The followers of the German educator Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) spread his kindergarten system across the globe. Even in countries like England where the term kindergarten was rejected in favour of 'nursery school', early childhood education bears the unmistakeable impress of Froebel's educational principles if not that of his symbolic and material apparatus.
That this was the case until quite recently begs the question of whether a continuous line of descent can be traced back to Froebel or whether it is more a case of discontinuity, of breaks and ruptures in the tradition he founded. Another possibility is that the structural location of early years educators, which includes their class and gender together with the material culture of the nursery school, makes them predisposed to a pedagogy that emphasises the role of play in young children's learning and the maternalist ideology so central to Froebel's world view.
Whatever view we take Froebel's writings are of more than antiquarian interest for they were inscribed or institutionalised in the English nursery school roughly during the first decade of this century. Furthermore, his ideas and practises, albeit revised by John Dewey and his followers, became the dominant ideology within the colleges were the teachers of young children were trained. It may be argued that this ideology was a hybridisation of the work of Froebel, Margaret McMillan and Maria Montessori but even if this view were to be accepted the Froebelians were the hegemonic grouping.
Froebel, of course wrote in German and it was some time before they became available in English translation. Into this gap leapt a number of exegetes, readers who produced their own diverse readings of Froebel. While it is possible that much of Froebel's work remains untranslated the Froebelians based their practice on a few key texts. These, together with a selection of Froebelian texts that appeared before the Montessori whirlwind was to challenge the Froebelian position, are to be reprinted in five volumes by Routledge. In addition to Froebel's main works and accounts of his life, there will be included works of exegesis and commentary, accounts of kindergartens in England, the turn to slöyd, critiques of the Froebelian ideology - internal as exemplified by the Deweyean revisionists and also ones of a Darwinian external kind - and texts illustrating the importance of the relation between Froebelians and the women's movement and the Froebelian women's professionalising project.
Any selection like this will inevitably contain gaps and silences. The material specific to England is drawn from a wide range of existing texts but Froebel's work is less extensive and I as editor have tried to be as inclusive as possible.
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