Finds his vocation. With Pestalozzi.

Do thou give bread to men; be it my effort to give men to themselves" (K. Schmidt's Gesch. d. Päd., 3rd ed. by Lange, vol. iv, p. 277).

§ 4. As yet the nature of the task was not clear to him, and it seemed determined by accident. While studying architecture in Frankfort-on-the-Main, he became acquainted with the director of a model school who had caught some of the enthusiasm of Pestalozzi. This friend saw that Froebel's true field was education, and he persuaded him to give up architecture and take a post in the model school. 66 The very first time," he says, “that I found myself before thirty or forty boys, I felt thoroughly at home. In fact, I perceived that I had at last found my long-missed lifeelement; and I wrote to my brother that I was as well pleased as the fish in the water: I was inexpressibly happy."

§ 5. In this school Froebel worked for two years with remarkable success; but he felt more and more his need of preparation, so he then retired and undertook the education of three lads of one family. Even in this he could not satisfy himself, and he obtained the parents' consent to his taking the boys to Yverdun, and there forming with them a part of the celebrated institution of Pestalozzi. Thus from 1807 till 1809 Froebel was drinking in Pestalozzianism at the fountain head, and qualifying himself to carry on the work which Pestalozzi had begun. For the science of education had to deduce from Pestalozzi's experience principles which Pestalozzi himself could not deduce; and "Froebel, the pupil of Pestalozzi, and a genius like his master, completed the reformer's system; taking the results at which Pestalozzi had arrived through the necessities of his position, Froebel developed the ideas involved

Froebel at the Universities.

in them, not by further experience but by deduction from the nature of man, and thus he attained to the conception of true human development and to the requirements of true education" (Schmidt's Gesch. d. Päd.).

§ 6. Holding that man and nature, inasmuch as they proceed from the same Source, must be governed by the same laws, Froebel longed for more knowledge of natural science. Even Pestalozzi seemed to him not to "honour science in her divinity." He therefore determined to continue the university course which had been so rudely interrupted eleven years before, and in 1811 he began studying at Göttingen, whence he proceeded to Berlin. In his Autobiography he tells us: "The lectures for which I had so longed really came up to the needs of my mind and soul, and made me feel more fervently than ever the certainty of the demonstrable inner connexion of the whole cosmical development of the universe. I saw also the possibility of man's becoming conscious of this absolute unity of the universe, as well as of the diversity of things and appearances which is perpetually unfolding itself within that unity; and then when I had made clear to myself, and brought fully home to my consciousness the view that the infinitely varied phenomena in man's life, work, thought, feeling, and position were all summed up in the unity of his personal existence I felt myself able to turn my thoughts once more to educational problems" (Autob. trans. by Michaelis and Moore, p. 89).

But again his studies were interrupted, this time by the king of Prussia's celebrated call "To my people." Though not a Prussian, Froebel was heart and soul a German. He therefore responded to the call, enlisted in Lützow's corps, and went through the campaign of 1813. His military

Thro' the Freiheits-krieg. Mineralogy.

ardour, however, did not take his mind off education. "Everywhere," he writes, "as far as the fatigues I underwent allowed, I carried in my thoughts my future calling as educator; yes, even in the few engagements in which I had to take part. Even in these I could gather experience for the task I proposed to myself." Froebel's soldiering showed him the value of discipline and united action, how the individual belongs not to himself but to the whole body, and how the whole body supports the individual.

Froebel was rewarded for his patriotism by the friendship of two men whose names will always be associated with his, Langethal and Middendorff. These young men, ten years younger than Froebel, became attached to him in the field, and were ever afterwards his devoted followers, sacrificing all their prospects in life for the sake of carrying out his ideas.

§ 7. At the peace of Fontainebleau (signed in May, 1814) Froebel returned to Berlin, and became curator of the Museum of Mineralogy under Professor Weiss. In accepting this appointment from the Government he seemed. to turn aside from his work as educator; but if not teaching he was learning. The unity of nature and human nature seemed more and more to reveal itself to him. Of the days past in the museum he afterwards wrote: Here was I at the central point of my life and strife, where inner working and law, where life, nature, and mathematics were united in the fixed crystaline form, where a world of symbols lay open to the inner eye." Again he says: "The stones in my hand and under my eye became speaking forms. The world of crystals declared to me the life and laws of life of man, and in still but real and sensible speech taught the true life of humanity." "Geology and crystal

The "New Education” started.

lography not only opened for me a higher circle of knowledge and insight, but also showed me a higher goal for my inquiry, my speculation, and my endeavour. Nature and man now seemed to me mutually to explain each other through all their numberless various stages of development. Man, as I saw, receives from a knowledge of natural objects, even because of their immense deep-seated diversity, a foundation for and a guidance towards a knowledge of himself and life, and a preparation for the manifestation of that knowledge" (Autob. ut supra, p. 97). More and more the thought possessed him that the one thing needful for man was unity of development, perfect evolution in accordance with the laws of his being, such evolution as science discovers in the other organisms of

nature.

§ 8. He at first intended to become a teacher of natural science, but before long wider views dawned upon him. Langethal and Middendorff were in Berlin, engaged in tuition. Froebel gave them regular instruction in his theory, and at length, counting on their support, he resolved to set about realising his own idea of "the new education." This was in 1816. Three years before one of his brothers, a clergyman, had died of fever caught from the French prisoners. His widow was still living in the parsonage at Griesheim, a village on the Ilm. Froebel gave up his post in Berlin, and set out for Griesheim on foot, spending his very last groschen on the way for bread. Here he undertook the education of his orphan niece and nephews, and also of two more nephews sent him by another brother. With these he opened a school, and wrote to Middendorff and Langethal to come and help in the experiment. Middendorff came at once, Langethal a

At Keilhau. "Education of Man" published.

year or two later, when the school had been moved to Keilhau, another of the Thuringian villages, which became the Mecca of the new faith. In Keilhau, Froebel, Langethal, Middendorff, and Barop, a relation of Midden. dorff's, all married and formed an educational community. Such zeal could not be fruitless, and the school gradually increased, though for many years its teachers, with Froebel at their head, were in the greatest straits for money, and at times even for food. Karl Froebel, who was brought up in the school, tells how, on one occasion, he and the other children were sent to ramble in the woods till some of the seed-corn provided for the coming year had been turned into bread for them. Besides these difficulties the community suffered from the panic and reaction after the murder of Kotzebue (1819), and were persecuted as a nest of demagogues. But "the New Education" was sufficiently successful to attract notice from all quarters; and when he had been ten years at Keilhau (1826) Froebel published his great work, The Education of Man.

§ 9. Four years later he determined to start other institutions in connexion with the parent institution at Keilhau; and being offered by a private friend the use of a castle on the Wartensee, in the canton of Lucerne, he left Keilhau under the direction of Barop, and with Langethal made a settlement in Switzerland. The ground, however, was very ill chosen. The Catholic clergy resisted what they considered as a Protestant invasion, and the experiment on the Wartensee and at Willisau in the same canton, to which the institution was moved in 1833, never had a fair chance. was in vain that Middendorff at Froebel's call left his wife and family at Keilhau, and laboured for four years in Switzerland without once seeing them. The Swiss institution

It