One of the biggest things that has ever happened to the world is kindergarten.
Prior to the nineteenth century, few people thought to educate children before the age of seven. So it was a Big Idea indeed when the German educator Friedrich Froebel launched the first kindergarten in 1837, grounded in “play and activity” and the nurturing of creativity through the systematic deployment of a sequence of “gifts” (colored balls, geometrical building blocks, mosaic tiles, etc.)—a system that Norman Brosterman, an architect, collector, and artist, argues constituted a direct inspiration to the careers of such one-time kindergartners as Paul Klee, Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Brosterman discusses Froebel’s revolutionary ideas about using nature as the model of perfection to educate children. Froebel’s goals were to teacher children how to observe, reason, express and create employing philosophies of unity and interconnectedness. Some of America’s most commonplace activities for children such as “coloring within the lines” but also roots of modern art can be traced to Froebel’s ideas of abstracting the world into grids.