left the forest at the early age of seventeen, he seems to have
been possessed by the main ideas which influenced him all his
life. The conception which in him dominated all others was the
unity of nature; and he longed to study natural sciences that
he might find in them various applications of nature’s universal
laws. With great difficulty he got leave to join his elder brother
at the university of Jena, and there for a year he went from
lecture-room to lecture-room hoping to grasp that connexion
of the sciences which had for him far more attraction than any
particular science in itself. But Froebel’s allowance of money
was very small, and his skill in the management of money was
never great, so his university career ended in an imprisonment
of nine weeks for a debt of thirty shillings. He then returned
home with very poor prospects, but much more intent on what
he calls the course of “self-completion” (Vervollkommnung
meines selbst) than on “getting on” in a worldly point of view.
He was sent to learn farming, but was recalled in consequence
of the failing health of his father. In 1802 the father died, and
Froebel, now twenty years old, had to shift for himself. It was
some time before he found his true vocation, and for the next
three and a half years we find him at work now in one part of
Germany now in another—sometimes land-surveying, sometimes
acting as accountant, sometimes as private secretary; but in all
this his “outer life was far removed from his inner life,” and in
spite of his outward circumstances he became more and more
conscious that a great task lay before him for the good of
humanity. The nature of the task, however, was not clear to
him, and it seemed determined by accident. While studying
architecture in Frankfort-on-Main, he became acquainted with
the director of a model school, who had caught some of the
enthusiasm of Pestalozzi. This friend saw that Froebel’s true
field was education, and he persuaded him to give up architecture
and take a post in the model school. In this school Froebel
worked for two years with remarkable success, but he then
retired and undertook the education of three lads of one family.
In this he could not satisfy himself, and he obtained the parents’
consent to his taking the boys to Yverdon, near Neuchâtel, and
there forming with them a part of the celebrated institution of
Pestalozzi. Thus from 1807 till 1809 Froebel was drinking in
Pestalozzianism at the fountain-head, and qualifying himself to
carry on the work which Pestalozzi had begun. For the science
of education had to deduce from Pestalozzi’s experience principles
which Pestalozzi himself could not deduce. And “Froebel, the
pupil of Pestalozzi, and a genius like his master, completed the
reformer’s system; taking the results at which Pestalozzi had
arrived through the necessities of his position, Froebel developed
the ideas involved in them, not by further experience but by
deduction from the nature of man, and thus he attained to the
conception of true human development and to the requirements
of true education” (Schmidt’s Geschichte der Pädagogik).
Holding that man and nature, inasmuch as they proceed from the same source, must be governed by the same laws, Froebel longed for more knowledge of natural science. Even Pestalozzi seemed to him not to “honour science in her divinity.” He therefore determined to continue the university course which had been so rudely interrupted eleven years before, and in 1811 he began studying at Göttingen, whence he proceeded to Berlin. But again his studies were interrupted, this time by the king of Prussia’s celebrated call “to my people.” Though not a Prussian, Froebel was heart and soul a German. He therefore responded to the call, enlisted in Lützow’s corps, and went through the campaign of 1813. But his military ardour did not take his mind off education. “Everywhere,” he writes, “as far as the fatigues I underwent allowed, I carried in my thoughts my future calling as educator; yes, even in the few engagements in which I had to take part. Even in these I could gather experience for the task I proposed to myself.” Froebel’s soldiering showed him the value of discipline and united action, how the individual belongs not to himself but to the whole body, and how the whole body 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, ten years younger than Froebel, became attached to him in the field, and were ever afterwards his devoted followers, sacrificing all their prospects in life for the sake of carrying out his ideas.
At the peace of Fontainebleau (signed in May 1814) Froebel returned to Berlin, and became curator of the museum of mineralogy under Professor Weiss. In accepting this appointment from the government he seemed to turn aside from his work as educator; but if not teaching he was learning. More and more the thought possessed him that the one thing needful for man was unity of development, perfect evolution in accordance with the laws of his being, such evolution as science discovers in the other organisms of nature. He at first intended to become a teacher of natural science, but before long wider views dawned upon him. Langethal and Middendorff were in Berlin, engaged in tuition. Froebel gave them regular instruction in his theory, and at length, counting on their support, he resolved to set about realizing his own idea of “the new education.” This was in 1816. Three years before one of his brothers, a clergyman, had died of fever caught from the French prisoners. His widow was still living in the parsonage at Griesheim, a village on the Ilm. Froebel gave up his post, and set out for Griesheim on foot, spending his very last groschen on the way for bread. Here he undertook the education of his orphan niece and nephews, and also of two more nephews sent him by another brother. With these he opened a school and wrote to Middendorff and Langethal to come and help in the experiment. Middendorff came at once, Langethal a year or two later, when the school had been moved to Keilhau, another of the Thuringian villages, which became the Mecca of the new faith. In Keilhau Froebel, Langethal, Middendorff and Barop, a relation of Middendorff’s, all married and formed an educational community. Such zeal could not be fruitless, and the school gradually increased, though for many years its teachers, with Froebel at their head, were in the greatest straits for money and at times even for food. After fourteen years’ experience he determined to start other institutions to work in connexion with the parent institution at Keilhau, and being offered by a private friend the use of a castle on the Wartensee, in the canton of Lucerne, he left Keilhau under the direction of Barop, and with Langethal he opened the Swiss institution. The ground, however, was very ill chosen. The Catholic clergy resisted what they considered as 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. It was in vain that Middendorff at Froebel’s call left his wife and family at Keilhau, and laboured for four years in Switzerland without once seeing them. The Swiss institution never flourished. But the Swiss government wished to turn to account the presence of the great educator; so young teachers were sent to Froebel for instruction, and finally Froebel moved to Burgdorf (a Bernese town of some importance, and famous from Pestalozzi’s labours there thirty years earlier) to undertake the establishment of a public orphanage and also to superintend a course of teaching for schoolmasters. The elementary teachers of the canton were to spend three months every alternate year at Burgdorf, and there compare experiences, and learn of distinguished men such as Froebel and Bitzius. In his conferences with these teachers Froebel found that the schools suffered from the state of the raw material brought into them. Till the school age was reached the children were entirely neglected. Froebel’s conception of harmonious development naturally led him to attach much importance to the earliest years, and his great work on The Education of Man, published as early as 1826, deals chiefly with the child up to the age of seven. At Burgdorf his thoughts were much occupied with the proper treatment of young children, and in scheming for them a graduated course of exercises, modelled on the games in which he observed them to be most interested. In his eagerness to carry out his new plans he grew impatient of official restraints; so he returned to Keilhau, and soon afterwards opened the first Kindergarten or “Garden of Children,” in the neighbouring village of Blankenburg (1837). Firmly convinced of the importance of
