Child's Garden: Kindergarten Movement from Froebel to Dewey Book

The first comprehensive account of the roots of the kindergarten movement in the United States, this book restores the Froebelians to their rightful place as pioneers of early childhood education. Although overshadowed by the followers of Dewey and Thorndike, the followers of Froebel played a key role in the dramatic struggle for control of the public schools, as the author shows, especially in urban settings.Drawing upon widely scattered archives - many previously untapped - Dr. Shapiro introduces unrecognized participants in turn-of-the-century educational reform, together with familiar figures. The work of Bronson Alcott, William Torrey Harris, G. Stanley Hall, Jane Addams, and John Dewey is presented in fresh perspective, and then is new insight on the impact of Freudianism in America. Among the attractive figures introduced in cameo portraits are Elizabeth Peabody, Susan Blow, Sarah Cooper, and Kate Douglas Wiggin. Due attention is given to the Forty-Eighters who joined established German communities in the new world: kindergarten advocates such as Carl and Margarethe Schurz, William Douglas Hailmann and John Kraus, Matilda Kriege and Maria Boelte, and the St. Louis Hegelians.The kindergarten movement has been a part of the reformist tide sweeping over America since the mid-19th century and has been caught in its crosscurrents. The childrearing notions of German Romanticism reinforced the New England Transcendentalist conviction of human perfectability, which gradually during the three generations between the Age of Jackson and the Progressive Era - surpassed evangelical Protestantism as the dominant ethos of American society. Diversity being an inherent quality of reform movements, kindergartners often have been at odds among themselves and with other reformers. Although by 1918 the Froebelian emphasis on spontaneity in education and learning through play had largely been supplanted by doctrines of discipline and social control, this book's epilogue shows how the ideals of the early kindergarten movement are still relevant for students of social and cultural history, developmental psychology, and early childhood education.Read More