1. Western University Foundation of Education Lecturer: Mr. Soeung Sopha
Student’s name: Yous Ponleu Page 1
Name: Yous Ponleu
Subject: Foundation of Education
Lecturer: Soeung Sopha
Room: W-101
Session: Afternoon
Date: 17 Aug, 2013
Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel
Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel was the youngest of five sons of Johann Jacob
Froebel, a Lutheran pastor at Oberweissbach in the German principality of Schwarzburg-
Rudolfstadt. Froebel's mother died when he was nine months old. When Friedrich was four years
old, his father remarried. Feeling neglected by his stepmother and father, Froebel experienced a
profoundly unhappy childhood. At his father's insistence, he attended the girls' primary school at
Oberweissbach. From 1793 to 1798 he lived with his maternal uncle, Herr Hoffman, at Stadt-
Ilm, where he attended the local town school. From the years 1798 to 1800 he was as an
apprentice to a forester and surveyor in Neuhaus. From 1800 to 1802 Froebel attended the
University of Jena. In 1805 Froebel briefly studied architecture in Frankfurt. His studies
provided him with a sense of artistic perspective and symmetry he later transferred to his design
of the kindergarten's gifts and occupations. In 1805 Anton Gruener, headmaster of the
Pestalozzian Frankfurt Model School, hired Froebel as a teacher.
Froebel shaped his educational philosophy during the high tide of German philosophical
Idealism that was marked by the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804), and Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831). In the Education of Man (1826), Froebel
articulated the following idealist themes: (1) all existence originates in and with God; (2) humans
possess an inherent spiritual essence that is the vitalizing life force that causes development; (3)
all beings and ideas are interconnected parts of a grand, ordered, and systematic universe.
Froebel based his work on these principles, asserting that each child at birth has an internal
spiritual essence a life force that seeks to be externalized through self-activity. Further, child

2. Western University Foundation of Education Lecturer: Mr. Soeung Sopha
Student’s name: Yous Ponleu Page 2
development follows the doctrine of preformation, the unfolding of that which was present
latently in the individual. The kindergarten is a special educational environment in which this
self-active development occurs. The kindergarten's gifts, occupations, and social and cultural
activities, especially play, promote this self-actualization.
Froebel was convinced that the kindergarten's primary focus should be on play the
process by which he believed children expressed their innermost thoughts, needs, and desires.
Froebel's emphasis on play contrasted with the traditional view prevalent during the nineteenth
century that play, a form of idleness and disorder, was an unworthy element of human life. For
Froebel, play facilitated children's process of cultural recapitulation, imitation of adult vocational
activities, and socialization. He believed the human race, in its collective history, had gone
through major epochs of cultural development that added to and refined its culture. According to
Froebel's theory of cultural recapitulation, each individual human being repeated the general
cultural epoch in his or her own development.