[Footnote 9:  This would nowadays be considered too sweeping an assertion.]

According to Froebel, “the aim of education is the steady progressive development of mankind, there is and can be no other”; and, except as regards physiological knowledge inaccessible in his day, he is at one with the biologist as to how we are to find out the course of this development.  First, by looking into our own past; secondly, by the observation of children as individuals as well as when associated together, and by comparison of the results of observation; thirdly, by comparison of these with race history and race development.

Froebel makes much of observation of children.  He writes to a cousin begging her to “record in writing the most important facts about each separate child,” and adds that it seems to him “most necessary for the comprehension of child-nature that such observations should be made public,... of the greatest importance that we should interchange the observations we make so that little by little we may come to know the grounds and conditions of what we observe, that we may formulate their laws.”  He protests that even in his day “the observation, development and guidance of children in the first years of life up to the proper age of school” is not up to the existing level of “the stage of human knowledge or the advance of science and art”; and he states that it is “an essential part” of his undertaking “to call into life an institution for the preparation of teachers trained for the care of children through observation of their life.”

In speaking of the stages of development of the individual, Froebel says that “there is no order of importance in the stages of human development except the order of succession, in which the earlier is always the more important,” and from that point of view we ought “to consider childhood as the most important stage, ... a stage in the development of the Godlike in the earthly and human.”  He also emphasises that “the vigorous and complete development and cultivation of each successive stage depends on the vigorous, complete and characteristic development of each and all preceding stages.”

So the duty of the parent is to “look as deeply as possible into the life of the child to see what he requires for his present stage of development,” and then to “scrutinise the environment to see what it offers ... to utilise all possibilities of meeting normal needs,” to remove what is hurtful, or at least to “admit its defects” if they cannot give the child what his nature requires.  “If parents offer what the child does not need,” he says, “they will destroy the child’s faith in their sympathetic understanding.”  The educator is to “bring the child into relations and surroundings in all respects adapted to him” but affording a minimum of opportunity of injury, “guarding and protecting” but not interfering, unless he is certain that healthy development has already been interrupted.  It is somewhat remarkable