99% Invisible - 349- Froebel's Gifts

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

In the late 1700s, a young man named Freidrich Froebel was on track to become an architect when a friend convinced him to pursue a path toward education instead. And in changing course, Froebel arguably ended up having more influence on the world of architecture and design than any single architect -- all because Friedrich Froebel created kindergarten. If you’ve ever looked at a piece of abstract art or Modernist architecture and thought “my kindergartener could have made that," well, that may be more true than you realize. Froebel’s Gifts

This is 99% invisible. 9 Roman Mars Once upon a time, there was a boy named Friedrich Frobo. His early life reads like one of those dark, old, German fairy tales. His mother died in 1783, right after he was born. And so Friedrich Frobo had a lonely childhood. He spent his days in the woods looking at trees and rocks and flowers, wandering

the dense forests of Therinjia and what was then, Prussia. It's a lush region, sometimes referred to today as the Daskruneherts Deutschlands, the green heart of Germany. That's Kurt Colstead, he produced this story. I actually lived near Therinjia when I was a kid, and the forest there are... ...sauberhoffed! Simply magical. And I can really see how Frobo became enthroned. He looked at rocks, he studied the trees, he worked with a forester for a while, he was an apprentice forester.

That's Norman Brosterman. He's an author who studied Friedrich Frobo for years. Brosterman says that Frobo worked for a time as a land surveyor and even served in the military. He was skilled at drafting in geometry, and at one point became convinced he should be an architect. He did everything you need to become an architect. He took all the right classes. But he didn't become an architect.

A friend convinced him to become an educator instead. And in changing course, Frobo arguably ended up having more influence in the world of architecture and design than any single architect. And that's because Friedrich Frobl created kindergarten. I believe kindergarten had a tremendous influence on the 20th century. It impacted all parts of society, of course, including art and architecture. If you've ever looked at a piece of abstract art or modernist architecture and thought, my kindergartener could have made that. Well, that may be more true than you realize.

The kindergarten was the product of Ferville's decades of experience in a wide range of fields, but the foundations of it were built on the principles of Johann Pestelotzi. Pestelotzi is considered the father of modern education, which basically means they will learn better if you treat them well rather than hit them with sticks, you know. In addition to the whole not-hitting kids with sticks thing, Pestelotzi emphasized physical activity and active learning over rope memorization and repetition. And in particular, he felt that kids should draw. Pestilocy was an early childhood educator

who had incorporated pedagogical drawings in the curriculum. That's author and Cooper Union professor, Tomara Zinger. And basically he is one of the first who thought that drawing should be part of any school curriculum and should be taught to the very, very young. Fribble worked for a time at a school based on these principles. And he built on what he learned from Pestilotse, incorporating his own ideas along the way about how children should be taught. Pestalotti was especially busy with breaking down the two-dimensional world,

but what Frobel did is break down the three-dimensional world. Frobel realized he wanted kids to go beyond just drawing lines on pages. He wanted them to learn through the physical manipulation of objects. Frobel wanted children to play with toys. Objects designed and crafted specifically for educational play. Now this doesn't sound unusual today, but it really was back in the early 1800s. Children used to go to work with their parents. They used to sit by their parents side and they would play with the detritus of the parents

work. I mean, for example, the candlemaker would make wax figurines with the leftover wax. The wooden blocks were only made from the leftover wood from the carpenter. So it was always from the leftover material. Frobl wanted to build real educational intent into objects of play, but it took him decades to come to this key realization, and a lot of time observing children and nature. He was put in charge of an orphanage for a while, overseeing young children, but he also studied the natural sciences, in particular the emerging discipline of crystallography.

Well, it turns out that the man who invented kindergarten was a crystal scientist. He worked with the foremost crystallographer of the time in Berlin. Where most people saw nature and big, flowing organic shapes like hills and plants and animals, Frobo zoomed in to study the straight lines and the geometric forms of crystals. To try to understand how the physical world around him is actually made. Frobel came to see crystal structures as the building blocks of reality. And this alchemy of crystals and the teaching of Pestilotse and a childhood alone in the woods all crystallized into a solid vision. In 1837, when he was 55 years old, Frobel founded the very first kindergarten

in Badlachenberg, Germany. His intention was to create an educational system for children who could not yet read or write. So he thought to use geometric forms as a way to teach complex and simple lessons all through play. If you can harness play, you can teach kids a lot of things. The word kindergarten cleverly encompassed two different ideas.

Kids would play in and learn from nature, but they would also themselves be nurtured and nourished, like plants in a garden. And the key to it all was a set of deceptively simple-looking toys. These were Frobo's gifts. They're called gifts because they were to draw out the gifts of the children. In German, of course, the phrase Frobo's gifts is rolled together into a single word. Frobo goblin. Frobo's gifts were meant to be given in a particular order.

The toys growing more complex over time. Teaching different lessons about shape, structure, and perception along the way. The first of Frobles gifts was a soft knitted ball. A wool ball. And it's basically the first gift a child could get at the age of six weeks. Then the child would graduate to another ball, roughly the same size as the first. But this one is not soft, it's hard, a wooden maple wooden ball and it has

a surface, it is smooth, it can roll. And then they're given the cube, and the cube is an opposite. It has sides, it has edges, it is sharp edges, it has points. The cube cannot roll. Kids are asked to enumerate the differences between the two. And then they get a cylinder, which combines elements of both the ball and the cube and it blows their little minds. Each new gift would get more and more interactive and more complex. Some were designed to be home from a string and spun in the air. And as they rotate, some very interesting forms are created that are not visible when the form is stationary.

Like a cube, for instance, looks like a cylinder when you spin it around fast enough. He wants the children to start to see that there are some invisible parts, contained within the visible. Next up came objects made up of smaller objects, like a cube that breaks down into a bunch of little cubes. And then the toys would ship from being about perception to being about creation. They would become more versatile, client and constructive,

locks gave way to paper, string, wire, little sticks and peas that could be connected and stacked into structures. The objects would get more abstract and creative, leading to the final lesson. The last is really just working freely with clay. Clay being the most malleable of all. It's rigid and it's soft.

And there's a whole range of things a child could build with it. But even at this final stage, this wasn't the kind of creative, free-for-all we tend to associate with childhood play. Frobble had children sitting at desks, little workstations with grids laid out on them. So it's not free play.

The fact that the table has an underlying grid is very much at the root of the directed play you follow instructions and there's an underlying order. And so in this very structured, very Germanic way, the gifts encourage students to think abstractly and to relate ideas, objects, and symbols. A set of blocks could be used to teach counting. Then the child could use those same blocks to build a house and then tell stories of a family living in that house. So they were modeling the world in different ways,

all using the same set of objects. The children realized that they can create new shapes and new forms that they create on top of the gridded table. These kindergarten weren't just schools. They were art schools, without other sex and drugs and clover cigarettes. They were places that taught about shape and form and color, and when kindergarten graduates went out into the world, the world changed. The kind of art that was being made in the 19th century is really different than the kind of art that was made after kids went to kindergarten.

Expressionist, cubist and surrealist artists like Paul Clay and Vasily Kandinsky attended early kindergarten Others, like Pete Montreal, encountered forbellian methods as teachers And when you look at a lot of their work alongside illustrations in kindergarten teacher guides, the resemblance is uncanny And it wasn't just artists. Kindergarten influenced designers too. Walt the Gropius started the Bauhaus in 1919. Gropius decided to hire a kindergarten teacher as the first hire of this famous school of design. So the Bauhaus had its adult design students doing geometric exercises, much like those found in kindergarten.

In the effects of Frobo's work on design education, Rippled out beyond Germany, and some of his most explicit and direct influences can be found among the world's most famous architects. Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect, is the great child of the kindergarten. You can find the kindergarten and everything right ever did. Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867

around the time kindergarten were gaining traction in the United States. And his mom took classes in kindergarten education. Wright never went to architecture school, but he recalls that when he was young, his mother brought home a set of Frobals gifts. Wright said that the moment he was given Frobals' gifts, he, quote, began to be an architect.

He went on to say, for several years, I sat at that little kindergarten table ruled by lines about four inches apart. But the smooth cardboard triangles and maple wood blocks were most important. All are in my fingers to this day." And right wasn't the only one. European modernist Le Corbusier also never went to architecture

school, but he did attend for Ballyen schools in Switzerland. The gridded geometries and repeated patterns of Le Corbusier's modernist houses and apartment blocks look like they were drawn on those gridded kindergarten desks. Look Kaboosie and Frank Lloyd Wright, considered by some the two most important architects of the 20th century, had exactly the same childhood education. And then there's Buckminster Fuller,

famous for pioneering geodesic domes made up of triangles. Fuller discovered his greatest engineering insight as a kindergartener, connecting for brilliant peas and sticks. If you know Buckman's the fuller, this is the thing he's most famous for. You know, the domes made out of peas and sticks basically, nodes and rods. So he learned that in kindergarten. Obviously not everyone who attended kindergarten became a Frank Lloyd Wright or a low-curbucier or a buckee, but the abstract lessons of kindergarten tilled and fertilized the ground, so

the seeds of their ideas could find purchase in the world. Abstraction was accepted fairly quickly in Paris and in Europe, perhaps because children had already been doing a lot of the same kinds of things for many decades, that was one of the reasons that they were not so shocked when art turned in that direction. So in terms of 20th century art and design, kindergarten was an absolute triumph, but Friedrich Frobel only got to witness the spread of his vision for about a decade before it was cut short.

In the 1850s, the Prussian government was cracking down on the birth thought. And in 1851, they issued the kindergarten for Burt, a national ban on kindergartens. And Frobel died the very next year. And you know, you wonder if he died of a broken heart in 1852. Of course, who knows? But even though the band slowed the expansion of kindergarten in Germany, it didn't stop the idea from spreading elsewhere, far from it. A lot of free-thinking liberals left Germany, and they brought Frobo's kindergarten with them.

So his disciples, they were so dedicated to the work that they immigrated, many of them to the United States. And basically because of the ban, that's what led to the four-bulls, the theories to be known around the world. And the most dedicated kindergarten evangelists were women. As Tomar Zinger points out in her book, Architecture & Play, Frobbel believed that women should play a leading role in educating children. To be clear, Frobble wasn't exactly a feminist. He had very traditional ideas about gender roles and believed that it was the role of women

to nurture children as mannies and kindergarten teachers. But regardless of Frobble's reasoning, teaching kindergarten was a rare opportunity. It was one of the only jobs you could get as a young woman. There weren't many jobs. And it was women who drew up and translated the lesson books that would be used to teach a generation of young artists and designers. By 1885, there were over 500 kindergarten in America, and they were taught primarily by women. And you might be thinking, hey, I went to kindergarten, why didn't I grow up with this incredibly Germanic, amacutly planned sequence of toys?

Well, ironically, the passion of some of kindergarten's biggest proponents is part of the reason why you probably didn't grow up playing with Frobo's gifts. The first kindergarten in the United States started in Watertown, Wisconsin in 1856, but it was German language only. The educator Elizabeth P.Body was inspired by this kindergarten and went on to found the first American English-language kindergarten in Boston in 1860. P.Body wanted to spread the teachings of Frobol to as many children as possible, and

so she reached out to Milton Bradley, the famous board game maker. She wanted Bradley to mass produce frivolous gifts so that he could be accessible to everyone. And Milton Bradley having heard her was convinced and since that moment it turned his entire attention to the manufacture of fruable blocks and gifts. But where P-Buddy saw an educational ideal, Bradley saw a business opportunity. Bradley began adding a bunch of new toys into the mix, and then other manufacturers got in on the game too, making all different kinds of stuff and just calling it all kindergarten toys.

He just made up stuff and he said, this is kindergarten and this is kindergarten and this is kindergarten. It's not necessarily fruibles kindergarten. The simple abstractions of frubo's gifts had gone commercial. And within a few years Elizabeth P. Body went from promoting the manufacture of kindergarten toys to speaking out against it. The interest of manufacturers and of merchants of the gifts and materials is a snare. It has already corrupted the simplicity of Frobo in Europe and America, for his idea was

to use elementary forms exclusively and simple materials. Even the word kindergarten itself became a generic term, a catch-all for early childhood education of all different kinds. These days most kindergarten are a lot different from anything Frobl imagined, and few kids encounter those early gifts in any kind of sequence, if at all. But kids still play with blocks. I mean, I really think that it's because of Frobal or Frobal or however it's correctly pronounced that children in the Western world play with blocks. But I think also blocks are a constant across a variety of educational systems,

Blocks are a constant across a variety of educational systems, because there's so much in them that they can teach. That's Alexandra Lang, an architecture critic and author of The Design of Childhood. Have the material world shapes independent kids. The block is this incredibly malleable toy that can be used in all of these different ways. Proble wasn't the only one to see educational value in blocks. In the early 1900s, Carolyn Pratt debuted her unit blocks. Unit blocks, which are essentially those classic brick-shaped pale wood blocks that really I can't think of any early childhood class from my Vin-2 that doesn't have those blocks. In some ways, all modern toy blocks were influenced by Frobo. Tinker toys, Lego and connects, they're all about understanding shape and form and making

connections. But they also represented a parcher from Frobo's highly organized and linear approach. You know, the Frobo blocks you were supposed to proceed from one to twenty through his exercises, whereas the unit blocks are much more open and they're more like we tend to encounter blocks today. These days, we don't think that blocks need an accompanying gritted desk or a syllabus of objects. Now blocks are creative tools for children that give them a chance to use their imagination as they build houses and cities and interact with each other. That's what I see when my boys play with Legos or build castles and Minecraft. There isn't this sense of strict progression.

It's more a sense that these blocks are a tool for children to recreate their own world as best they can. And who knows how many architects, builders, designers, and thinkers all started with these literal building blocks, for billion or otherwise, learning creativity through construction. The Frobel influenced the design of educational toys, but his ideas also impacted how children play outdoors. That's coming up after the break.

Frobles' gifts impacted early childhood education inside the classroom, but Frobles also influenced the way children played outdoors. That's because his kindergarten had literal gardens, little plots where kids could get their hand-starty and learn to cultivate plants. In her book, The Design of Childhood, author Alexander Lang traces the connection between Frobo's kindergarten plots and the very first playgrounds in Berlin, Germany. The first playgrounds were actually piles of sand, which were called sand gardens, which really popped up in Berlin in the 1850s and 1860s.

There wasn't much to them design-wise. They were basically just huge piles of sand dumped in public parks for kids to play around in. And a group of sort of charitable ladies from Boston saw these sand gardens in Berlin and thought, oh, you know, the children in the settlement houses in Boston, the immigrant children don't have anything to do during the summer when schools out. So they decided to bring these sand gardens to New England. Their thinking in part was that dense urban areas didn't have a lot of places for kids to play, especially kids whose parents

couldn't afford a big private yard. So sand gardens would be useful additions to cities. So they picked an empty lot in kind of the densest part of Boston. And they just poured a pile of sand in it and said, okay, it's a sand garden come play. And then the kids spent the summer, you know, digging in the sand, making mountains of the sand, playing in the sand. And it was hugely successful. Soon, sand gardens started popping up all over the country, often in public parks. Sometimes they were staffed with play leaders who would teach organized games and marching

exercises and calisthenics and songs, but also more traditional organized sports. There is also this push to Americanize the immigrant children, and so they teach them how to play baseball, which was thought to be a very collaborative and democratic sport. And so the sand garden actually starts to shrink and become a box rather than a garden, a box rather than a whole lot, and they have paved areas and grassy areas. So sand gardens kicked off the playground movement, organized around ideas of American culture, productive teamwork, and healthy exercise. And then there's a whole proliferation of amazing spinning wheels,

climbing structures, giant slides, all of this, like, the metal equipment that you can still sometimes find on older playgrounds. In the 20s and 30s, there are catalogs of this and cities buy it. Nearly every city bought into this idea of playgrounds. Seasaws, slides, and swings all became standard features. Actual sandboxes got smaller and smaller, becoming just another thing a playground could have.

In two weeks, we're gonna bring you the story of the rise of the mass produced playground, and the stubborn, super famous artist who pushed back. But next week's episode, we're going to feature the greatest podcast crossover of Ed in history. Seriously, you don't want to miss it. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Kurt Colestead and Emmett Fitzgerald, edited

by Avery Truffleman, mixed in tech production by Sheree Fusef, music by Sean Rial. The rest of the team includes senior producer Katie Mingle, senior editor Delaney Hall, Taren Mazza, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, Joe Rosenberg, and me Roman Mars. This episode was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, advancing public understanding and engagement with science. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Role in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Ork. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But we have side-by-side comparisons of Pro Bowl kindergarten lessons and famous pieces of modern architecture that will blow your mind at 99pi.org.