Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education

Transnational Investigations

Helen May, Kristen Nawrotzki, Larry Prochner, Helen May, Kristen Nawrotzki, Larry Prochner

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781474254434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Kindergarten Narratives on Froebelian Education showcases the latest scholarship and historical understandings concerning the casting of the kindergarten idea abroad: across cultures, continents and centuries. Each chapter reveals previously unknown narratives of intrepid endeavour, political pragmatism and pedagogical innovation that collectively provide insight into the transformation of Froebel's ideas on early education into a global phenomenon. Across global contexts, each chapter presents a case study of the ideas scattering abroad, illustrative of the movement of ideas, curricula and pedagogical change; in effect taking the kindergarten beyond the geographies and pedagogies of its German beginnings and borders. Chapters draw on historical examples of Froebelian education from The Netherlands, New Zealand, Japan, Sweden, the UK and the USA. In the journal History of Education in 2006, Froebelian history scholar Professor Kevin J. Brehony (1948-2013) lamented the 'relative neglect' of the history of early years education at the same time there was a heightened global social and political interest in educating the young child. In this book, an international team of contributors respond to Brehony's suggestion that historical perspectives can play a role in current debates and suggest ways historical narratives might inform policies and practices in twenty-first century early childhood education, care settings and contexts. Reconnecting past lessons and insights with present and future concerns for early education, young children and their place in society, this important collection also includes an historical timeline charting the spread of Froebelian education ideas and kindergartens across the world.

1

Tracking Kindergarten as a Travelling Idea

Larry Prochner

Kindergarten Narratives presents new work by historians aiming to document and explain kindergarten’s international reach. Much earlier writing on the history of kindergarten education described the idea’s travels from its epicentre in Germany to diverse global contexts. The chapters in this collection expand the scope to include kindergarten’s connection to issues of educational policy, pedagogy, curriculum and teacher education. The book is timely: young children’s well-being is a top priority for governments around the world, established in Education for All goals, in the European Council’s Barcelona Agreement and by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Network on Early Childhood Education and Care, initiatives which together have had a major impact on the discourses and practices of early years education in countries around the world.¹ And there is a call for more child-centred pedagogies, a principle included in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.² A countervailing influence is the impact of PISA – OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment – and the trend towards academic preschools with a government or ‘staff-initiated curriculum with cognitive aims for school preparation’.³ Preschools in the three countries at the top of PISA’s ranking in 2012⁴ – China, Singapore and Korea – tend to be academically oriented with teacher-directed pedagogies,⁵ contributing to pressure to emulate more teacher-directed approaches elsewhere.⁶ As Kevin Brehony described,

The place of play in early years education is under threat in many societies as the neo-liberal emphasis on work and preschool, conceived solely as preparation for school, in the belief that schooling is the key to economic success in conditions of globalization, bids to become hegemonic.⁷

Kindergarten Narratives contributes to the debate on the purpose of preschool by explaining what happens to child-centred forms of early education in diverse contexts.

Friedrich Froebel’s (1782–1852) idea of education, in which children engage in developmental, child-centred learning activities under the direction of a specially trained teacher, has become commonplace in many parts of the world, in principle if not in practice. The system originated in schools directed by Froebel over a period of several decades. In 1816 Froebel led a school for older children at Keilhau in Saxony where he developed his theory of education, described in his book Die Menschenerziehung (The Education of Man) published in 1826; in 1833 he directed an orphanage in Switzerland where he deepened his understanding of the importance of early education to later development and worked out some of his teaching materials; and in 1839 he organized a small school called Spiel- und Beschäftigungsanstalt (Play and Activity Institute) in Bad Blankenburg in Prussia, giving it the new name of Kindergarten in 1840. The German term was subsequently adopted as a loanword in many English-speaking countries⁸ or translated literally, as in the Swedish barnträdgårdar (described by Johannes Westberg in this volume).

Froebel’s theory drew upon his religious beliefs, his studies in mathematics, physics, crystallography, forestry and architecture, and his observations at Johann Pestalozzi’s school, where he lived for two years.⁹ Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he believed in the innocence of childhood, though for Froebel its nature required ordering. Like Pestalozzi, he understood the importance of connecting learning to real-life experiences, but Froebel used materials with a more symbolic and spiritual purpose. The guiding idea in Froebel’s theory was a religious belief in the divine unity of all things, echoing German scientific thinking that ‘saw all living things interrelated by a great chain of being raising from lower to higher forms of life’.¹⁰ The kindergarten activities were planned to enable children to make these essential connections. The credo of the kindergarten movement, ‘come let us live for our children’,¹¹ did not mean that children took the lead in their own education, but that teachers should show the way on the basis of Froebel’s idealistic understanding of the nature of childhood. Froebel believed that children’s minds were fully formed at birth and capable of reason but were unfocused. The guidance of a specially trained female teacher – presumed to have qualities of a sensitive mother – could bring children’s reason to full flower by providing materials known as play-gifts (Spielgaben) and by engaging children in activities called occupations (Beschäftigungsmittel). The materials were designed to mediate abstract ideas, bringing children to an integrated understanding of their relation to the world and facilitating their natural development or unfoldment. As Froebel described, in a child’s play with the first gift, the ball, ‘the life of the child makes itself known, and the outer world makes itself known to the child in unity’.¹²

Froebel surrounded himself with gifted and innovative teachers and students, leaving a group of dedicated women (and some men) who identified as his disciples to more fully articulate his ideas after his death. Others, learning about kindergarten through books or lectures, also took up the cause. They included writers and teachers working in different places and at different times to promote his vision and adapt it to new circumstances. The chapters that follow track some of the meanings of kindergarten over its 175-year history as it circulated the globe as a travelling idea of education for young children.

Many of the chapters in the book touch on the nature of play in kindergarten, considering what play is, who should lead it and its purpose. Kevin Brehony’s chapter explores ideas of play and work in Froebel’s writings and as interpreted by others. Brehony considers play and work as an apparent binary, reviewing debates across the period from the 1850s to the twentieth-first century. Brehony’s chapter serves as a primer on ideas of play in Froebelian education, and readers may wish to begin with it before delving into the book according to individual interests. The remainder of the book is organized in three parts. Chapters in part one consider the circulation of Froebelian education in different locations – the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States – and at different times, spanning the period from the 1850s to the present. Nelleke Bakker focuses on the advancement of Froebelian ideas in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century through her study of the work of ‘Froebel’s Dutch missionary’, Elise van Calcar-Schiotling. Bakker describes themes in van Calcar’s work in the Netherlands that we see in other chapters in this volume, including tension between calls for freedom in learning on the one hand and love of order on the other. Such order was considered to be natural – ‘God’s law’ – and supported by the apparent fixity of Froebel’s gifts, though he meant them to be used alongside other, natural objects. Bakker brings to light developments unique to Froebelian education in the Netherlands: van Calcar added her own notion of ‘the importance of first impressions’, reminiscent of the English infant school idea in which children’s initial impressions were believed to ‘form a kind of main spring to all their actions’.¹³ As Bakker describes, van Calcar never conceived of Froebelian education as a social project to improve the lives of working-class children. And in spite of her emphasis on children’s happiness and self-activity, by 1900 free play was marginalized in the Dutch Froebel school, where play had to be useful and support bourgeois morality and Calvinist work ethos. Although the Dutch kindergarten no longer exists as a distinct institution, the legacies of these debates are present in current discussions on curriculum and practice.

Kerry Bethell examines the demand for reform of the infant curriculum in New Zealand schools along Froebelian lines during the years 1906 to 1926. Education officials in New Zealand looked to Britain to recruit suitably qualified and experienced teachers to lead change in the colony’s infant schools. British teachers Dorothy Fitch and Winifred Maitland, who had trained at the Froebel Educational Institute in London, were recruited to head a new Normal School attached to the teachers’ college in Wellington, New Zealand, taking up their appointments in 1905 and 1912 respectively. Their brief was to modernize the curriculum for teacher education as a step towards modernizing teaching in schools. Bethell explores influences on the women’s work and ideas and identifies challenges they encountered in implementing the changes in New Zealand schools, from old-style classroom architecture in which children were seated in galleries, to large class sizes. Despite obstacles, their normal school became a leading progressive model of infant schooling that gained the interest of teachers and educators throughout the dominion. Fitch and Maitland’s work provides insights into the relevance of Froebel’s teachings in education today, not just for young children but, as they argued, for all children.

Johannes Westberg describes the phenomenon of exhibitions for fundraising for kindergarten in Sweden in the first half of the twentieth century. The exhibitions fulfilled several purposes in addition to fundraising, promoting the kindergarten idea and an image of bourgeois childhood – even though the kindergartens served working-class children. The exhibitions celebrated kindergarten through elaborate performances, combining a specific notion of ‘idyllic childhood’ along with cultural elements. While the daily activities of teachers and children in kindergartens were largely hidden from view, the exhibitions brought their work to public attention, transforming it along the way to reflect Swedish culture in its songs, stories and games, along with elements reflecting citizenship and nationalism. The fundraising events promoted kindergarten as a private charitable enterprise, a funding context that contrasts with the current situation in Sweden, in which there is significant state investment along with interest in shaping the pedagogy and practice of early education and, more broadly, the culture of childhood.

In the final chapter in part one, Kristen Nawrotzki turns our attention to the American kindergarten through a case study of developments in Grand Rapids, Michigan from the 1870s to the early years of the twentieth century. Following kindergartens’ initial introduction into the United States by teachers trained in Germany, the system was spread through the work of individuals and voluntary women’s organizations mobilizing local campaigns. As described by Nawrotzki, developments in Grand Rapids proceeded rapidly at times and only incrementally at others, as a type of ‘kindergarten conversion’ took hold in communities, which built a base of support for local organizations’ private and charitable programmes. Nawrotzki identifies the conditions leading to the growth of kindergarten in smaller urban centres, including: rapid increase in population, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Kevin J. Brehony 1948–2013 Rosemary Deem
• Preface Helen May and Kristen Nawrotzki
• 1 Tracking Kindergarten as a Travelling Idea Larry Prochner
• 2 Working at Play or Playing at Work? A Froebelian Paradox Re-examined Kevin J. Brehony
• Part I International Movement of Ideas: Froebelian Education in Time and Place
• Part II Curricular and Pedagogical Change: Froebelians beyond the Kindergarten
• Part III Radical by Tradition: Long-Term Perspectives on Kindergarten Education
• Selected References
• Index
• Copyright