Fröbel-Album. Emmy Boldt (cover title) and Weaving (cover title)
In the early nineteenth century, Friedrich Fröbel proposed
the radical notion that education, and early education in particular, was a
creative process, and that before setting foot in a customary schoolroom,
children ought to be grounded in self-expression and playfulness. The reality
of the proposition was the establishment of the kindergarten system and Fröbel’s
“gifts” and “occupations”. His gifts consisted of physical implements, such as
wood blocks and yarn, which students could manipulate and mutate. His occupations
required slightly more craftsmanship, involving the cutting, folding, and
pricking of paper and advancing through a series of skills including embroidery
and weaving. Both the gifts and the occupations offered avenues for play in
tandem with tasks to be mastered, wherein students received the rewards of
their own creativity.
Fröbel viewed the various paper techniques as the foundation
of the other occupations. In his own autobiographical reflections, he asked of
himself “‘What did you do as a boy? What happened to you to satisfy that need
of yours for something to do and to express? By what, at the same period of
your life, was this need most fully met, or what did you then most desire for
this purpose?’” (Autobiography 75).
Fröbel’s personal answer, the creation of forms out of paper, fulfilled his and
his students’ need to derive “precise, clear, and many-sided results due to
[their] own creative power” (Autobiography
76). This activity concretely connected the student to Nature, such that the
student could mirror Nature’s creative powers and in so doing find a greater
sense of belonging, enterprise, and wisdom. The folding of paper also offered a
tangible basis for abstract mathematical and logical concepts. A child would make
“progressive experiments which teach it by experience” (Reminiscences 71). Such experimentation was, in Fröbel’s words, the
means by which “unconsciousness is raised to consciousness” (Reminiscences 73). His gifts and
occupations worked to prompt the child to the nature of work and introduced
them through playful and practical means to the abstract notions of the
gathering and employment of knowledge.
During his lifetime, Fröbel’s ideas progressed throughout
Germany and the Netherlands, gathering the support of several royal proponents,
such as the Baroness Bertha Marie von Marenholtz-Bülow and the Duke of Meiningen.
Unfortunately, just before his death the Prussian government banned Fröbel’s
practices, citing them as “atheistic and demagogic”. Though the ban was more
the result of a confusion of names – Fröbel’s nephew had published an unwelcome
pamphlet on the education of women – the damage deterred the growth of
kindergarten education in Europe for fifteen years. Fröbel’s legacy instead
grew in the United States, where his former pupil, Margarethe Schurz, founded in
1856 the first American kindergarten and later inspired the educational
reformers Elizabeth Peabody and Lucy Wheelock. Fröbel occupations became
particularly popular in the Midwest, as exhibited by the two volumes pictured.
Students would compile albums of their work as a means to track their
competencies and display their creativity. Whereas the “Weaving” album shows a
single skill improved over time, the “Fröbel-Album” evinces a steady
progression through a variety of tasks completed with increasing skill.
These and other albums like them, in their invitation to
create something out of nothing and to repurpose common materials new fashions,
served as an inspiration for later abstract artistic movements. The Bauhaus
school took particular cues from Fröbel; Walter Gropius designed the Friedrich Fröbel Haus in his honor (the
building was never completed, but building plans can be viewed here).
Frank Lloyd Wright also noted Fröbel as a key influence, stating that his early
interactions building and rebuilding with a set of Fröbel gifts taught him the
basic elements of geometry and structure (Alofsin 359). Fröbel has made more
indirect impressions elsewhere in the creation and perpetuation of toys and
educational materials that encourage expression through manipulation, such as
LEGO blocks and Montessori sensorial materials.
(28032); (28055)
References:
Alofsin, Anthony. Frank
Lloyd Wright – The Lost Years, 1910-1922: A Study of Influence. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Fröbel, Friedrich. Autobiography
of Friedrich Froebel. Translated by Emilie Michaelis and H. Keatley Moore.
(London: Swan Sonnenchein, 1908).
