The first twenty years of his experience convinced Froebel that the neglect or mismanagement of the earliest years of a child’s life rendered useless all that was done later.  What came to Owen as an inspiration grew in Froebel to be a reasoned truth, and like Owen he put it into practice.  In 1837 the little Kindergarten at Blankenburg was begun, with the village children as pupils; the beautiful surroundings of forest-covered hills and green slopes made a very different background from the bleak little Lanarkshire village, overshadowed by the factory, where Owen’s school stood, but the spirit was the same; the children were in surroundings suitable for their growth, and the very name of Kindergarten does more to make Froebel’s aim clear than any explanation.  He lived to see other Kindergartens established in different parts of Thuringia, and about the middle of the nineteenth century some of his teachers came to England, and did similar work in London, Croydon and Manchester.  The private Kindergarten became an established thing, and educationalists came to understand something of its meaning.

In 1870 the London School Board suggested that the Kindergarten system should be introduced into their Infant Schools, and in doing so they were unconsciously the factors in bringing together the work initiated by Owen and by Froebel.  The Infant School of Wilderspin, already briefly described, was almost a dead thing, with its galleries and its mechanical prodigies, its object-lessons and its theology; now it was breathed upon by the spirit of the man who said:  “Play is the highest phase of child development, of human development at this period:  for it is the spontaneous representation of the inner, from inner necessity and impulse.”  “Play is the purest, most spiritual activity of man.”  “The plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life.”  “If the child is injured at this period, if the germinal leaves of the future tree of his life are marred at this time, he will only with the greatest difficulty and the utmost effort grow into strong manhood.”

It is perhaps not altogether to be wondered at that teachers at first seized the apparatus rather than the spirit of the Kindergarten when we remember that we have not accepted in anything like its fulness the teaching of Froebel.  Formalism and materialism always die slowly:  play in the Board School was interpreted as something that had to be dictated and taught:  the gifts, occupations and games were organised, and appeared on the time-table as subjects side by side with Wilderspin’s theology and object-lessons.  The combination must have been curious, but even with its formalism the change was welcome to the children:  at least they could use their hands and do something; at least they could leave their back-breaking galleries and dance and skip, even though the doing and the dancing were according to strict rule.