Inspired by this post from BLDGBLOG, I dug up some information on Friedrich Froebel, the founder of kindergarten. The first, and perhaps most relevant to design, is this snippet about Froebel from the Institute of Figuring:

Most of us today experienced kindergarten as a loose assortment of playful activities – a kind of preparatory ground for school proper. But in its original incarnation kindergarten was a formalized system that drew its inspiration from the science of crystallography. During its early years in the nineteenth century, kindergarten was based around a system of abstract exercises that aimed to instill in young children an understanding of the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and flow of creation. This revolutionary system was developed by the German scientist Friedrich Froebel whose vision of childhood education changed the course of our culture laying the grounds for modernist art, architecture and design. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller are all documented attendees of kindergarten. Other “form-givers” of the modern era – including Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Georges Braque – were educated in an environment permeated with Frobelian influence.

I’m ready to sign my daughter up at a kindergarten that practices it the old-school way.

To be completely serious, I love the idea of education via the observation, analysis, and creative interpretation of the mathematical aspects of our physical world. What better way than to teach both life’s most important subjects; mathematics and aesthetics. Your put the two together, and you get this quote.