Friedrich Froebel Quotes

The end of education is not reason per se, but rather the happy, unified man who need not keep his instincts and impulses chained down, for they are functionally a part of the integrated man at peace with himself, his universe, and his God.

In the late eighteenth-century, German educationalist Friedrich Froebel found that the best way to promote learning in children was through play. His studies found that people are naturally creative, and that their creativity was best brought out inside educational environments that included materials (which he called “gifts”) that encouraged learning through hands-on play. The idea was to teach young children through ways they valued and enjoyed rather than through ways they viewed as useless and boring.

Kindergarten, as first conceived by Friedrich Froebel in the nineteenth century, was a place where children would play, as if in a garden. However, the push to teach to the test has squeezed self-directed play out of kindergartens almost entirely, as described by the Alliance for Childhood in their report Crisis in the

a German teacher and staunch nature lover named Friedrich Froebel picked up on the idea that play is key to children’s physical, moral, and spiritual development.