My educational method offers to its pupils from the beginning the opportunity to collect their own experiences from things themselves, to look with their own eyes and learn by their own experiments to know things and the relations of things to each other, and also the real life of the world of humanity; this last however, within the limits necessary for morality and not divested of the nimbus of the beautiful and the ideal.
In such a manner a greater inward as well as outward independence will be gained, which teaches one how to stand on one’s own feet . . . The too much and too early knowledge with which youth is crammed prevents men from reaching a true and real independence, which is only the fruit of the vigorous efforts of one’s own powers, especially by acting and doing.
Friedrich Froebel quoted by W H G Armytage in 1952