Paste your essay in here..Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel was born on April 21, 1782. He was a German pedagogue who essentially started the foundation for the modern education solely based on recognizing that children have distinctive capabilities and needs. He was the founder of kindergarten and was in fact one of the most dominant reformers of education in the 19th century. Froebel had a rocky childhood, and his raising and bringing up was not the best or the most ideal for a child. He was the fifth child in a clergyman’s family, and his mother passed away when he was only nine months old. He was very much neglected as a child until his uncle took him in and gave him a home, and he then was sent to school. Froebel became fascinated with studying natural phenomena and plants, and he also began studying languages and mathematics. He took some unofficial courses at the University of Jena until he was put into jail for a debt that was unpaid. He practiced and tried out different forms of employment until he decided to take a teaching appointment at an advanced school in Frankfurt, and it was run by Anton Gruner. While there, Froebel was ultimately convinced that his calling was a teacher at the school.
Two years passed while he was an assistant to Gruner, and Froebel decided to travel to Yverdon, Switzerland. There, he came into close contact with Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who was a Swiss educator. In 1811, Froebel joined the University of Gottingen, but service in the military during the Napoleonic Wars soon interrupted his studies. In 1816, he opened a school at Griesheim in Thuringia. Two years later, the school moved to Keilhau, which was still part of Thuringia. It was there that Froebel placed into the practice of his own educational theories. He, friends, and their wives all became a kind of educational community, and the school soon lengthened into a prosperous institution. At this time of Froebel’s career and life, he wrote numerous articles, and in 1826, he published his most known and important treatise, which was titled The Education of Man. This was his philosophical presentation of various principles and methods pursued while at the school in Keilhau.
In 1831, Froebel left the school at Keilhau to his partner, and he accepted an invitation from the Swiss Government to train elementary school teachers. All of his experiences at Keilhau and being the head of a new orphan asylum at Burgdof in Switzerland majorly impressed him with the utmost importance of the define early stages of education. In 1837, Froebel returned to Keilhau, and he opened up an infant school in Blankenburg, Prussia. He originally titled it the Child Nurture and Activity Institute, and as he became more and more happily inspired, he renamed it the Kingergarten, or “garden of children.” He also started a firm of publishing for play and other various educational materials. This included a selected collection of Mother-Play and Nursery songs, and these did have very lengthy explanations of the songs’ meanings and their uses. This was a hugely popular book for its time, and it was translated into many different foreign languages. Froebel did insist that a vast improvement of infant education was an important preliminary to comprehensive educational and social reform. Froebel’s experiments at the Kindergarten did attract a widespread and global interest, and because of this huge interest, other kindergartens were started and brought up. What was unfortunate was that there was a simple confusion with the socialist views of the nephew of Froebel, the government of Prussia prohibited the kindergarten movement in 1851. The ban was not removed until way after 1860, which was several years after Froebel’s death in 1852.
The Baroness of Marehholtz-Bulow was one of Froebel’s most passionate disciples. The Baroness was immensely responsible for bringing Froebel’s ideas to the notice of most educators in England, France, and the Netherlands. Later on, they were introduced into other countries, which included the United States. There, the Froebelian movement achieved its greatest success. John Dewey did wind up adopting Froebel’s principles in his school in Chicago. Kindergartens were established all throughout Europe and North America, and they became a standard educational institution for children of four to six years of age. It was a tremendous start for childhood education.
Froebel was influenced by the amazing German idealist philosophers of his time and by the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Pestalozzi. He was quite a devout religious man, and because of his belief in the fundamental unity of all things, he tended towards pantheism and has in fact been called a mystic of nature. He had many important contributions to education theory, but his most important contribution was his belief in “self activity” and play as essential factors of the childhood education. The role of the teacher was not to drill or proselytize the children, but it was rather to embolden the children’s self-expression through the material of play, both individually and in the instance of group activities. Froebel developed circles, spheres, and other various toys, and he referred to all of them as “gifts” or “occupations.” They were designed to motivate learning through play activities that were accompanied by uses of songs and music. The modern techniques of education in kindergarten and preschool are much indebted to Froebel.