Philosophically, kindergarten was grounded in Froebel’s belief in the Unity of all things and in the existence of simple laws and principles underlying nature’s apparent complexity. As Froebel saw it, the crystal was the archetypal form from which we could derive a model for all of nature. The child herself could be seen as a crystal… Froebel wrote that the role of education was to guide the development of the nascent, crystalline mind from “one-sidedness, individuality and incompleteness” toward “all-sidedness, harmony and completeness.
By education the divine essence of man should be unfolded, brought out, lifted into consciousness.
Friedrich Froebel, 1826
Froebel Kindergarten’s Gifts - Twenty in number, the gifts were tools designed to encourage the exploration of form.
More about Froebel gifts here.
Inventing Kindergarten book from Norman Brosterman, images of the book here and video of the writer.
In his book Inventing Kindergarten, Norman Brosterman argues that within this lost world of women and children we can locate the seedbed of modern art. With its emphasis on abstract decomposition and building up from elemental forms, the original kindergarten system of the mid-nineteenth century created an education and design revolution that profoundly affected the course of modern art and architecture, as well as physics, music, psychology and the modern mind itself. Brosterman discusses the history of kindergarten and its influence on such modernist giants as Frank Lloyd Wright, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus school.
Exhibition Inventing Kindergarten:
When I made this I had no idea about the dimension of Froebel work…
Amazing work by La Trenza here.
More links:
Froebel Museum
Froebel USA
Very nice great article thank you…