ABSTRACT
Pestalozzi believed that education was the key to creating a just society. However, Froebel believed that spirituality was missing from Pestalozzi’s theory. Theorists have given the people useful theories about how children develop and learn and have also contributed to our understanding of the subject. They provide educators with a useful framework for encouraging them to reflect upon their own practice - and their ideas are still very relevant today. In an attempt to understand the whole child, Susan Isaacs work focused on observing children in group care situations, made over time and in a range of contexts, using a theoretical frame she devised to help classify her observations. Gardner argues that this conveys the relevance of the contributions that educational theorists such as Froebel, Isaacs, Dewey, Piaget, Montessori and Freud made to Early Childhood education; she believes that they provided practitioners with a bridge with which to link principles to practice.
