In 1851, Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten, weighed up fleeing his homeland for America. That August, the Prussian government had banned as seditious the network of kindergartens he had started eleven years earlier. To a government fearful of liberal-democratic ideas, the new institutions were breeding grounds of “atheism and demagoguery,” dangerous cells of “Froebel’s socialist system” that promoted “destructive tendencies in the realms of religion and politics.” One aristocratic alumna of Froebel’s recently founded college for training kindergarten teachers – it was the first secular professional school for women in Germany – actually felt compelled to emigrate to escape accusations of subversion.

Though Froebel didn’t follow her, he was devastated by the news of the prohibition, which seemed to render his life’s work a failure. He would die a year later. His dream of the kindergarten – a “garden” in which each child would grow like a plant, naturally yet helped by cultivation – was just developing. Already it had found supporters throughout Germany. Froebel urgently appealed to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV: “I beseech you in the name of childhood … do not allow the sprouting seed of a new education for humanity to be trampled!” His protests that he was neither a socialist nor an atheist went unheeded; the government apparently regarded kindergartens as a genuine political threat, preferring the traditional system of religious childcare that emphasized obedience to authority and rote learning of scripture. The kindergarten ban would only be lifted eight years after Froebel’s death.

The ban didn’t work, as attested by the fact that kindergarten is now a word in more than forty languages. In fact, the repression helped seed Froebel’s idea worldwide, as educators inspired by his vision left Germany and planted new kindergartens throughout Europe and North America, eventually spreading to Asia as well.

In one respect, the Prussian government was on to something: Froebel’s pedagogy was politically threatening, at least to authoritarian regimes. The goal of education both in the family and the school, he insisted, is “freedom and self-determination.” That’s why during the heady revolutionary days of 1848, the German National Assembly had resolved that Froebelian kindergartens “should form a part of every child’s education.”

That recommendation no doubt helped bring the backlash. Reactionaries wanted educators to inculcate submissiveness and compliance. To Froebel, the educator’s job was to hone the individual’s will to exercise freedom. Intellectual and physical training were essential, but in service to this higher goal. So to treat young humans as raw material to be shaped according to the educator’s own designs, whether ideological or personal, struck Froebel as a kind of sacrilege: “When at last will we stop stamping our children like coins, or seeing them emblazoned with the portraits and inscriptions of others?”

Not that he was anti-authoritarian in the sense of “authority-free”; he was not an early proponent of “gentle parenting.” Education, he insisted, requires “freedom with guidance” from the parent or educator. Precisely because he held individual human potential in such high regard, his method demanded hard work and rigor. Yet such discipline must always be in service to nurturing freedom, “the manifestation of the divine within a human being.” For Froebel, this goal required lifelong learning, starting in the cradle and continuing through school and higher education to adult life.

One town over from Froebel’s first kindergarten is the boarding school he founded in 1821 on the same principles, in the Thuringian village of Keilhau. The school is still in operation. On its campus stands a bronze bust of the educator inscribed with a quote that most succinctly sums up his mission: “I wanted to educate human beings who are free, thinking, and active on their own initiative.”

By contrast, contemporary ways of talking about the purpose of education tend to sound much more like stamping coins. The stated mission of the United States Department of Education, for example, is to “promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness.” That is to say, educating humans boils down to promoting academic success as judged by standardized tests, and securing a competent workforce. The result of this view is a ranking of young people, with those primed for high grades and future earnings at the top, and everyone else as trailing also-rans.

Even at the pinnacle of this stratified system, there’s a void. To be sure, Harvard College’s mission statement gestures toward the public good, committing “to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society” through “the transformative power of a liberal arts and sciences education.” Yet what the nature or goal of that transformation might be remains a blank. What is the good life for which human beings, including “citizen-leaders,” are to be prepared? With no clear vision of this, the vacuum may be filled by anti-humane goals – for example, dominating the high-stakes status game just to be a winner in a world of losers.

The inventor of the kindergarten challenges us to ask: What should we be educating humans for?

The beginning of Froebel’s life was as sad as the end, but it was critical to his forming an alternative vision for children. Froebel’s mother died before he turned one, and what he described as “the awful dawn of my life” seems straight from a Grimm fairy tale. His father viewed him as stupid and “wicked,” while his stepmother only addressed him in the third person. One day she locked him in the cellar for some infraction and forgot him. When she remembered next day and unbolted the door, she found him standing in the threshold, immaculately turned out. He explained, “My mother came in the night and washed and dressed me.” (Froebel’s yearning for his missing mother may explain why much of his later work focused on promoting children’s relationship to their parents. One of his most influential projects was Songs of Endearment for Mothers, a book of songs and games with finger actions for nursing mothers to use to strengthen the bond with their babies.)

The young Froebel found respite by playing alone in the garden behind his house. In playing, he discovered nature:

Memories from my youth: gazing at tulips with unutterable delight. Intense pleasure in their regular forms. The striking pattern of the six petals and the three-edged seed pods.… Joyful contemplation of the hazel catkin with its delightful colors; pleasure in lime blossom. All their caring and loving traits filled me with awe. Dissecting beans at Oberweissbach in the hope of finding an explanation.

Through playing free in nature, he found his way to the “unification of life” that he would later identify as essential to educating for freedom. “Our own life is a broken, violated, oppressed, infirm, and morbid one,” he wrote. The only way to gain wholeness as a free person is to find our way back “to ourselves, to nature, to God.”

During the twentieth century, Froebel’s initial celebrity faded, along with such “Romantic” notions, giving way to rationalist methods that would be scalable to mass education systems. Elements of his thought flowed into the theories of later educators such as Maria Montessori, Peter Petersen, and John Dewey. But these successors generally sought to replace his soaring vision of freedom with a more pragmatic and empirical approach. Froebel went out of fashion except as a boutique nature flavor in elite kindergartens and schools in Europe and Asia. In the Anglosphere today, while his name still registers as an index entry in the history of education, it’s more likely to be cited as an influence on architects and designers such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, and the Bauhaus school.

Yet in recent years, there’s at least one way he’s been roundly vindicated: by a rediscovery of the centrality of play. Free play, Froebel argued, is the crucial basis for free thinking and free acting. That insight is now getting a second look.

In a 2024 article for the Journal of Pediatrics, Peter Gray (interviewed in this issue), a professor of psychology at Boston College, argues that the alarming rise in anxiety and depression among children and adolescents is tightly linked to the disappearance of opportunities to play freely. What’s caused this loss, he observes, is ironically the good intentions of modern parents and educators to protect children through constant supervision and to maximize the educational value of how they spend their time through adult-controlled activities such as early academic learning or youth sports. Yet this deprives children of fulfilling a natural need. He argues that humans evolved to learn skills and gain trust and independence through play, just as other young mammals do:

A primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults. Such independent activities may promote mental well-being through both immediate effects, as a direct source of satisfaction, and long-term effects, by building mental characteristics that provide a foundation for dealing effectively with the stresses of life.

For Froebel, similarly, play is “the highest level of child development,” “the purest spiritual product of a human being,” and “the source of all good.” Play, he insisted, is the key to what it means to be a free human being, and so must be the cornerstone for educating the young.

“The great pedagogical discovery that we owe to [Froebel],” the child psychology pioneer Martha Muchow once observed, is “the discovery of the child, the child as he actually is.” As Gray’s research hints, today’s rise in youth mental disorders may be caused precisely by failing to see the child “as he actually is.” The old Romantic might be right after all.

My own view is that Froebel was right, and that his insights are essential for meeting the challenges of today, from technology to educational polarization. And just as his vision survives to meet the moment, the school he founded has been revived to stand as an example. I have an inside view thanks to a family connection. My grandmother, Annemarie Wächter, herself an educator, was born in Froebel’s Keilhau school just a few hundred feet from the great man’s statue. The daughter of the school’s director, she was also Froebel’s grand-niece – the school had remained in the extended family ever since his day and would remain so until its 1939 seizure by National Socialists as a hotbed of free-thinking (for example, the pupils did not use the Heil Hitler salute).

An enterprising charity later restored the school, now known as the Free Froebel School, which educates around four hundred students from first to tenth grade. (It is now co-educational; previously, Keilhau was primarily a boys’ school, with occasional exceptions including Annemarie.) It bases its claim to excellence not on selectivity but on its commitment to educating each child as an individual, according to Froebel’s motto “unity in diversity”; around seventy of the students are referred there by social services. At each visit, I’m struck by how his school stands as a physical illustration of his vision for educating humans for freedom. Let’s take a quick historical tour.

In the center of the small village is the house that Froebel moved into in 1817 with two cofounders, Wilhelm Middendorff and Heinrich Langethal. The three had become close friends four years earlier as comrades in arms, fighting Napoleon’s occupation in a volunteer militia, the Lützow Free Corps, which drew many students with democratic ideals. Froebel, who had apprenticed under the Swiss reform educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi before the war, had instilled his own passion for emancipatory education in his friends.

A commitment to practical skills and physical work was core to their method. Traditional subjects were taught in interdisciplinary style and with a mix of approaches including Socratic questioning by the teacher and student-led instruction. As Miriam Mathis, editor of Plough’s new Froebel anthology Where Children Grow, describes the program:

Froebel believed that humans are essentially creative – and therefore children need opportunity to experiment and invent. He balanced morning lessons with afternoons of practical work, sports, handicrafts, art, and free play. Evenings were relaxed, with storytelling, singing, and hobbies.

The year 1817 marked the tercentenary of the Reformation, and Froebel wanted to erect a “living monument” to Martin Luther, whom he venerated as an apostle of freedom. He enrolled two descendants of the Reformer, Georg and Ernst Luther, teenage brothers who were illiterate day laborers living in abject poverty. From this unpromising beginning, Froebel’s method achieved astounding results. Georg went on to study theology, and Ernst became an accomplished stonemason.

The vocational paths of the two brothers nicely illustrate how Froebel’s combination of academic and polytechnic learning worked in practice. Rather than segregating children into separate tracks, he encouraged all students both to challenge themselves intellectually and to learn to work with their hands.

In this program of hands-on learning, agriculture had pride of place. The original schoolhouse came with a plot of agricultural land, which was the nucleus for what would soon become a thriving farm. For over a hundred years, the school was self-sustaining, growing its own food in an operation including vegetable gardening, livestock, hay fields, apple orchards, and hundreds of acres of forest for firewood, foraging, and hunting. This remarkable enterprise survived until 1949, when over-enthusiastic Communists dynamited the farm’s estate house as “feudalistic.”

Though the big farm is gone, the Keilhau school today still has school gardens and orchards, plus a blacksmith shop, reflecting the vision of its founder. For Froebel, working with the soil and living plants was central to learning to be human (the garden in kindergarten wasn’t meant to be only a metaphor).

One purpose of gardening, he believed, was to teach work ethic. But as with play, a more fundamental objective was the “unification of life.” By exposure to the laws of nature, whose author is the Creator, growing carrots or potatoes tangibly connects a child to spiritual reality: “From every point in nature a road leads to God.”

Froebel was also passionate about the need for physical activity. The absence of opportunities for work and exercise in conventional school, he wrote, “leads the children to physical inertia and laziness; unspeakable human strength remains undeveloped; unspeakable human strength is lost!”

The inspiration went back to his military days. Among the friends he made in the militia was Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the “father of gymnastics” and of the modern sports club; the first collegiate and public gyms in the United States, from 1826, were built by his American admirers. Jahn had played a leading role in the spread of the patriotic student fraternities that provided recruits for the uprising against French occupation. His muscular-Christian movement’s motto frisch, fromm, fröhlich, frei – fit, devout, cheerful, free – dovetailed in obvious ways with Froebel’s educational aim of “unification of life.”

The school’s ethos also gave rise to conflict with established religion. A loyal but unconventional Lutheran, Froebel’s experience of God as Creator was almost mystical: “Underlying the universal order of things is a living, all-pervading unity. This unity is God, in whom everything lives and has its being.”

This fervent love of nature opened him up to accusations of pantheism (which the Prussian government cast as “atheism” when it banned kindergartens). After starting the school, he soon incurred the wrath of the village priest by conducting his own Sunday services, whenever possible outdoors in the “cathedral of the forest,” believing long sermons indoors would harm rather than foster the spiritual lives of his charges.

Yet a look inside the village church reveals his legacy there as well. Four large plaques stretch the length of the balconies, bearing the names of the ninety-six Keilhau students and alumni who fell in World War I. Among them is Annemarie’s older brother Otto, who volunteered in 1915 at age seventeen together with his entire class; most never came home. Froebel had written that his education sought to train courage, manliness, and self-sacrifice for a greater cause. Whether imperial Germany’s war aims were a greater cause worth dying for is debatable. Yet as a testimony to the virtues Froebel sought to instill, the church plaques are evidence that he succeeded.

Behind the church’s altar hangs a painting in the Nazarene style by one of Froebel’s former students. It depicts the educator’s favorite biblical scene: Jesus stands surrounded by a crowd of exuberant children whom he blesses, while his disciples observe from behind (two of them have the faces of Froebel’s friends Langethal and Middendorff). The viewer is invited to recall Jesus’ words: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God” (Matt. 19:14).

These words are quoted in a crucial passage of Froebel’s masterwork, The Education of Man, written in 1826 to defend the Keilhau school as government hostility was escalating. The book is a dense and often maddening conglomeration of pedagogical, scientific, and philosophical discourse. Yet at the work’s heart is the Jesus of the Gospels, the cornerstone of Froebel’s idea of both freedom and education:

The life of Jesus, the highest and most perfect known to humankind, found its fulfillment within its own being. This perfect life would have each human being likewise become a similar image of the eternal, developing from within, self-active and free, in accordance with the eternal law. This life is, indeed, the aim of all instruction and training; there can be no other.

Jesus, for Froebel, presents us with the “highest, most complete, exemplary life.” And as the Teacher par excellence, he is also the exemplar of the educator.

While Froebel didn’t elaborate on this observation, his main proposals for education can be read as distillations of Jesus’ way of educating. Long before Froebel, Jesus called for a “unification of life” free of hypocrisy, in which the outer life expresses the inner, and the inner the outer. He saw childhood not as mere preparation for adulthood but as a key to what it means to be human: “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of God” (Matt. 18:3). His love of nature – his habit of retreating to the wilderness, his exhortations to imitate “the birds of the air and the lilies of the field,” his parables drawing from the natural world – reflected his love of his Father the Creator. Froebel’s teaching methods are reminiscent of Jesus’: using stories from everyday life and probing questions to elicit understanding from the hearer. Jesus did not teach by transmitting knowledge through systematic lectures, but by summoning to (as Froebel wrote) “active thought” and “thoughtful action.” “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them” (John 13:17).

In all these ways, Jesus educated for freedom – for human beings to learn to become “free, thinking, and active on their own initiative.” As he’s quoted in the Gospel of John, “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” His example, as Froebel reminds us, shows the paltriness of education that aims only at academic achievement and global competitiveness. Human beings, young and old, are made for more.