Friday, September 18, 2015

conditions of development...

Friedrich Froebel had laid out the basic conditions of development, for he was not concerned with test scores but with the development of humanity, one child at a time.

One condition was the sense of connectedness... that what the child was learning had to fit in a broader scheme of things to be of interest to the child. The idea of connectedness can range from the small (being drawn from the interest of the child) to the large ( discovering the inter-connectedness of all things.)

The second was self-activity. The student must be actively rather than passively engaged in learning so that he or she would utilize what was taken in expressed in a self-directed, self-motivated manner.

The third was creativeness. Creativeness is the means through which the student makes personal claim to the object or expression achieved through learning.

One visitor of Froebel's school before his invention of Kindergarten spent two days observing and recording his experience.  Superintendent Zeh described the methods and effect of Froebel's school as follows:
Self-activity of mind is the first law of this instruction; therefore the kind of instruction given here does not make the young mind a strong-box into which, as early as possible, all kinds of coins of the most different values and coinage, such as are now current in the world, are stuffed; but slowly, continuously, gradually, and always inwardly, that is, according to a connection founded on the nature of the human mind, the instruction steadily goes on without any tricks . . . from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract, so well adapted to the child and his needs that he goes as readily to his learning as to his play; indeed, I was a witness of how the little ones, whose lesson had been somewhat delayed by my arrival, came in tears to the principal of the institute and asked 'whether to-day they were always to play and never to learn, and whether the big boys only were to have lessons?'"
Make, fix, create, and establish for others the opportunity to do likewise.

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