Page 23 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Frederick Froebel: Kindergarten education + Froebel’s Gifts 1826
Froebel is most famous for his creation of the concept of ‘kindergarten’ - a pre-school education formula based upon activity and interactivity - involving children in games, dance, singing, play-acting and other group creative activities, as a basis for learning how to learn, how to communicate, and how to express themselves. As a result of his practical endeavours building the Kindergarten movement, Froebel also developed a range of construction toys that were called Froebel’s Gifts - made mostly in wood - toy bricks and blocks (sphere, cube, eight small 1” cubes, soft balls of yarn, 8 oblongs, and so on). “it is important to consider what Froebel expected the Gifts to achieve. He envisaged that the Gifts will teach the child to use his (or her) environment as an educational aid; secondly, that they will give the child an indication of the connection between human life and life in nature; and finally that they will create a bond between the adult and the child who plays with them.” (Joachim Liebschner: A Child’s Work: Freedom and Guidance in Froebel’s Theory and Practice (2002). Froebel’s Gifts were the precursor to a whole range of pre-school educational aids, toys, games and construction-play kits like Meccano and Lego, and in the 21st century, software toolkits like Roblox (2006) and Minecraft (2011).Froebel invented the ‘kindergarten’ educational philosophy, and promoted its widespread use around the world, starting in his native Switzerland. By sowing the seeds of ‘self-education’ at such an early (pre-school) age, Froebel’s kindergarten theory and practice, reinforced by his innovative ‘gifts’, transformed the whole idea of children’s education (pedagogy) from the notion of ‘pouring knowledge’ into individuals to the idea of encouraging self motivated action-led learning - a process that he hoped would lead to a lifelong self-learning. practice.
A lot of thinking on children’s education - from this time on - derives from the proverbial Confucius: "When I hear, I forget. When I see, I remember. When I do, I learn." - and this mnemonic, presumedly from Confucius: Analects (220AD), and this quote was used by many evangelists (myself included) of the new interactive media in the 1980s and 1990s to convince clients that what they needed was ‘interactivity’ (‘doing’) as the core ingredient in a learning programme.
BTW, this mode of learning by doing, is the mode adopted by artist’s studios from the craft guilds of the Middle Ages onwards - and modified in the 1920s to suit the industrial age by Walter Gropius and his artists, craftsmen, technicians and visionaries at the Bauhaus School of Art (from 1919-1929), and later at Chicago ‘New Bauhaus’ and the Black Mountain College, and most art schools around the world. Nowadays its known as ‘student-centred, project-based learning’ - and in my experience is the best modus operandi for encouraging life-long self-learning.