Who is Friedrich Froebel?
Friedrich Froebel officially opened the first kindergarten on 28 June 1840, to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Gutenberg’s discovery of movable type. Froebel created the name Kindergarten for the Play and Activity Institute, which he had founded in 1837 in the village of Bad Blankenburg, in the small principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Thuringia, Germany. The first kindergarten in the United States was founded in Watertown, Wisconsin by Margarethe (Margaretta) Meyer Schurz (wife of activist/statesman Carl Schurz). Margarethe Schurz initially taught five children in her home (including her own daughter Agatha) in Watertown, Wisconsin, but was so successful that she opened her first kindergarten in America in 1856. While Schurz’s first kindergarten was German-language, she also advocated the establishment of English-language kindergartens. The first English-language kindergarten in America was founded in 1859 in Boston by Elizabeth Peabody, who received her first exposure to a
fredrich froebel (fröbel) Best known for his work on kindergardens and play, Froebel has a lot to say for informal educators picture: friedrich froebel – believed to be in public domainFriedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (Fröbel) (1782 – 1852). Friedrich Froebel, the German educationalist, is best known as the originator of the ‘kindergarten system’. By all accounts he had a difficult childhood. His mother died when he was a baby, and his father, a pastor, left him to his own devices. He grew up, it is said, with a love for nature and with a strong Christian faith and this was central to his thinking as an educationalist. He saw, and sought to encourage, unity in all things. The purpose of education is to encourage and guide man as a conscious, thinking and perceiving being in such a way that he becomes a pure and perfect representation of that divine inner law through his own personal choice; education must show him the ways and meanings of attaining that goal. (Friedrich Froebel 1826 Di
