"All education," says Froebel " not founded on religion is unproductive." This conviction followed naturally from his conception of the unity of all things, a unity due to the original Unity whence all proceed and in whom all "live, move, and have their being." "All has come forth from the divine, from God, an/ is through God alone eon ditioned. To this it is that all things owe their existence, to the divine working in them. The divine element that works in each thing is the true idea of the thing." "The des tiny and calling of all things is to develop their true idea, and in so doing to reveal God in outward and through passing forms." "In the creation, in nature and the order of the material world, and in the progress of mankind, God has given us the true type of education." As the cultivator creates nothing in the trees and plants, so the educator creates nothing in the children—he merely superintends the development of inborn faculties. So far F. agrees with Pestalozzi; but in one respect he went beyond him, and has thus become, according to Michelet, the greatest of educational reformers. Pes talozzi had said that the faculties were developed by exercise, F. added that the function of education was to develop the faculties by arousing voluntary activity. Action proceeding from inner impulse was the one thing needful. And here Froebel, as usual, refers to God. " God's every thought is a work, a deed." As God is the Creator, so must man be a creator also. " He who will early learn to recognize the Creator must early exercise his own power of action with the consciousness that, he is bringing about what is good, for the doing good is the link'between the creature and the creator, and the conscious doing of it is the conscious connection, the true living union of the man with God, of the individual man as of the human race, and is therefore at once the starting-point and the eternal aim of all education." Again he says: " The starting point of all that appears, of all that exists, and therefore of all intellectual conception, is act, action. From the act, from action, must therefore start true
human education, the developing education of man; in action, in acting, it must be rooted and must spring up. . . Living, acting, conceiving—these must form a triple chord within every child of man, though the sound now of this string, now of that, may preponderate, and then again of two together." F. held with 'Rousseau that each age has a completeness of its own, and that the perfection of the latter stage can be attained only through the perfection of the earlier. Impressed with the immense importance of the first stage, F., like • Pestalozzi, devoted- himself to the instruction of mothers. But he would not, like. Pestalozzi, leave the children entirely in the mother's hands. Petalozzi held that the child belonged to the family; Fichte, on the other hand, claimed it for society and the state. Froebel, whose mind delighted in harmonizing apparent contradictions, and who taught that "all pr6gress lay through opposites to their reconciliation," maintained that the child belonged both to the family and to society and he would therefore have children spend some hours of the day in a common • life and in well-organized employments. These assemblies of children he would not call schools, for the children in them ought not to be old enough for schooling. • So he invented the name " kindergarten," garden of children, and called the superintendents "children's gardeners." He laid great stress on every child cultivating its own plot of ground, but this was not his reason for his choice of the name. It was rather that he thought of these institutions as inclosures in which young human plants are nurtured. In the kindergarten the children's employ-. ment should be play. But any occupation in which children delight is play to them; and Froebel invented a series of employments which, while they are in this sense play to the children, have nevertheless, as seen from the adult point of view, a distinct edu tional object. [Condensed from Encyc. Brit. 9th ed.] See KINDERGARTEN, ante.