Friedrich Froebel - Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY

OF

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL

TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY

EMILIE MICHAELIS,

_Head Mistress of the Croydon Kindergarten and Preparatory School_,

AND

H. KEATLEY MOORE, MUS. BAC., B.A.,

_Examiner in Music to the Froebel Society and Vice-Chairman of the Croydon
Kindergarten Company._

*"Come, let us live for our children."*

SYRACUSE, N.Y.:
C.W. BARDEEN, PUBLISHER.
1889.

German Books on Pedagogy.

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und der Lehre Jacotot's," von GOERING. 12mo, pp. 364. Price $3.75.

7. _Froebel._ Paedagogische Schriften. Herausgegeben von SEIDEL. 3 vols.
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9. _Martin Luther._ Paedagogische Schrifte. Mit Einleitung von SCHUMANN.
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10. _Herder als Paedagog._ Von MORRES. Price 75 cts.

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*C.W. BARDEEN, Publisher, Syracuse, N.Y.*

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

It will be long before we have a biography of Froebel to compare with
DeGuimp's _Pestalozzi_, of which an English translation has just
appeared. Meantime we must content ourselves with two long
autobiographical letters contained in this volume, which, though
incomplete, have yet the peculiar charm that comes from the candid
record of genuine impressions.

The first of these letters, that to the Duke of Meiningen, has already
appeared in English, in a translation by Miss Lucy Wheelock for
Barnard's _American Journal of Education_, since reprinted in pp. 21-48
of his _Kindergarten and Child Culture_, (see p. 146), and in a small
volume under the title _Autobiography of Froebel_ (see p. 146). While a
faithful attempt to reproduce the original, this translation struggled
in vain to transform Froebel's rugged and sometimes seemingly incoherent
sentences into adequate and attractive English, so that the long letter
has proved to most English readers formidable and repellant. But in the
original it is one of the most charming productions in literature,
candid and confidential in tone, and detailing those inner gropings for
ideas that became convictions which only an autobiography can reveal.
These qualities are so admirably preserved in the translation by Miss
Emily Michaelis and H. Keatley Moore that it seemed to leave nothing to
be desired. They have not only given a faithful rendering, but they have
impressed upon it the loving touch of faithful disciples. Accordingly I
purchased from the English publishers the American rights to this
translation; and have reproduced not only this letter, but that to the
philosopher Krause, with Barop's "Critical Moments," and the
"Chronological Abstract," all from duplicates of the English plates.

The rest of the volume appears for the first time. The Bibliography
seemed desirable, and is confined to attainable books likely to be of
value to American teachers. The Index is full, but not fuller than the
fragmentary character of the material seemed to require. The Table of
Contents will also serve to make reference easy to the principal evens
of Froebel's history.

In the lives of Pestalozzi and of Froebel many resemblances may be
traced. Both were sons of clergymen. Both were half-orphans from their
earliest recollections. Both were unhappy in childhood, were
misunderstood, companionless, awkward, clumsy, ridiculed. Both were as
boys thrown into the almost exclusive society of women, and both
retained to the last strongly feminine characteristics. Both were
throughout life lacking in executive ability; both were financially
improvident. Both were dependent for what they did accomplish upon
friends, and both had the power of inspiring and retaining friendships
that were heroic, Pestalozzi's Kruesi corresponding with Froebel's
Middendorf. Both became teachers only by accident, and after failure in
other professions. Both saw repeated disaster in the schools they
established, and both were to their last days pointed at as visionary
theorists of unsound mind. Both failed to realize their ideas, but both
planted their ideas so deeply in the minds of others that they took
enduring root. Both lacked knowledge of men, but both knew and loved
children, and were happiest when personally and alone they had children
under their charge. Both delighted in nature, and found in solitary
contemplation of flowers and woods and mountains relief from the
disappointments they encountered among their fellows.

But there were contrasts too. Pestalozzi had no family ties, while
Froebel maintained to the last the closest relations with several
brothers and their households. Pestalozzi married at twenty-three a
woman older than himself, on whom he thereafter relied in all his
troubles. Froebel deferred his marriage till thirty-six and then seems
to have regarded his wife more as an advantage to his school than as a
help-meet to himself.

Pestalozzi was diffident, and in dress and manner careless to the point
of slovenliness; Froebel was extravagant in his self-confidence, and at
times almost a dandy in attire. Pestalozzi was always honest and candid,
while Froebel was as a boy untruthful. Pestalozzi was touchingly humble,
and eager to ascribe the practical failure of his theories to his
personal inefficiency; Froebel never acknowledged himself in the wrong,
but always attributed failure to external causes. On the other hand,
while Froebel was equable in temperament, Pestalozzi was moody and
impressionable, flying from extreme gaiety to extreme dejection,
slamming the door if displeased with a lesson a teacher was giving, but
coming back to apologize if he met a child who smiled upon him. Under
Rousseau's influence Pestalozzi was inclined to skepticism, and limited
religious teaching in school to the reading of the gospels, and the
practice of Christianity; Froebel was deeply pious, and made it
fundamental that education should be founded plainly and avowedly upon
religion.

Intellectually the contrast is even stronger. While Froebel had a
university education, Pestalozzi was an eminently ignorant man; his
penmanship was almost illegible, he could not do simple sums in
multiplication, he could not sing, he could not draw, he wore out all
his handkerchiefs gathering pebbles and then never looked at them
afterward. Froebel was not only a reader but a scientific reader, always
seeking first to find out what others had discovered that he might
begin where they left off; Pestalozzi boasted that he had not read a
book in forty years. Naturally, therefore, Pestalozzi was always an
experimenter, profiting by his failures but always failing in his first
attempts, and hitting upon his most characteristic principles by
accident; while Froebel was a theorist, elaborating his ideas mentally
before putting them in practice, and never satisfied till he had
properly located them in his general scheme of philosophy.

And yet, curiously enough, it is Pestalozzi who was the author. His
"Leonard and Gertrude" was read by every cottage fireside, while
Froebel's writings were intelligible only to his disciples. Pestalozzi
had an exuberant imagination and delightful directness and simplicity of
expression; Froebel's style was labored and obscure, and his doctrines
may be better known through the "Child and Child Nature" of the Baroness
Marenholz von Buelow than through his own "Education of Man."

The account of Froebel's life given in this volume is supplemented
somewhat by the "Reminiscences" of this same Baroness, who became
acquainted with him in 1849, and was thereafter his most enthusiastic
and successful apostle. Till some adequate biography appears, that
volume and this must be relied upon for information of the man who
shares equally with Pestalozzi the honor of educational reform in this
century.

C.W. BARDEEN.
Syracuse, June 10, 1889.

COMMENTS UPON FROEBEL AND HIS WORK.

Und als er so, wie Wichard Lange richtig sagt, der Apostel des
weiblichen Gechlechts geworden war, starb er, der geniale, unermuedlich
thaetige, von Liebe getragene Mann.--SCHMIDT, _Geschichte der Paedagogik_,
Coethen, 1862, iv. 282.

En resume, Rousseau aurait pu etre deconcerte par les inventions
pratiques, un peu subtiles parfois, de l'ingenieux Froebel. Il eut
souri, comme tout le monde, des artifices par lesquels il obligeait
l'enfant a se faire acteur au milieu de ses petits camarades, a imiter
tour a tour le soldat qui monte la garde, le cordonnier qui travaille,
le cheval qui pietine, l'homme fatigue qui se repose. Mais, sur les
principes, il se serait mis aisement d'accord avec l'auteur de
_l'Education de l'homme_, avec un penseur a l'ame tendre et noble, qui
remplacait les livres par les choses, qui a une instruction pedantesque
substituait l'education interieure, qui aux connaissances positives
preferait la chaleur du sentiment, la vie intime et profonde de l'ame,
qui respectait la liberte et la spontaneite de l'enfant, qui enfin
s'efforcait d'ecarter de lui les mauvaises influences et de faire a son
innocence un milieu digne d'elle--COMPAYRE's _Histoire Critique des
Doctrines de l'Education en France depuis le XVIme Siecle_, Paris, 1879,
ii. 125.

We might say that his effort in pedagogy consists chiefly in organizing
into a system the sense intuitions which Pestalozzi proposed to the
child somewhat at random and without direct plan.--COMPAYRE's _History
of Pedagogy_, Payne's translation, Boston, 1886, p. 449.

Er war gleich Pestalozzi von den hoechsten Ideen der Zeit getragen und
suchte die Erziehung an diese Ideen anzuknuepfen. So lange die Mutter
nicht nach den Gesetzen der Natur ihr Kind erzieht und bildet und dafuer
nicht ihr Leben einsetst, so lange--davon geht er aus--sind alle
Reformen der Schule auf Sand gebaut. Trotsdem verlegt er einen Theil der
muetterlichen Aufgabe in den Kindergarten, in welchem er die Kinder vor
ihre Schulpflichtigkeit vereinigt wissen will, (1) um auf die haeusliche
Erziehung ergaenzend und verbessernd einzuwirken, (2) um das Kind aus dem
Einzelleben heraus Zum Verkehr mil seinesgleichen zu fuehren, und (3) um
dem weiblichen Geschlechte Gelegenheit zu geben, sich auf seinen
erzieherischen Beruf vorzubereiten.--BOeHM's _Kurzgefasste Geschichte der
Paedagogik_, Nuernberg, 1880, p. 134.

Le jardin d'enfants est evidemment en opposition avec l'idee
fondamentale de Pestalozzi; car celui-ci avait confie entierement a la
mere et au foyer domestique la tache que Froebel remet, en grande
partie, aux jardins d'enfants et a sa directrice. A l'egard des rapports
de l'education domestique, telle qui elle est a l'heure qu'il est, on
doit reconnaitre que Froebel avait un coup-d'oeil plus juste que
Pestalozzi.--_Histoire d'Education_, FREDERICK DITTES, Redolfi's French
translation, Paris, 1880, p. 258.

While others have taken to the work of education their own pre-conceived
notions of what that work should be, Froebel stands consistently alone
in seeking in the nature of the child the laws of educational action--in
ascertaining from the child himself how we are to educate him.--JOSEPH
PAYNE, _Lectures on the Science and Art of Education_, Syracuse, 1885,
p. 254.

Years afterwards, the celebrated Jahn (the "Father Jahn" of the German
gymnastics) told a Berlin student of a queer fellow he had met, who
made all sorts of wonderful things from stones and cobwebs. This queer
fellow was Froebel; and the habit of making out general truths from the
observation of nature, especially from plants and trees, dated from the
solitary rambles in the Forest.

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 Froebel agrees with Pestalozzi;
but in one respect he was beyond him, and has thus become, according
to Michelet, the greatest of educational reformers. 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_. Action proceeding from inner impulse
(_Selbsthaeligkeit_) 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. Living acting,
conceiving,--these must form a triple cord within every child of man,
though the sound now of this string, now of that may preponderate, and
then again of two together.

Pestalozzi held that the child belonged to the family; Fichte on the
other hand, claimed it for society and the State. Froebel, whose mind,
like that of Frederick Maurice, delighted in harmonizing apparent
contradictions, and who taught that "all progress lay through opposites
to their reconciliations," 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 common
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 term _Kindergarten_, garden of children, and called the
superintendents "children's gardeners."--R.H. QUICK, in _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_, xix edition.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PAGE

INTRODUCTORY 1, 2

LETTER TO THE DUKE OF MEININGEN 3-101

Birth and early life 3, 104

Enters the girls' school 9

Goes away from home to Stadt-Ihm 15

Is apprenticed to a forester 24

Returns to his father's house 27

Goes to the University of Jena 28, 105

Returns home again 35

Goes to Bamberg as clerk 33

Becomes land-surveyor 39

Goes to the Oberfalz as accountant 42

Soon after to Mecklenberg 42

Gets small inheritance from his uncle 43

Goes to Frankfurt 48, 107

Becomes teacher in the Model School 31, 109

Visits Pestalozzi 52

Resigns to become a private tutor 65, 110

Takes his three pupils to Yverdon 77

Returns to Frankfurt 84

Goes to the University of Goettingen 84, 111

Goes to Berlin 89, 111

Enters the army 91, 111, 120

Becomes curator in Berlin 96, 111, 121

Enlists in the army again 100, 121

SUPPLEMENTARY REMARKS BY THE TRANSLATORS 102, 103

LETTER TO KRAUSE 104-125

Begins at Griesheim his ideal work 113, 121

Undertakes education of his nephews 121

Moves to Keilhau 122, 127

NOTE BY THE TRANSLATORS 126

CRITICAL MOMENTS IN THE FROEBEL COMMUNITY 127-137

Froebel goes to the Wartensee 131

Then to Willisau 132, 136

Then to the Orphanage at Burgdorf 135, 136

Visits Berlin 137

NOTES BY THE TRANSLATORS 138, 139

Death of Froebel 138

CHRONOLOGICAL ABSTRACT OF FROEBEL'S LIFE AND MOVEMENT 140-144

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF FROEBEL 145-152

INDEX 153-167

INTRODUCTORY.

The year 1882 was the centenary of Froebel's birth, and in the present
"plentiful lack" of faithful translations of Froebel's own words we
proposed to the Froebel Society to issue a translation of the "Education
of Man," which we would undertake to make at our own cost, that the
occasion might be marked in a manner worthy of the English branch of the
Kindergarten movement. But various reasons prevented the Society from
accepting our offer, and the lamentable deficiency still continues. We
have therefore endeavoured to make a beginning by the present work,
consisting of Froebel's own words done into English as faithfully as we
know how to render them, and accompanied with any brief explanation of
our own that may be essential to the clear understanding of the passages
given. We have not attempted to rewrite our author, the better to suit
the practical, clear-headed, common-sense English character, but have
preferred simply to present him in an English dress with his national
and personal peculiarities untouched.

In so doing we are quite aware that we have sacrificed interest, for in
many passages, if not in most, a careful paraphrase of Froebel would be
much more intelligible and pithy to English readers than a true
rendering, since he probably possesses every fault of style except
over-conciseness; but we feel that it is better to let Froebel speak for
himself.

For the faithfulness of translation we hope our respective nationalities
may have stood us in good stead. We would, however, add that a faithful
translation is not a verbal translation. The translator should rather
strive to write each sentence as the author would have written it in
English.

Froebel's opinions, character, and work grow so directly out of his
life, that we feel the best of his writing that a student of the
Kindergarten system could begin with is the important autobiographical
"Letter to the Duke of Meiningen," written in the year 1827, but never
completed, and in all probability never sent to the sovereign whose name
it bears. That this is the course Froebel would himself have preferred
will, we think, become quickly apparent to the reader. Besides, in the
boyhood and the earliest experiences of Froebel's life, we find the
sources of his whole educational system. That other children might be
better understood than he was, that other children might have the means
to live the true child-life that was denied to himself, and that by
their powers being directed into the right channels, these children
might become a blessing to themselves and to others, was undoubtedly in
great part the motive which induced Froebel to describe so fully all the
circumstances of his peculiar childhood. We should undoubtedly have a
clearer comprehension of many a great reformer if he had taken the
trouble to write out at length the impressions of his life's dawn, as
Froebel has done. In Froebel's particular case, moreover, it is evident
that although his account of himself is unfinished, we fortunately
possess all that is most important for the understanding of the origin
of the Kindergarten system. After the "Letter to the Duke of Meiningen,"
we have placed the shorter account of his life which Froebel included in
a letter to the philosopher Krause. A sketch of Barop's, which varies
the point of view by regarding the whole movement more in its outer
aspect than even Froebel himself is able to do, seemed to us also
desirable to translate; and finally we have added also a carefully
prepared "chronology" extended from Lange's list. Our translation is
made from the edition of Froebel's works published by Dr. Wichard Lange
at Berlin in 1862.

EMILIE MICHAELIS.
H. KEATLEY MOORE.
THE CROYDON KINDERGARTEN,
_January 1886_.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF FROEBEL.

(A LETTER TO THE DUKE OF MEININGEN.)

I was born at Oberweissbach, a village in the Thuringian Forest, in the
small principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, on the 21st April, 1782.
My father was the principal clergyman, or pastor, there.[1] (He died in
1802.) I was early initiated into the conflict of life amidst painful
and narrowing circumstances; and ignorance of child-nature and
insufficient education wrought their influence upon me. Soon after my
birth my mother's health began to fail, and after nursing me nine months
she died. This loss, a hard blow to me, influenced the whole environment
and development of my being: I consider that my mother's death decided
more or less the external circumstances of my whole life.

The cure of five thousand souls, scattered over six or seven villages,
devolved solely on my father. This work, even to a man so active as my
father, who was very conscientious in the fulfilment of his duty as
minister, was all-absorbing; the more so since the custom of frequent
services still prevailed. Besides all this, my father had undertaken to
superintend the building of a large new church, which drew him more and
more from his home and from his children.

I was left to the care of the servants; but they, profiting by my
father's absorption in his work, left me, fortunately for me, to my
brothers, who were somewhat older than myself.[2] This, in addition
to a circumstance of my later life, may have been the cause of that
unswerving love for my family, and especially for my brothers, which
has, to the present moment, been of the greatest importance to me in
the conduct of my life. Although my father, for a village pastor, was
unusually well informed--nay, even learned and experienced--and was an
incessantly active man, yet in consequence of this separation from him
during my earliest years I remained a stranger to him throughout my
life; and in this way I was as truly without a father as without a
mother. Amidst such surroundings I reached my fourth year. My father
then married again, and gave me a second mother. My soul must have felt
deeply at this time the want of a mother's love,--of parental love,--for
in this year occurs my first consciousness of self. I remember that I
received my new mother overflowing with feelings of simple and faithful
child-love towards her. These sentiments made me happy, developed my
nature, and strengthened me, because they were kindly received and
reciprocated by her. But this happiness did not endure. Soon my
step-mother rejoiced in the possession of a son of her own;[3] and then
her love was not only withdrawn entirely from me and transferred to her
own child, but I was treated with worse than indifference--by word and
deed, I was made to feel an utter stranger.

I am obliged here to mention these circumstances, and to describe them
so particularly, because in them I see the first cause of my early
habit of introspection, my tendency to self-examination, and my early
separation from companionship with other men. Soon after the birth of
her own son, when I had scarcely entered my boyhood, my step-mother
ceased to use the sympathetic, heart-uniting "thou" in speaking to me,
and began to address me in the third person, the most estranging of our
forms of speech. And as in this mode of address the third person, "he,"
isolates the person addressed, it created a great chasm between my
step-mother and me.[4] At the beginning of my boyhood, I already felt
utterly lonely, and my soul was filled with grief.

Some coarse-minded people wished to make use of my sentiments and my
mood at this time to set me against my step-mother, but my heart and
mind turned with indignation from these persons, whom I thenceforth
avoided, so far as I was able. Thus I became, at an early age, conscious
of a nobler, purer, inner-life, and laid the foundation of that proper
self-consciousness and moral pride which have accompanied me through
life. Temptations returned from time to time, and each time took a more
dangerous form: not only was I suspected as being capable of unworthy
things, but base conduct was actually charged against me, and this in
such a way as left no doubt of the impropriety of the suspicion and of
the untruthfulness of the accusation. So it came to pass that in the
first years of my boyhood I was perforce led to live to myself and in
myself--and indeed to study my own being and inner consciousness, as
opposed to external circumstances. My inward and my outward life were
at that time, even during play and other occupations, my principal
subjects for reflection and thought.

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