Name: Joanna Mae B.

Mendoza Subject: ECED 21

Year & Section: BECED 2nd year Student Number: 201901-448

Friedrich Froebel

Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel was born on April

21, 1782, in Thuringia. Froebel’s strict father, a Lutheran
pastor, raised him from infancy after Froebel’s mother died.
At the age of ten, Froebel was sent to live with an uncle. In
his youth, Froebel enjoyed nature and studied botany and
mathematics. His first professional position was as a teacher
at a school in Frankfurt. He taught in private duty, serving as
the in-house educator for the children of noble families, and
at several different schools throughout Germany. Froebel
served briefly in the Prussian army during the Napoleonic
wars. 
In 1816, Froebel founded the Universal German
Educational Institute, which was relocated to Keilhau the
following year. During this time, Froebel began publishing
his theories on education. His most acclaimed work,  The
Education of Man, was published in 1826.Froebel spent time in Switzerland and also
founded an institution for education there in 1831. Upon his return to Germany in 1837,
Froebel dedicated his work to the study of preschool education, and he published several
magazines and papers on the topic. Froebel developed all of the educational play tools in
the kindergarten, including building blocks, pattern games, and other educational exercises.
His innovations in the kindergarten environment are said to have influenced many fields,
including architecture and art.
The German educator Friedrich froebel is significant for developing an idealist
philosophy of early childhood education and establishing the kindergarten, a school for four
and five years old children that is found worldwide.
Froebel established a new type of early childhood school, a child's garden or
kindergarten, for three and four years old children. Using play, songs, stories, and activities,
the kindergarten was designed as an educational environment in which children, through
their own self activity, could develop in the right direction. The right direction meant that, in
their development, children would follow the divinely laws of human growth through their own
activity.
Froebel based his work in principles, asserting that each child at birth has an internal
spiritual essence of life force that seeks to be externalized through self-activity. Further
more, child development follows the doctrine of preformation, the unfolding of that which
was present latently in the individual. The kindergarten is a special educational environment
in which this self-active development occurs. Froebel seek to encourage the creation of
educational environments that involved practical work and the direct use of materials.
Froebel was convinced that kindergarten's primary focus should be on play because
by the process he believes that children expressed their innermost thoughts, needs, and
desires. For Froebel, play facilitated children's process of cultural recapitulation, imitation of
adult vocational activities and socialization.