We’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. We also looked at the Lancaster Monitorial system from the early decades of the 19th century before shifting to the Common School Movement and how it shaped U.S. Education. We talked about the one-room schoolhouse and some of the shifts it embodied. We looked at an 8th grade exam from 1895 that didn’t begin to approach the level of content expected of modern 8th graders and we’ve looked at the abuses of the Indian Boarding School system. We went back again to look at the parallel-but-very-unequal development of Black schools in the U.S. between the Civil War and Brown v. Board and we took a look at an 8th grade exam from 1912. Now we’re going backward again to look at the the roots of the Kindergarten movement.
Friedrich Froebel. Image in the public domain.
Kindergarten is such an established part of every child’s educational experience, such a given, that it comes as a mild surprise to note that it’s a fairly recent development. Educating the very young in some capacity isn’t really novel; even formal education for small children goes right back to the first colonists. What was very novel about Kindergarten in its earliest inception was that it focused on rich environments where students could engage in play to stimulate their creativity and nurture their inborn potential.
To understand how radical this was, we have to be reminded of how children and children’s activities were viewed prior to about 1830. Children were seen as miniature – but defective – adults. The prevailing belief was that they were inherently sinful and their innate desire to engage in play was seen as proof that they needed strict discipline to train these tendencies out of them, lest they mature into lazy and morally lax adults. In tandem with this was the widespread practice of putting children, even very young children, to work either on the family farm or in factories so that the family could benefit from their labor.* Only wealthy children had the luxury of not working, but even they were sent to school so that their time would be productively spent getting the education necessary to become upstanding adults. Dame schools for the very young and the less well-off taught “useful skills” like knitting, sewing, and embroidery that would benefit employers or that might benefit their families by enabling them to find jobs or take in mending. Corporal punishment to enforce this discipline had been de rigueur for centuries, though it was beginning to be phased out in some areas of Europe by the early 1800s.
Childhood as a separate, legitimate phase of life (rather than a condition that needed to be trained out of children) was a distinctly European idea. As far back as 1762, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that children were born innocent** and that the “artificial” learning forced on them caused them to fall from that state of original goodness. The educator’s job was to civilize the child and retain that inherent goodness by engaging in a more “natural” program of education, in essence working with the child instead of imposing education on the child.*** Johann Pestalozzi, a Swiss educator, was influenced by Rousseau’s ideas and from them shaped his own philosophy of education, in which all understanding could be achieved through a psychologically ordered sequence – in essence, he was suggesting that children pass through distinct developmental stages. We take this for granted now but it was revolutionary for the time. He believed educators needed to design educational experiences to work with those distinct stages. This, too, was a departure from the very prevalent idea that instruction took only one form and it was the child’s job to conform to it.
Froebel Gifts. Image in the public domain.
Enter Friedrich Froebel. Froebel was a German educator who opened the first Kindergarten^^ in Germany in 1837. He was a protégé of Pestalozzi and took what he learned working with him back to Germany. He used the idea of childhood as a valid phase of life in and of itself as the foundation for his own ideas about early childhood education, including his ideas about the value of spontaneous play. Froebel spent hours observing young children at play, noting how they responded to various situations, what they said, and how they used their play experiences to construct understanding of the world around them. He pioneered things that now seem obvious and inevitable but were novel at the time: the use of manipulatives like numbered blocks and geometric shapes, the educational value of games, the use of songs, fingerplays, dancing, gardening, and even free play – though he called it “free work” because to him, play was the work of children. His manipulatives came to be known as ‘Froebel Gifts’ and were foundational to his program.
Froebel had at one time worked for the Museum of Mineralogy studying and cataloging crystals. He became fascinated with their structure, and wrote:
“…Even in these so-called lifeless stones and fragments of rock…there lay germs of transforming, developing energy and activity. Amidst the diversity of forms around me, I recognised … one law of development…Geology and crystallography … showed me [that] nature and man now seemed to me…to explain each other, through all their numberless various stages of development.”
To him, the patterns in the crystals mirrored what he saw in young children: the “germs of transforming, developing energy and activity.” Activities in Froebel’s Kindergarten were designed to stimulate the child’s inner potential, those seeds of transformation in each of them.
In Part 2, we’ll look at how Froebel’s ideas crossed the Atlantic and took root in the U.S.
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*For many families, this wasn’t a mercenary impulse; they needed everyone’s labor as a matter of survival.
** This was a radical departure from earlier thought. Less than 75 years earlier, in 1689, Puritan preacher Cotton Mather wrote, “you can’t begin with [children] too soon….they are no sooner wean’d but they are to be taught…. the Devil has been with them already.” Inherent sinfulness wasn’t solely a Puritan feature, but they reiterated the idea in preaching and writing a lot. Just 3 years later, Mather would go on to be a key figure in the Salem Witch Trials.
***There’s far more here than I can discuss, including the tabula rasa – or blank slate—philosophy of education which holds that children are empty vessels into which the teacher pours knowledge. It has taken centuries — millennia — to recognize that children have innate personality traits and are shaped by their early experiences in a multitude of ways before they ever come to school.
^^He didn’t call it this, though. He called it the “care, playing, and activity institute for small children.” He didn’t coin the term Kindergarten (children’s garden) until 1840.