History

This article situates Friedrich Fröbel, inventor of the kindergarten, within the pedagogy of play developed from the late Aufklärung through the mid-nineteenth century. The first half of the chapter describes the theory and practice of childhood play as developed in Fröbel’s Menschenerziehung (1826) and other sources on the earliest German kindergartens. The second half situates Fröbel’s account amidst a series of other intellectual figures and influences, including Pestalozzi, Philanthropinism, Kant, Schiller, and Schleiermacher.

Looking backward from Prussia’s repression of the kindergarten in 1851, the chapter confronts the paradox of how, in a society with such sharply restricted civil and political freedoms and socioeconomic opportunities, play became central to educational theory and practice—only to be consciously set aside later. The irony was that there was no more progressive country than Germany when it came to public education, and no more advanced state than Prussia in making such education available to citizens at government expense. Germany, and Prussia in particular, led the world in the provision of compulsory elementary education to all school-aged children, and its example spurred other countries to improve their own systems of public schooling. To this day, two German inventions—the kindergarten and the Ph.D. degree—form the alpha and omega of formal education in many countries across the world. Both were part of an educational revolution that began during the Goethezeit as the analogue to political revolution in France and industrial revolution in England, and that ranks among the most important but historiographically neglected institutional and ideological transformations of the entire modern period. Play, in addition to its intrinsic interest, sheds light on these larger developments.