Froebel is Dead; Long Live Froebel! The National Froebel Foundation and English Education

Abstract

The German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel lived from 1782 to 1852. The pedagogy that made Froebel famous was encompassed in his Kindergarten, a set of strictly defined methods and activities for the education of young children, which he developed and refined in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Froebel’s Kindergarten reached England in the mid‐1850s, where it attracted a small but enthusiastic group of followers and practitioners. By 1900, Froebel’s followers in England had become awakened to movements in child study and psychology and Froebel’s prescriptions did not hold up to ensuing criticism. In most histories of English education, the story of Froebelian education in England stops there, with the so‐called death of Froebelian early childhood pedagogy and its replacement with an eclectic range of pedagogies and institutions based variously on the work of Sigmund and Anna Freud, Margaret McMillan, John Dewey, Susan Isaacs, Maria Montessori and others. This article picks up this dropped thread, examining the English neo‐Froebelian movement after the death of Froebelian methods by the start of the twentieth century. Based on analysis of the organizational records and publications of the Froebel Society, National Froebel Foundation, NSA and other professional groups connected with early childhood and progressive pedagogy, this article identifies several turning points in the institutional and ideological trajectory of neo‐Froebelians in the most turbulent and decisive period of twentieth‐century English pedagogical and policy debate. More specifically, this article shows that Stuart Hall’s theories of identity politics—as well as Eric Hobsbawm’s and Terence Ranger’s concept of invented tradition—can help us make sense of the apparently paradoxical persistence of ‘Froebel’ discourse in interwar and 1940s progressive English educational discourse despite what appeared to be a complete disavowal of Friedrich Froebel, the man and his pedagogy on the part of those wielding his name.