My Alphabetical Biography List: Froebel, Friedrich - inventor of kindergarten

Well, after 139 pages I'm still not sure exactly what made his idea of kindergarten unique or really how he came about it. But I did read about his inner life and his outer life ad nauseum. Basically I think he had trouble relating all his schooling to life outside school and wanted there to be some sort of connection. He also mentioned at one point noticing that children learn through playing. Other than that all he did was contemplate.
Maybe if I had found a biography instead of an autobiography it would have been better. It was written in 1827, and felt like it. Also, as the translators said, "...a careful paraphrase of Froebel would be much more intelligible and pithy to English readers than a true rendering, since he possesses every fault of style except over-conciseness..." The translators also said, toward the end of the book (when Froebel was complaining that no one had read his works on education), "Froebel, as has already abundantly appeared, was but a poor author. His stiff, turgid style makes his works in many places most difficult to understand, as the present translators have found to their cost, and he was therefore practically unreadable to the general public." I love it.
There was one thing that jumped out at me, though. "...though [my studies] were regarded from a higher point of view by myself in the privacy of my own thoughts, I had to return to ordinary every-day work...Yet, though I lived the outward business life to all appearance, it remained ever foreign to my nature; I carried my own world within me, and it was that for which I cared and which I cherished." I hear ya, buddy.