FROEBEL, FRIEDRICH WILHELM AUGUST (1782-1852), German educational reformer, was born at Ober weissbach, Thuringia, on April 21, 1782. Like Comenius, with whom he had much in common, he was neglected in his youth until a maternal uncle gave him a home at Stadt-Ilm. He went to the village school, but like many thoughtful boys he passed for a dunce, and was apprenticed to a forester In the Thuringian forest, Froebel obtained a profound insight into the uniformity and unity of nature's laws. No training could have been better suited to his tendency to mysticism ; and when he left the forest at 17, he seems to have possessed the main ideas which influenced him all his life. He was dominated by the idea of the unity of nature, and longed to study natural sciences to find in them various applications of nature's universal laws. To this end, he went to Jena, but his allowance was small, and his university career ended in an imprisonment of nine weeks for a debt of 3o shillings. He returned home more intent on what he called "self-completion" than on getting on in a worldly sense. During his various employments, as surveyor, accountant and private secretary, he became more and more conscious that a great task lay bef ore him for the good of humanity. While studying architecture in Frankfurt-on-Main, he met the director of a model school, who had caught some of the enthusiasm of Pestalozzi, and who induced him to take a post in his school. From 1807 till 1809 Froebel was attached to Pestalozzi's celebrated institution at Yverdon, near Neuchatel. But holding that man and nature, inasmuch as they proceed from the same source, must be governed by the same laws, he longed for more knowledge of natural science than Pestalozzi advocated. In 1811 he began to study at Got tingen, whence he proceeded to Berlin. But this time his studies were interrupted by the king of Prussia's call "to my people." Though not a Prussian, Froebel was heart and soul a German. He enlisted in Lutzow's corps, and went through the campaign of 1813, his experience showing him the value of discipline and united action, how the individual belongs not to himself but to the whole, and how the whole 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 were ever afterwards his devoted followers, sacrificing all their prospects to carry out his ideas. After the peace of Fontainebleau (May 181 4) Froebel returned to Berlin, and became curator of the museum of miner alogy under Weiss. Langethal and Middendorff were in Berlin, engaged in tuition. Froebel instructed them in his theory, and at length in 1816 resolved to realize his own idea of "the new educa tion." He went to Griesheim, a village on the Ilm, but two years later moved to Keilhau, a Thuringian village which became the Mecca of the new faith.
In Keilhau Froebel, Langethal, Middendorff and Barop, a rela tion of Middendorff's, all married and formed an educational community. The school gradually increased, though for many years its teachers, with Froebel at their head, were short of money and of food. After 14 years' experience he determined to start other institutions to work in connection with the parent institution at Keilhau. Leaving the Keilhau institution under the direction of Barop, he opened another school at a castle on the Wartensee, Lucerne, offered to him by a friend. But the Catholic clergy resisted what they considered 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.
The Swiss Government, however, sent young teachers to Froebel for instruction, and finally Froebel moved to Burgdorf (famous for Pestalozzi's activities there 3o years earlier) to establish a public orphanage and superintend a course for schoolmasters. The elementary teachers of the canton were to spend three months every alternate year at Burgdorf, and compare experiences, and receive instruction from distinguished men such as Froebel and Bitzius. In his conferences with these teachers Froebel found that the schools suffered because up to school age the children were entirely neglected. Froebel's conception of harmonious develop ment attached much importance to the earliest years, and his great work on The Education of Man (182 6) deals chiefly with the child up to the age of seven. His thoughts were occupied with the proper treatment of young children, and in scheming for them a graduated course of exercises, modelled on the games which in terested them. Official restraints led him to return to Keilhau, where he opened the first Kindergarten or "Garden of Children," in the neighbouring village of Blankenburg (1837). It had to be given up for lack of funds and Froebel carried on his courses first at Keilhau, and from 1848 to 1852 near Liebenstein, in the Thuringian forest, and in the duchy of Meiningen. In 1849 he attracted within the circle of his influence a woman of great intellectual power, the baroness von Marenholtz-Bulow, who wrote Recollections of Friedrich Froebel (Eng. trans. 1877), the only lifelike portrait we possess.
In the great year of revolutions (1848) Froebel had hoped to turn to account the general eagerness for improvement, and Mid dendorff had presented an address on Kindergartens to the German parliament. A nephew of Froebel's, however, Professor Karl Froebel of Zurich, published books which were supposed to teach socialism, and the uncle and nephew were regarded as the united advocates of some new thing. Froebel found himself suspected of socialism and irreligion, and in 1851 the education minister, von Raumer, issued an edict forbidding the establishment of schools "after Friedrich and Karl Froebel's principles" in Prussia. This was a heavy blow to the old man, who did not long survive the decree. He died on June 21, 1852, and was buried at Schweina, a village near Bad-Liebenstein.
"All education not founded on religion is unproductive." This conviction followed naturally from Froebel's conception of the unity of all things, a unity due to the original Unity from whom all proceed and in whom all "live, move and have their being." As man and nature have one origin they must be subject to the same laws. Hence Froebel, like Comenius two centuries earlier, looked to the course of nature for the principles of human educa tion. As the cultivator creates nothing in the trees and plants, so the educator creates nothing in the children, he merely superin tends the development of inborn faculties. Pestalozzi said that the faculties were developed by exercise. Froebel added that the function of education was to develop the faculties by arousing voluntary activity.
The prominence which Froebel gave to action and his doctrine that man is primarily a doer and an originator, learning only through "self-activity," has its importance throughout the entire period of education. But it was to the first stage that Froebel paid the greatest attention. He held with Rousseau that each age has a completeness of its own, and that the perfection of the later stage rests upon the perfection of the earlier. Impressed with the importance of the first stage, Froebel like Pestalozzi devoted him self to the instruction of mothers. But he rejected Pestalozzi's view that the child belonged to the family. Fichte had claimed it for society and the state. Froebel who believed that "all progress lay through opposites to their reconciliation," maintained that the child belonged both to the family and to society, and that he should spend some part of the day in a common life and in common employments. Since these assemblies were for children not old enough for schooling, he invented the name Kindergarten, garden of children, and desired that the children's employment should be play. Any occupation in which children delight is play, and Froebel invented a series of employments, which, while they are in this sense play to the children, have nevertheless a distinct educational object, namely, to strengthen their bodies, to exercise their senses, to engage their awakening minds, and through their senses to acquaint them with nature and their fellows; it is especially to guide aright the heart and the affections, and to lead them to the basis of all life, to unity with themselves.
Froebel's works are: Menschenerziehung (1826 Eng. trans., i885) ; Pddagogik d. Kindergartens; Kleinere Schriften and Mutter- and Kose lieder; collected editions have been edited by Lange (1862) and Seidel (1883). There are English translations of the Autobiography (last ed. 1903), of his chief writings on education (1912) and of the Mother': Songs (1895) . See A. B. Hauschmann, F. Frobel; E. Shirreff, Principles of Froebel's System; H. Barnard, Papers on Froebel's Kindergarten (i881) ; R. H. Quick, Educational Reformers (189o) ; J. White, The Educational Ideas of Froebel (1905) ; R. D. Chalke, A Synthesis of Froebel and Herbart (1912) ; E. R. Murray, Froebel as a Pioneer in Modern Psychology (1914) ; W. H. Kilpatrick, Froebel's Kindergar ten Principles (1916). (R. H. Q.; X.)