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SPEAKER_08: It's a lush region, sometimes referred to today as Das Grünherzdeutschland, the Green Heart of Germany. That's Kurt Kohlstedt. He produced this story.
SPEAKER_08: I actually lived near Thuringia when I was a kid, and the forests there are Einfachtsauberhauft, simply magical. And I can really see how Froebel became enthralled. He looked at rocks, he studied the trees, he was, we worked with a forester for a while, he was an apprentice forester.
SPEAKER_04: That's Norman Brosterman. He's an author who studied Friedrich Froebel for years.
SPEAKER_08: Brosterman says that Froebel worked for a time as a land surveyor and even served in the military. He was skilled at drafting and 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.
SPEAKER_06: But he didn't become an architect. A friend convinced him to become an educator instead. And in changing course, Froebel arguably ended up having more influence in the world of architecture and design than any single architect.
SPEAKER_08: And that's because Friedrich Froebel created Kindergarten.
SPEAKER_04: 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.
SPEAKER_08: The Kindergarten was the product of Froebel's decades of experience in a wide range of fields, but the foundations of it were built on the principles of Johann Pestalozzi.
SPEAKER_04: Pestalozzi 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, Pestalozzi emphasized physical activity and active learning, overrope memorization and repetition.
SPEAKER_06: And in particular, he felt that kids should draw.
SPEAKER_07: Pestalozzi was an early childhood educator who had incorporated pedagogical drawings in the curriculum.
SPEAKER_06: That's author and Cooper Union professor, Tamar 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.
SPEAKER_08: Froebel worked for a time at a school based on these principles, and he built on what he learned from Pestalozzi, incorporating his own ideas along the way about how children should be taught.
SPEAKER_07: Pestalozzi was especially busy with breaking down the two-dimensional world, but what Froebel did is break down the three-dimensional world.
SPEAKER_06: Froebel realized he wanted kids to go beyond just drawing lines on pages. He wanted them to learn through the physical manipulation of objects.
SPEAKER_08: Froebel wanted children to play with toys, objects designed and crafted specifically for educational play. Now, this doesn't sound that 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.
SPEAKER_07: I mean, for example, the candle maker 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. Froebel 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.
SPEAKER_06: 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.
SPEAKER_08: Well, it turns out that the man who invented kindergarten was a crystal scientist.
SPEAKER_07: He worked with the foremost crystallographer of the time in Berlin. Where most people saw nature in big, flowing, organic shapes like hills and plants and animals, Froebel zoomed in to study the straight lines and the geometric forms of crystals.
SPEAKER_08: To try to understand how the physical world around him is actually made.
SPEAKER_07: Froebel came to see crystal structures as the building blocks of reality.
SPEAKER_08: And this alchemy of crystals and the teaching of Pestalozzi and a childhood alone in the woods all crystallized into a solid vision.
SPEAKER_06: In 1837, when he was 55 years old, Froebel founded the very first kindergarten in Bad Blockenberg, Germany. And 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.
SPEAKER_04: If you can harness play, you can teach kids a lot of things.
SPEAKER_06: 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.
SPEAKER_08: And the key to it all was a set of deceptively simple looking toys.
SPEAKER_06: These were Froebel's gifts.
SPEAKER_07: They're called gifts because they were to draw out the gifts of the children.
SPEAKER_08: In German, of course, the phrase Froebel's gifts is rolled together into a single word, Froebelgaben.
SPEAKER_06: Froebel'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.
SPEAKER_08: The first of Froebel's gifts was a soft knitted ball.
SPEAKER_07: It's a wool ball. And it's basically the first gift a child could get at the age of six weeks.
SPEAKER_08: Then the child would graduate to another ball, roughly the same size as the first.
SPEAKER_07: 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 are given the cube. And the cube is an opposite. It has sides, it has edges, it has sharp edges, it has points. The cube cannot roll. Kids are asked to enumerate the differences between the two.
SPEAKER_06: And then they get a cylinder, which combines elements of both the ball and the cube. And it blows their little minds.
SPEAKER_08: Each new gift would get more and more interactive and more complex. Some were designed to be hung from a string and spun in the air.
SPEAKER_07: And as they rotate, some very interesting forms are created that are not visible when the form is stationary.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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 shift from being about perception to being about creation.
SPEAKER_06: They would become more versatile, pliant, and constructive. Blocks 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.
SPEAKER_08: The last is really just working freely with clay.
SPEAKER_06: 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.
SPEAKER_08: Froebel had children sitting at desks, little workstations with grids laid out on them.
SPEAKER_07: 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.
SPEAKER_08: 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.
SPEAKER_07: These kindergartens weren't just schools.
SPEAKER_06: They were art schools without all the sex and drugs and clove cigarettes. They were places that taught about shape and form and color. And when kindergarten graduates went out into the world, the world changed.
SPEAKER_04: 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.
SPEAKER_08: Expressionist, cubist, and surrealist artists like Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky attended early kindergartens. Others, like Piet Mondrian, encountered rebellion methods as teachers. And when you look at a lot of their work alongside illustrations and kindergarten teacher guides, the resemblance is uncanny.
SPEAKER_06: And it wasn't just artists. Kindergarten influenced designers, too. Walter Gropius started the Bauhaus in 1919.
SPEAKER_04: 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 kindergartens.
SPEAKER_06: And the effects of Froebel'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.
SPEAKER_04: Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect, is the great child of the kindergarten. You can find a kindergarten in everything Wright ever did. Frank Lloyd Wright was born in 1867, around the time kindergartens were gaining traction in the United States.
SPEAKER_08: 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 Froebel's gifts.
SPEAKER_06: Wright said that the moment he was given Froebel's 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.
SPEAKER_08: And Wright wasn't the only one. European modernist Le Corbusier also never went to architecture school. But he did attend Froebelian schools in Switzerland. The gridded geometries and repeated patterns of Le Corbusier's modernist houses and apartment blocks
SPEAKER_06: look like they were drawn on those gridded kindergarten desks. Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, considered by some the two most important architects of the 20th century,
SPEAKER_04: had exactly the same childhood education.
SPEAKER_08: 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 Froebelian peas and sticks.
SPEAKER_04: If you know Buckminster 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.
SPEAKER_06: Obviously not everyone who attended kindergarten became a Frank Lloyd Wright, or a Le Corbusier, or a Bucky. 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.
SPEAKER_04: 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.
SPEAKER_06: But Friedrich Froebel 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 liberal thought.
SPEAKER_08: And in 1851, they issued the Kindergartenverbot, a national ban on kindergartens. And Froebel died the very next year. And you know, you wonder if he died of a broken heart in 1852. Of course, who knows?
SPEAKER_04: But even though the ban slowed the expansion of kindergartens in Germany, it didn't stop the idea from spreading elsewhere. Far from it.
SPEAKER_06: A lot of free-thinking liberals left Germany, and they brought Froebel's kindergarten with them. So his disciples, they were so dedicated to the work that they immigrated, many of them to the United States.
SPEAKER_07: And basically because of the ban, that's what led to Froebel's theories to be known around the world. And the most dedicated kindergarten evangelists were women.
SPEAKER_08: As Tamar Zinger points out in her book, Architecture and Play, Froebel believed that women should play a leading role in educating children. To be clear, Froebel wasn't exactly a feminist.
SPEAKER_06: He had very traditional ideas about gender roles and believed that it was the role of women to nurture children as nannies and kindergarten teachers.
SPEAKER_08: But regardless of Froebel'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.
SPEAKER_04: 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.
SPEAKER_08: By 1885, there were over 500 kindergartens 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 dramatic, immaculately planned sequence of toys?
SPEAKER_06: 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 Froebel's gifts. The first kindergarten in the United States started in Watertown, Wisconsin in 1856, but it was German language only. The educator Elizabeth Peabody was inspired by this kindergarten and went on to found the first American-English language kindergarten in Boston in 1860.
SPEAKER_08: Peabody wanted to spread the teachings of Froebel 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 Froebel's gifts so that he could be accessible to everyone.
SPEAKER_07: And Milton Bradley, having heard her, was convinced, and since that moment, it turned his entire attention to the manufacture of Froebel blocks and gifts. But where Peabody saw an educational ideal, Bradley saw a business opportunity.
SPEAKER_06: 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.
SPEAKER_04: He just made up stuff and he said, this is kindergarten, this is kindergarten, this is kindergarten. It's not necessarily Froebel's kindergarten.
SPEAKER_06: The simple abstractions of Froebel's gifts had gone commercial. And within a few years, Elizabeth Peabody went from promoting the manufacture of kindergarten toys to speaking out against it.
SPEAKER_08: The interest of manufacturers and of merchants of the gifts and materials is a snare.
SPEAKER_00: It has already corrupted the simplicity of Froebel 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.
SPEAKER_08: These days, most kindergartens are a lot different from anything Froebel imagined, and few kids encounter those early gifts in any kind of sequence, if at all.
SPEAKER_06: But kids still play with blocks.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I really think that it's because of Froebel or Foebel or however it's correctly pronounced that children in the Western world play with blocks. But I think also blocks are constant across a variety of educational systems because there's so much in them that they can teach.
SPEAKER_06: That's Alexandra Lange, an architecture critic and author of The Design of Childhood, How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids.
SPEAKER_05: The block is this incredibly malleable toy that can be used in all of these different ways. Froebel wasn't the only one to see educational value in blocks.
SPEAKER_08: 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 classroom I've been to that doesn't have those blocks.
SPEAKER_05: In some ways, all modern toy blocks were influenced by Froebel.
SPEAKER_08: Tinker Toys and Lego and K'NEX, they're all about understanding shape and form and making connections. But they also represent a departure from Froebel's highly organized and linear approach.
SPEAKER_05: You know, the Froebel blocks, you were supposed to proceed from 1 to 20 through his exercises, whereas the unit blocks are much more open-ended. They're more like we tend to encounter blocks today.
SPEAKER_06: These days, we don't think that blocks need an accompanying gridded 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 in Minecraft.
SPEAKER_05: 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.
SPEAKER_06: And who knows how many architects, builders, designers, and thinkers all started with these literal building blocks, Froebelian or otherwise, learning creativity through construction. Froebel influenced the design of educational toys, but his ideas also impacted how children play outdoors. That's coming up after the break. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava Superblend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible kachava.com slash invisible. What's more important, making sure you're set for today or planning for tomorrow? You can actually do both at the same time with annuity and life insurance solutions from Lincoln Financial. You're not just taking care of you and your family's future. You're also helping yourself out today. Lincoln's annuities offer options to not only provide you with your guaranteed retirement income for life, but to help protect you from everyday market volatility. And their life insurance policies not only provide your family with a death benefit, but some can even give you immediate access to funds in case of an emergency. Go to Lincoln financial dot com slash get started now to learn how to plan, protect and retire. Lincoln annuities and life insurance are issued by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Products sold in New York are issued by Lincoln Life and Annuity Company of New York, Syracuse, New York, distributed by Lincoln Financial Distributors Inc., a broker dealer.
SPEAKER_06: We all know that heart health is oh so important, and with Honey Nut Cheerios, making heart healthy decisions doesn't have to be complicated. Heart health can be fun and easy when you make Honey Nut Cheerios part of your breakfast. With whole grain oats and a touch of real golden honey, not only do they taste great, but they can help lower your cholesterol. Eating a heart healthy breakfast like a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios can help set you up to make better choices throughout the day. So say good morning to a delicious breakfast and add a change of heart to your shopping cart. Froebel's gifts impacted early childhood education inside the classroom, but Froebel also influenced the way children played outdoors. That's because his kindergarten had literal gardens, little plots where kids could get their hands dirty and learn to cultivate plants. In her book, The Design of Childhood, author Alexandra Lange traces the connection between Froebel's kindergarten plots and the very first playgrounds in Berlin, Germany.
SPEAKER_05: The first playgrounds were actually piles of sand, which were called sand gardens, which really popped up in Berlin in the 1850s and 1860s.
SPEAKER_06: 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 school's out.
SPEAKER_06: 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, OK, it's a sand garden. Come play.
SPEAKER_05: 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.
SPEAKER_06: 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.
SPEAKER_05: 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.
SPEAKER_06: 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.
SPEAKER_05: 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.
SPEAKER_06: In two weeks, we're going to 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 event in history. Seriously, you don't want to miss it. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Kurt Kohlstedt and Emmett Fitzgerald, edited by Avery Truffleman, mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif, music by Sean Real. The rest of the team includes senior producer Katie Mingle, senior editor Delaney Hall, Taran 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 Row 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 Radio-Topia.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.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit too. But we have side by side comparisons of frobol kindergarten lessons and famous pieces of modern architecture that will blow your mind at 99pi.org. Radio-Topia from PRX.
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