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Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (Fröbel) (b. 1782–d. 1852) was a German-born, child-centered educationalist who is frequently placed in a genealogy of modern child-centered education beginning with Rousseau and containing Pestalozzi, Montessori, and John Dewey. Froebel’s place in this pantheon was secured by his practice as a teacher and by his writing, which both described and justified his pedagogical innovations. While these covered all stages of childhood, he is especially renowned for those writings that bore upon the education of children in their early years, defined as birth to seven years old. For children in this age group, Froebel created the kindergarten—the garden of children. Conceived as filling the gap between home and school, the kindergarten curriculum was intended to foster self-activity; at first in the form of play and later as work of a physical nature. After his death, his ideas and practices were spread to many places in the world by his followers, a phenomenon facilitated by the kindergarten’s universal view of the child and its basis in abstract theory amenable to but not constitutive of religion in diverse forms. Kindergartens thus became institutionalized in private schools and colleges in many parts of the world, and in some instances, such as in the United States, they were incorporated into the public school system. The literature in English relating to Froebel falls into three main periods. First, there are the works he wrote in his lifetime, the various accounts of his life that appeared after his death, and exegetical works, many of which appeared before the main body of his work had been translated. This permitted a wide variety of interpretations, many unhindered by what Froebel had actually said. Second, there are numerous works informed by child study and psychology that appeared from the late 1880s onward and that were critical of much of his notions of child development and early-years education. Finally, there is the scholarship produced from the end of the 20th century onward that is focused on the kindergarten movements and their contribution to early-years education, much of it from a feminist perspective.

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