Wartensee and at Willisau in the same canton, to which the institution was moved in 1833, never had a fair chance. It was in vain that Middendorff at Froebel s call left his wife and family at Keilhau, and laboured for four years in Switzerland without once seeing them. The Swiss institu tion never flourished. But the Swiss Government wished to turn to account the presence of the great educator ; so young teachers were sent to Froebel for instruction, and finally Froebel moved to Burgdorf (a Bernese town of some importance, and famous from Pestalozzi s labours there thirty years earlier) to undertake the establishment of a public orphanage, and also to superintend a course of teaching for schoolmasters. The elementary teachers of the canton were to spend three months every alternate year at Burgdorf, and there compare experiences, and learn of distinguished men such as Froebel and Bitzius. In his conferences with these teachers Froebel found that the schools suffered from the state of the raw material brought into them. Till the school age was reached the children were entirely neglected. Froebel s conception of harmonious development naturally led him to attach much importance to the earliest years, and his great work on The Education of Man, published as early as 1826, deals chiefly with the child up to the age of seven. At Burgdorf his thoughts were much occupied with the proper treatment of young children, and in scheming for them a graduated course of exercises, modelled on the games in which he observed them to be most interested. In his eagerness to carry out his new plans he grew im patient of official restraints ; so he returned to Keilhau, and soon afterwards opened the first Kindergarten or " Gardsn of Children," in the neighbouring village of Blankenburg (1837). Firmly convinced of the importance of the Kinder garten for the whole human race, Froebel described his system in a weekly paper (his Sonniagsblatt) which appeared from the middle of 1837 till 1840. He also lectured in great towns ; and he gave a regular course of instruction to young teachers at Blankenburg. But although the prin ciples of the Kindergarten were gradually making their way, the first Kindergarten was failing for want of funds. It had to be given up, and Froebel, now a widower (he had lost his wife in 1839), carried on his course for teachers first at Keilhau, and from 1848, for the last four years of his life, at or near Liebenstein, in the Thuringian Forest, and in the duchy of Meiningen. It is in these last years that the man Froebel will be best known to posterity, for in 1849 lie attracted within the circle of his influence a woman of great intellectual power, the Baroness von Murcnholtz- Biilow, who has given us in her Recollections of Fnedrich Froebel the only lifelike portrait we possess. IX. 100