if only kindergarten lasted forever. i try to live that way but sometimes i have to skip playtime - always a bummer. oddly a good friend was schooling me on mister froebel the magnificent and the next day i just so happened to come across this site and exhibition without looking for it: inventing kindergarten exhibition would have been cool to check out had i known about it.
paper weaving workbook by Ms. F. Wegerich, Germany, c. 1880.Most of us today experienced kindergarten as a loose assortment of playful activities – a kind of preparatory ground for school proper. But in its original incarnation kindergarten was a formalized system that drew its inspiration from the science of crystallography. During its early years in the nineteenth century, kindergarten was based around a system of abstract exercises that aimed to instill in young children an understanding of the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and flow of creation. This revolutionary system was developed by the German scientist Friedrich Froebel whose vision of childhood education changed the course of our culture laying the grounds for modernist art, architecture and design. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller are all documented attendees of kindergarten. Other “form-givers” of the modern era – including Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Georges Braque – were educated in an environment permeated with Frobelian influence.
more on Froebel’s influence on modern art in the terrific book Inventing Kindergarten
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