Friedrich Froebel Remembered

Scott Bultman, President of Froebel USA, recently shared these thoughts with Exchange:

"Friedrich Froebel invented Kindergarten, the first system for educating young children. In the early 19th century, Froebel pioneered play-based techniques and what we today consider educational toys. His many contributions to education influenced Montessori, Steiner, Dewey, and Piaget. A century ago most major U.S. cities had Froebel associations and his birthday was widely celebrated, but today he has largely been forgotten." Some of Froebel's words of wisdom:

Children are like tiny flowers; they are varied and need care, but each is beautiful alone and glorious when seen in the community of peers.

It would prove a boon to our children and a blessing to coming generations if we could but come to see that we possess a great oppressive load of extraneous and merely external information and culture; that we foolishly seek to increase this from day to day; and that we are very poor in inner knowledge, in information evolved from our own soul and grown up with it.

A documentary film project, crowdfunded on Kickstarter, seeks to tell Froebel's story. In addition to preserving this important history, filmmaker Scott Bultman also hopes to inform the current debates on the need for Pre-K and "play versus instruction" in preschool. "Kindergarten played a crucial role during the Industrial Revolution," writes Bultman. "It provided childcare to working mothers, boosted creativity and spatial literacy needed for emerging careers in growing urban centers, and inspired children to become lifelong learners .... the same benefits we seek today in the era of design/technology jobs."

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