Papierdenken: Blasche, Fröbel, and the Lessons of Nineteenth-Century Paper Modeling

Abstract:This article focuses on paper modeling as a theoretical subject and material practice at the center of nineteenth-century pedagogical reform debates in Germany and beyond. Tracing a brief history of paper-based craft instruction after 1800—from Heinrich Blasche to Friedrich Fröbel—it shows how the plastic and haptic capabilities of paper and pasteboard modeling are understood as the basis for new, often radical educational models. Such models implicitly short-circuit the principle of alphabetical learning to propose instead the possibility of fundamental relations between "making" and "thinking."