ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a new look at Friedrich Frobel’s pedagogy of kindergarten and play and how it was modified in the years after his passing. Frobel’s pedagogy is complex and multilayered. Frobel is a multi-faceted and often ambiguous educational thinker, and the study’s approach, the analysis of a wide variety of Frobel’s original writings on kindergarten pedagogy, has shown precisely that. Ultimately, however, Frobel’s kindergarten pedagogy needs to be understood as an extension and necessary element of his worldview: the philosophy of the law of the sphere. For Frobel, everything was rooted in, connected to, and only made sense in these connections, in the manifold expression of unity. The ultimate goal of kindergarten, as well as all of Frobel’s educational endeavors, was to promote and to support life unification. Studying Frobel and the history of kindergarten pedagogy encourages to think about what it means to live with and educate young children.
