the Kindergarten for the whole human race, Froebel described his system in a weekly paper (his Sonntagsblatt) which appeared from the middle of 1837 till 1840. He also lectured in great towns; and he gave a regular course of instruction to young teachers at Blankenburg. But although the principles of the Kindergarten were gradually making their way, the first Kindergarten was failing for want of funds. It had to be given up, and Froebel, now a widower (he had lost his wife in 1839), carried on his course for teachers first at Keilhau, and from 1848, for the last four years of his life, at or near Liebenstein, in the Thuringian forest, and in the duchy of Meiningen. It is in these last years that the man Froebel will be best known to posterity, for in 1849 he attracted within the circle of his influence a woman of great intellectual power, the baroness von Marenholtz-Bülow, who has given us in her Recollections of Friedrich Froebel the only lifelike portrait we possess.
These seemed likely to be Froebel’s most peaceful days. He married again in 1851, and having now devoted himself to the training of women as educators, he spent his time in instructing his class of young female teachers. But trouble came upon him from a quarter whence he least expected it. In the great year of revolutions (1848) Froebel had hoped to turn to account the general eagerness for improvement, and Middendorff had presented an address on Kindergartens to the German parliament. Besides this, a nephew of Froebel’s, Professor Karl Froebel of Zürich, published books which were supposed to teach socialism. True, the uncle and nephew differed so widely that the “new Froebelians” were the enemies of “the old,” but the distinction was overlooked, and Friedrich and Karl Froebel were regarded as the united advocates of some new thing. In the reaction which soon set in, Froebel found himself suspected of socialism and irreligion, and in 1851 the “cultus-minister” Von Raumer issued an edict forbidding the establishment of schools “after Friedrich and Karl Froebel’s principles” in Prussia. This was a heavy blow to the old man, who looked to the government of the “Cultus-staat” Prussia for support, and was met with denunciation. Whether from the worry of this new controversy, or from whatever cause, Froebel did not long survive the decree. His seventieth birthday was celebrated with great rejoicings in May 1852, but he died on the 21st of June, and was buried at Schweina, a village near his last abode, Marienthal, near Bad-Liebenstein.
“All education not founded on religion is unproductive.” This conviction followed naturally from Froebel’s conception of the unity of all things, a unity due to the original Unity from whom all proceed and in whom all “live, move and have their being.” As man and nature have one origin they must be subject to the same laws. Hence Froebel, like Comenius two centuries before him, looked to the course of nature for the principles of human education. This he declares to be his fundamental belief: “In the creation, in nature and the order of the material world, and in the progress of mankind, God has given us the true type (Urbild) of education.” As the cultivator creates nothing in the trees and plants, so the educator creates nothing in the children,—he merely superintends the development of inborn faculties. So far Froebel agrees with Pestalozzi; but in one respect he went beyond him. Pestalozzi said that the faculties were developed by exercise. Froebel added that the function of education was to develop the faculties by arousing voluntary activity. Action proceeding from inner impulse (Selbsttätigkeit) was the one thing needful.
The prominence which Froebel gave to action, his doctrine that man is primarily a doer and even a creator, and that he learns only through “self-activity,” has its importance all through education. But it was to the first stage of life that Froebel paid the greatest attention. He held with Rousseau that each age has a completeness of its own, and that the perfection of the later stage can be attained only through the perfection of the earlier. If the infant is what he should be as an infant, and the child as a child, he will become what he should be as a boy, just as naturally as new shoots spring from the healthy plant. Every stage, then, must be cared for and tended in such a way that it may attain its own perfection. Impressed with the immense importance of the first stage, Froebel like Pestalozzi devoted himself to the instruction of mothers. But he would not, like Pestalozzi, leave the children entirely in the mother’s hands. Pestalozzi held that the child belonged to the family; Fichte, on the other hand, claimed it for society and the state. Froebel, whose mind delighted in harmonizing apparent contradictions, and who taught that “all progress lay through opposites to their reconciliation,” maintained that the child belonged both to the family and to society, and he would therefore have children spend some hours of the day in a common life and in well-organized common employments. These assemblies of children he would not call schools, for the children in them ought not to be old enough for schooling. So he invented the name Kindergarten, garden of children, and called the superintendents “children’s gardeners.” He laid great stress on every child cultivating its own plot of ground, but this was not his reason for the choice of the name. It was rather that he thought of these institutions as enclosures in which young human plants are nurtured. In the Kindergarten the children’s employment should be play. But any occupation in which children delight is play to them; and Froebel invented a series of employments, which, while they are in this sense play to the children, have nevertheless, as seen from the adult point of view, a distinct educational object. This object, as Froebel himself describes it, is “to give the children employment in agreement with their whole nature, to strengthen their bodies, to exercise their senses, to engage their awakening mind, and through their senses to bring them acquainted with nature and their fellow creatures; it is especially to guide aright the heart and the affections, and to lead them to the original ground of all life, to unity with themselves.”
Froebel’s own works are: Menschenerziehung (“Education of Man”), (1826), which has been translated into French and English; Pädagogik d. Kindergartens; Kleinere Schriften and Mutter- und Koselieder; collected editions have been edited by Wichard Lange (1862) and Friedrich Seidel (1883).
A. B. Hauschmann’s Friedrich Fröbel is a lengthy and unsatisfactory biography. An unpretentious but useful little book is F. Froebel, a Biographical Sketch, by Matilda H. Kriege, New York (Steiger). A very good account of Froebel’s life and thoughts is given in Karl Schmidt’s Geschichte d. Pädagogik, vol. iv.; also in Adalbert Weber’s Geschichte d. Volksschulpäd. u. d. Kleinkindererziehung (Weber carefully gives authorities). For a less favourable account see K. Strack’s Geschichte d. deutsch. Volksschulwesens. Frau von Marenholtz-Bülow published her Erinnerungen an F. Fröbel (translated by Mrs. Horace Mann, 1877). This lady, the chief interpreter of Froebel, has expounded his principles in Das Kind u. sein Wesen and Die Arbeit u. die neue Erziehung. H. Courthope Bowen has written a memoir (1897) in the “Great Educators” series. In England Miss Emily A. E. Shirreff has published Principles of Froebel’s System, and a short sketch of Froebel’s life. See also Dr Henry Barnard’s Papers on Froebel’s Kindergarten (1881); R. H. Quick, Educational Reformers (1890). (R. H. Q.)
FROG,[1] a name in zoology, of somewhat wide application,
strictly for an animal belonging to the family Ranidae, but also
used of some other families of the order Ecaudata of the sub-class
Batrachia (q.v.).
Frogs proper are typified by the common British species, Rana temporaria, and its allies, such as the edible frog, R. esculenta, and the American bull-frog R. catesbiana. The genus Rana may be defined as firmisternal Ecaudata with cylindrical transverse processes to the sacral vertebra, teeth in the upper jaw and on the vomer, a protrusible tongue which is free and forked behind, a horizontal pupil and more or less webbed toes. It includes about 200 species, distributed over the whole world
- ↑ The word “frog” is in O.E. frocga or frox, cf. Dutch vorsch, Ger. Frosch; Skeat suggests a possible original source in the root meaning “to jump,” “to spring,” cf. Ger. froh, glad, joyful and “frolic.” The term is also applied to the following objects: the horny part in the center of a horse’s hoof; an attachment to a belt for suspending a sword, bayonet, &c.; a fastening for the front of a coat, still used in military uniforms, consisting of two buttons on opposite sides joined by ornamental looped braids; and, in railway construction, the point where two rails cross. These may be various transferred applications of the name of the animal, but the “frog” of a horse was also called “frush,” probably a corruption of the French name fourchette, lit. little fork. The ornamental braiding is also more probably due to “frock,” Lat. floccus.
