Kindergartners

The kindergarten idea originated in Bad Blankenburg, Thuringia, in 1837 with Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852). It reflected pioneering pedagogy and philosophy of early childhood education, based on be­havioral studies in child development and aiming to socialize children with teachers playing passive, protective maternal roles rather than being controlling and directive.

After hearing Froebel lecture in her hometown of Hamburg in 1849, Mar- garethe Meyer (1833—1876) prepared notes on training that Froebel endorsed. Caring for her ailing sister in London in 1852, she and her brother-in-law, Johann Ronge, a German expatriate and Froebel disciple, ran a model kindergarten. There Margarethe met and wed Carl Schurz. They immigrated to a German community near Philadelphia and then to Watertown, Wisconsin, where she opened a small class in her home for her daughter, Agathe, and other children in the winter of 1856—1857.

Schurz introduced the Froebelian plan to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804—1894) in Boston in 1859. Although Milwaukee’s German-English Academy created a kindergarten in 1851, “Miss Peabody” (as she was called), an associate of Transcen- dentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the Alcotts, is credited with opening the first kinder­garten in the United States in 1860. She re­leased her Moral Culture of Infancy, and Kindergarten Guide, written with Horace Mann, in 1863. Peabody went to Germany (1867-1868) to study Froebel’s methods, returning to devote herself to the move­ment and luring German Froebelian Matilda Kriege to help in her Boston kindergarten (1868-1872).

Born at Hagenow in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Maria Boelte (1836-1918) moved to Hamburg in 1854 to study with the widow Luise Levine Froebel and work in original kindergartens while attending the Hamburg Teachers Seminary. She then went to London to teach in the school of Froebel disciple Bertha Ronge, displaying students’ work at the 1862 London International Exhibi­tion. Back in Hamburg in 1867, she taught at the Froebel Union training school under Johanna Goldschmidt, then opened her own private kindergarten in Lubeck with teacher training. Peabody tried to lure her to Boston in 1868, and correspondence with German-born John Kraus in the fed­eral Bureau of Education peaked Maria’s interest in promoting Froebelism in the United States. She finally agreed to Peabody’s request to form a model kinder­garten and mothers’ classes in Henrietta B. Haines’s School in New York City in 1872. Kraus left his Washington appointment in 1873. He and Boelte married and immedi­ately founded the New York Seminary for Kindergartners, including primary grades and teacher training.

St. Louis established the first public kindergarten in the United States in 1873 under Susan Elizabeth Blow (1843-1916). Superintendent William T. Harris, a

The kindergarten in the North-end Industrial Home, Boston, Massachusetts, 1881. (Library of Congress)

Hegelian leader of the philosophical St. Louis movement, called kindergartens the only way to save children from broken families from vice in slums. Blow discov­ered Froebel’s methods while in Germany in 1870 and then studied under Kraus- Boelte in New York before opening her own training school with Alice Harvey Whiting Putnam (1841—1919), which launched the careers of influential kinder­gartners like Elizabeth Harrison and Laura Fisher, who interpreted Froebel through Hegelian idealism.

Ruth Burritt ran a Philadelphia train­ing school and displayed a model kinder­garten in the Women’s Building at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Such programs spread rapidly in public and private schools. Pauline Agassiz Shaw, for instance, brought such programs for early childhood education to Boston in 1877. Social reformer Anna Hallowell (1831—1905) began to open free kinder­gartens in Philadelphia slums in 1879, or­ganizing the Sub-Primary School Society (1881), which won some municipal funds in 1882. The Board of Education took over twenty-seven kindergartens in 1887, with Hallowell serving as its first female mem­ber for fourteen years. She launched kindergarten teacher training in the Philadelphia Normal School for Girls.

Froebel disciple Emma Jacobina Christina Marwedel (1818—1893), born in Munden near Gottingen, was a leading ad­vocate of women’s and children’s education when Peabody met her in Hamburg in 1867. Marwedel immigrated to found a private school in Washington, D.C., in 1871 for students up to age twelve with a kindergarten and teacher training program, applying Froebelian theories on all levels. She carried her methodology to Los Ange­les in 1876, sponsored by Caroline B. Sev­erance, to open the short-lived California Model Kindergarten and Pacific Model Training School for Kindergartners. Strong in administration, Marwedel founded the San Francisco Silver Street Kindergarten Society (1878) for poor slum children, and the staunchly Froebelian California Kindergarten Union (1879).

Inspired by San Francisco kinder­gartens, Sarah Brown Ingersoll Cooper (1835—1896) saw the potential to spread “applied Christianity” in early childhood, moving beyond Froebel’s freethinking, and formed the Jackson Street Kindergarten (1879) with her Bible class members. A founder of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Kindergarten Association (1884) and Golden Gate Kindergarten Free Normal Training School (1891), Cooper founded over sixty programs in her city, some in or­phanages and “day homes,” and spread the “Golden Gate model” through western states with missionary zeal.

Annie Laws (1855—1927) helped found the Cincinnati Kindergarten Associ­ation (1879), starting a teacher training program and serving as president in 1891 and again from 1901 until her death. Alice Putnam developed a personal interest in Froebel in the 1870s while raising her chil­dren, opening Chicago’s first kindergarten in her wealthy home. She formed the Chicago Froebel Association (1880) and supervised training for kindergartners (1880—1910), often in Hull-House, the model settlement house founded by Jane Addams in Chicago, taking time to study with Blow, Kraus-Boelte, and at Francis W. Parker’s summer school on Martha’s Vine­yard. Inspired by Parker’s interpretation of Froebel’s ideas of freedom, self-expression, and social participation, Putnam won ap­pointment as head of the Cook County Normal School in 1882. She persuaded the Chicago Board of Education to let her run kindergartens in public schools—ten were operating under private auspices by 1892 when the city system took them over.

Anna Bryan (1858-1901) completed training in the Chicago Free Kindergarten Association School in 1884 and taught in the Marie Chapel Charity Kindergarten until called back to her native Louisville to head the Free Kindergarten Association in 1887 with its own training school. In her seven years as head of this association, she expanded teacher classes from five to fifty students and opened eight kindergartens. Breaking from Froebelian methods as too rigid, she advocated creative, flexible reform, leaving Louisville to Patty Smith Hill in 1894 as she returned to Chicago to head the Armour Institute’s Kindergarten Normal Department. John Dewey drew on her ex­perience in setting up a kindergarten in his experimental University of Chicago School.

Froebel’s influence grew with publica­tion of his books in English: The Education of Man (1877) and Letters on the Kinder­garten (1891). Elizabeth Harrison (1849-1927) had observed Alice Putnam’s training classes in Chicago in 1879 and raised funds to study with Blow in 1882 by running her own kindergarten in Iowa.

Putnam and Harrison formed the Chicago Kindergarten Club (1883) to in­terest mothers in using Froebelian princi­ples in the home through classes and lec­tures from 1887 to 1894. Success led to national mothers’ conferences staged in Chicago in 1894, 1895, and 1896, laying the groundwork for the formation of the National Congress of Mothers (1897, later the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, PTA) by Alice McClellan Birney.

Encouraged by Peabody, Lucy Whee­lock (1857-1946) began teaching in Boston’s Chauncy Hall School kindergarten in 1879. When Boston public schools inte­grated such classes in 1888, Chauncy Hall continued a one-year teacher training pro­gram, lengthening it to two years in 1893. Wheelock left in 1896 to form her own Kindergarten Training School, expanding training for primary grades in 1899. It be­came Wheelock College in 1941.

Working for the Indianapolis Free Kindergarten Society (1882), Eliza Cooper Blaker (1854-1926) opened sixty programs, supported privately until a 1901 state law provided local tax monies. Her training program became the Teachers College of Indianapolis in 1905 (later ab­sorbed by Butler University). A 1905 Ohio law mandated public kindergartens. The University of Cincinnati established a Kindergarten Department in its Teachers College in 1926 through Annie Law’s ef­forts. Professionalization spread through­out the National Education Association’s Kindergarten Department from the 1890s on as higher education absorbed and up­graded private training programs, many of which had been only six-months or a year long and admitted those with eighth-grade educations. Elizabeth Harrison had created the Chicago Kindergarten Training School in 1887, but expanded it to a three-year curriculum after her trip to study with Henrietta Breyman Schrader in Berlin and Baroness von Marenholtz-Bulow in Dres­den.

Kraus-Boelte focused on teachers after discontinuing education for older children in 1890, forming the Kraus Alumni Asso­ciation (1898) after her husband died, becoming president of the National Educa­tion Association’s Kindergarten Depart­ment (1899). Through her work, the New York University School of Education began kindergarten education in 1903, in which she taught until 1907. She spread the movement until retiring in 1913 as the most authentic of the Froebelians.

The International Kindergarten Union (1892, IKU) mounted an exhibit in the Children’s Building at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, populariz­ing the idea among progressive reformers. There, Virginia Thrall Smith (1836- 1903), founder of Connecticut’s first free kindergarten and instrumental in the first state law creating public school kinder­gartens, emphasized the community values of such pedagogy to prevent “moral dis­eases” caused by the poverty, ignorance, or “vicious” surroundings, advocating begin­ning attendance at age two and a half. IKU president Sarah Cooper spoke on “charac­ter building” and learning by doing.

Susan Blow resisted attempts to inno­vate on Froebelian theory and practice, ex­pounding views in five volumes in William Harris’s International Education Series (1894) and lectures. Based at Columbia University’s Teachers College (1905­1909), she remained a leader in the IKU Committee of Fifteen (later Nineteen) until her death, debating pedagogical or­thodoxy. Blow’s chief opponent was Anna Bryan, influenced by John Dewey and G. Stanley Hall. Bryan’s reformist kinder­garten curriculum at the Louisville Colle­giate Institute influenced Patty Smith Hill (1868-1946) who took over in 1893, ex­panding the movement beyond strict Froe- belism from her Louisville base and then at Columbia’s Teachers College from 1906 to 1935. For her part of the debate, Wheelock espoused gradual changes but led a pil­grimage of kindergartners to Froebel sites in Germany in 1911. Americanization pro­gressed after Hill became president of the IKU in 1908.

Dr. Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska (1829-1902), born in Berlin and a pio­neering woman physician in the United States, opened a children’s sand garden in Boston in 1885, modeled after one in Berlin. Kindergarten and German ideals about the salutary functions of physical recreation based in the Turner movement underlay the founding of the Playground

Association of America (1906), and the movement spread through the Progressive era and thereafter under public auspices, albeit not quite as Froebel had wanted.

Blanche M. G. Linden

See also Addams (Laura), Jane; Anneke, Mathilde Franziska; Chicago; Milwaukee; New York City; Schurz, Agathe Margarethe; Schurz, Carl; Transcendentalism; Zakrzewska, Marie Elizabeth

References and Further Reading

Blow, Susan E. Symbolic Education: A Commentary on Froebel’s “Mother Play. ” New York: D. Appleton, 1894.

------. Letters to a Mother on the Philosophy of Froebel. New York: D. Appleton, 1899.

------. Kindergarten Education. New York: D. Appleton, 1900.

Brosterman, Norman. Inventing Kindergarten. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1997.

Feinstein, Karen. “Kindergartens, Feminism, and the Professionalism of Motherhood.” Journal of Women’s Studies 3 (January-February 1980): 28—39.

Froebel, Friedrich. Mother’s Songs, Games, and Stories. London: W. Rice, 1886.

----------. Mother Play and Songs. Vol. 11:

International Education Series, ed. William T Harris, 1895, 2 vols. translated by Susan Blow.

Kindergarten Union. Pioneers of the Kindergarten in America. 1924.

Kraus, John, and Maria Kraus-Boelte. The Kindergarten Guide. 2 vols. New York: E. Steiger, 1881.

Menius, Joseph. Susan Blow: “Mother of the Kindergarten. ”New York: Page One Publishers, 1993.

Priddy, Bob. “Across Our Wide Missouri: Kindergarten Founders.” Missouri Life 8 (May-June 1980).

Ronge, Johannes, and Bertha Ronge. A Practical Guide of the English Kindergarten. London: V. S. Hodson, 1855.

Ross, Dale. The Kindergarten Crusade. Athens: Ohio University, 1976.

Vanderwalker, Nina. The Kindergarten in American Education. New York: MacMillan, 1923.

Weber, Evelyn. The Kindergarten: Its Encounter with Educational Thought in America. New York: Teachers College, 1969.