Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel | Page 2

power of inspiring and retaining friendships
that were heroic, Pestalozzi's Krüsi corresponding with Froebel's
Middendorf. Both became teachers only by accident, and after failure
in other professions. Both saw repeated disaster in the schools they

established, and both were to their last days pointed at as visionary
theorists of unsound mind. Both failed to realize their ideas, but both
planted their ideas so deeply in the minds of others that they took
enduring root. Both lacked knowledge of men, but both knew and
loved children, and were happiest when personally and alone they had
children under their charge. Both delighted in nature, and found in
solitary contemplation of flowers and woods and mountains relief from
the disappointments they encountered among their fellows.
But there were contrasts too. Pestalozzi had no family ties, while
Froebel maintained to the last the closest relations with several brothers
and their households. Pestalozzi married at twenty-three a woman older
than himself, on whom he thereafter relied in all his troubles. Froebel
deferred his marriage till thirty-six and then seems to have regarded his
wife more as an advantage to his school than as a help-meet to himself.
Pestalozzi was diffident, and in dress and manner careless to the point
of slovenliness; Froebel was extravagant in his self-confidence, and at
times almost a dandy in attire. Pestalozzi was always honest and candid,
while Froebel was as a boy untruthful. Pestalozzi was touchingly
humble, and eager to ascribe the practical failure of his theories to his
personal inefficiency; Froebel never acknowledged himself in the
wrong, but always attributed failure to external causes. On the other
hand, while Froebel was equable in temperament, Pestalozzi was
moody and impressionable, flying from extreme gaiety to extreme
dejection, slamming the door if displeased with a lesson a teacher was
giving, but coming back to apologize if he met a child who smiled upon
him. Under Rousseau's influence Pestalozzi was inclined to skepticism,
and limited religious teaching in school to the reading of the gospels,
and the practice of Christianity; Froebel was deeply pious, and made it
fundamental that education should be founded plainly and avowedly
upon religion.
Intellectually the contrast is even stronger. While Froebel had a
university education, Pestalozzi was an eminently ignorant man; his
penmanship was almost illegible, he could not do simple sums in
multiplication, he could not sing, he could not draw, he wore out all his

handkerchiefs gathering pebbles and then never looked at them
afterward. Froebel was not only a reader but a scientific reader, always
seeking first to find out what others had discovered that he might begin
where they left off; Pestalozzi boasted that he had not read a book in
forty years. Naturally, therefore, Pestalozzi was always an experimenter,
profiting by his failures but always failing in his first attempts, and
hitting upon his most characteristic principles by accident; while
Froebel was a theorist, elaborating his ideas mentally before putting
them in practice, and never satisfied till he had properly located them in
his general scheme of philosophy.
And yet, curiously enough, it is Pestalozzi who was the author. His
"Leonard and Gertrude" was read by every cottage fireside, while
Froebel's writings were intelligible only to his disciples. Pestalozzi had
an exuberant imagination and delightful directness and simplicity of
expression; Froebel's style was labored and obscure, and his doctrines
may be better known through the "Child and Child Nature" of the
Baroness Marenholz von Buelow than through his own "Education of
Man."
The account of Froebel's life given in this volume is supplemented
somewhat by the "Reminiscences" of this same Baroness, who became
acquainted with him in 1849, and was thereafter his most enthusiastic
and successful apostle. Till some adequate biography appears, that
volume and this must be relied upon for information of the man who
shares equally with Pestalozzi the honor of educational reform in this
century.
C.W. BARDEEN. Syracuse, June 10, 1889.

COMMENTS UPON FROEBEL AND HIS WORK.
Und als er so, wie Wichard Lange richtig sagt, der Apostel des
weiblichen Gechlechts geworden war, starb er, der geniale,
unermüdlich thätige, von Liebe getragene Mann.--SCHMIDT,
_Geschichte der Pädagogik_, Cöthen, 1862, iv. 282.

En résumé, Rousseau aurait pu être déconcerté par les inventions
pratiques, un peu subtiles parfois, de l'ingénieux Froebel. Il eût souri,
comme tout le monde, des artifices par lesquels il obligeait l'enfant à se
faire acteur au milieu de ses petits camarades, à imiter tour à tour le
soldat qui monte la garde, le cordonnier qui travaille, le cheval qui
piétine, l'homme fatigué qui se repose. Mais, sur les principes, il se
serait mis aisément d'accord avec l'auteur de _l'Education de l'homme_,
avec un penseur à l'âme tendre et noble, qui remplaçait les livres par les
choses, qui à une instruction pédantesque substituait l'éducation
intérieure, qui aux connaissances positives préférait la