ABSTRACT
THE IMPORTANCE of the education of the very young was recognized by several of the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus J. V. Andreae in his Christianopolis (I6Ig) and J. A. Comenius in his School of Infancy (I66g) both discuss the training of infants, but they and later writers, notably Rousseau and Pestalozzi, viewed infant education up to the age of six as the training of children within the home.1 Influenced by Rousseau and Pestalozzi, Froebel was the first great educator on the Continent "who endeavoured to provide a coherent scheme of infant education based on the nature of the child in order to improve and supplement the training given by the mother and the nurse".2
