Finding Froebel

Friedrich Froebel, the ‘father of kindergarten’, is one of the most influential pedagogues of the 19th century. However, relatively little is known about his life, his successes and failures, and his personal relationships. Based on many untranslated and unknown letters, this new biography presents Froebel as a brilliant but also flawed man.

Beginning with his childhood and the early death of his mother, as well as his difficult relationship with his father and stepmother, we see the early seeds of Froebel’s interest in children and the training of early childhood practitioners. While Froebel lacked basic academic knowledge due to his poor early education, he was able to overcome these deficits and found an educational institute, and develop ground-breaking educational theories about play and pedagogy. He authored multiple books, including his most famous work The Education of Man. The focus of this book, though, is not on Froebel’s educational theories but on his complicated relationships with his family, the Keilhau community, and the mother of one of his pupils, Caroline von Holzhausen, whom he called the “rune of his life”. After many personal and professional disappointments, Froebel finally came up with the idea that made him famous until today: kindergarten. In the last decade of his life, he became a salesman of this new idea and worked tirelessly for the establishment of the kindergarten movement. However, when the Prussian government banned kindergarten shortly before his death, Froebel was broken – even if kindergarten lives until today.

Helge Wasmuth is Professor of Early Childhood and Childhood Education at Mercy College, USA. He is co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Friedrich Froebel (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Ulf Sauerbrey is Professor of Early Childhood Education at Neubrandenburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany.

Michael Winkler is Professor of General Pedagogy and Theory of Social Pedagogy at the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, Germany, and Visiting Lecturer at the Evangelical University of Dresden, Germany, and the Sigmund Freud University of Vienna, Austria.