schemingreader

Happy Birthday, magnetic_pole!

I really really wanted to write at least a little bitty drabble for your birthday. So many people on my flist wrote you lovely fics, which warmed the cockles of my heart, or, you know, somewhere. Well, then, suddenly, I had another idea: a birthday book review. If regan_v can write birthday meta, I can do this. (All right, maybe her essay is going to be sexier than mine--but I think this will fit you.)

I have this great book that I got from the library as a result of a comment conversation with veradee, called Inventing Kindergarten by Norman Brosterman. It's a biography of Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) and an art and social history of kindergarten. I was trying to explain to veradee the important role that I thought kindergarten had in German social history. I knew that many reformers who were involved in feminism in 19th century Germany were also kindergarten devotees.

What I didn't know was what Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten originally was. Brosterman collected all of Froebel's original "gifts", the toys he made to teach children through a combination of object lesson and arts and crafts. I was incredibly excited to learn that Froebel was the inventor of building blocks. (I had to resist the urge to put an exclamation point after the word blocks there. You know that blocks are big in chez schemingreader.)

Why this book will provide you with hours of enjoyment, provided that you haven't already read it:

1. The LA connection. There is a lovely photo of an LA kindergarten in 1900 on page 37. Not the classroom; it's a photo of the children in their flower and vegetable garden outside. Froebel's idea was that children should learn from growing flowers and vegetables.

I realized immediately that this was probably why there were formal gardens around my father's kindergarten in the 1930s.

The other LA connection: if you are going to be in LA for the holidays, you can go to see Brosterman's collection of kindergarten artifacts--"gifts", and the crafts that children and teachers made with them.

2. The overlap of social and artistic/architectural history. (This is why I am afraid you must have already read this book, in which case this review is just an exercise in polite nodding for you.) Brosterman shows the relationship between the gifts and various important artistic and architectural works: the "peas" play gift (playdough balls and toothpicks) and geodesic domes, for example. He shows the relationship between the grids and geometric shapes of the Froebelian kindergarten, and Cubism. He explores the shapes of Froebel's blocks, and the shapes of Bauhaus architecture.

I think he might not dwell in sufficient detail on the way that US Froebelians first tried their ideas on orphans and immigrants, which is--interesting! On the other hand, he does go into detail about the dilution of Froebel's insistence on children learning for themselves.

Yes, I know, this has nothing to do with the Harry Potter fandom, nor with my belief in the role of fan fiction in developing writers--but... it does a little. First of all, this is clearly as much squee as it is a legit review, and I didn't even know the word squee until I entered fandom. Second, as you know, I believe that people learn through play, even into adulthood.

Brosterman lists at length the many things that children learn from playing with blocks, including the social skills from playing with the objects with other children. I have learned many things from playing in fandom, and quite a few of them I have learned with or from you. WHICH brings me neatly back to thanking you (on Thanksgiving) and wishing you a very happy birthday.