To one of his students he writes:  “You remember well enough how hard we worked and how we had to fight that we might elevate the Darmstadt creche, or rather Infant School, by improved methods and organisation until it became a true Kindergarten....  Now what was the outcome of all this, even during my own stay at Darmstadt?  Why, the fetters which always cripple a creche or an Infant School, and which seem to cling round its very name—­these fetters were allowed to remain unbroken.  Every one was pleased with so faithful a mistress as yourself,... yet they withheld from you the main condition of unimpeded development, that of the freedom necessary to every young healthy and vigorous plant....  Is there really such importance underlying the mere name of a system?—­some one might ask.  Yes, there is....  It is true that any one watching your teaching would observe a new spirit infused into it, expressing and fulfilling the child’s own wants and desires. You would strike him as personally capable, but you would fail to strike him as priestess of the idea which God has now called to life within man’s bosom, and of the struggle towards the realisation of that idea—­education by development—­the destined means of raising the whole human race.... No man can acquire fresh knowledge, even at a school, beyond the measure which his own stage of development fits him to receive....  Infant Schools are nothing but a contradiction of child-nature.  Little children especially those under school age, ought not to be schooled and taught, what they need is opportunity for development.  This idea lies in the very name of a Kindergarten....  And the name is absolutely necessary to describe the first education of children.”

For an actual definition of what Froebel meant by his Nursery School for Little Children or Kindergarten, it is only fair to go to the founder himself.  He has left us two definitions or descriptions, one announced shortly before the first Kindergarten was opened, which runs: 

“An institution for the fostering of human life, through the cultivation of the human instincts of activity, of investigation and of construction in the child, as a member of the family, of the nation and of humanity; an institution for the self-instruction, self-education and self-cultivation of mankind, as well as for all-sided development of the individual through play, through creative self-activity and spontaneous self-instruction.”

A second definition is given in Froebel’s reply to a proposal that he should establish “my system of education—­education by development”—­in London, Paris or the United States: 

“We also need establishments for training quite young children in their first stage of educational development, where their training and instruction shall be based upon their own free action or spontaneity acting under proper rules, these rules not being arbitrarily decreed, but such as must arise by logical necessity from the child’s mental and bodily nature, regarding him as a member of the great human family; such rules as are, in fact, discovered by the actual observation of children when associated together in companies.  These establishments bear the name of Kindergartens.”