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Urban Reform and the Schools: Kindergartens in Massachusetts, 1870–1915

In the decades after the Civil War, no individual did more to popularize the kindergarten in America than Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. First acquainted with the new institution for childhood through Mrs. Carl Schurz in 1859, later followed by a European tour to see Friedrich Froebel's work, Peabody spent the next thirty-five years of her life proselytizing for the emancipation of the child. The kindergarten, she believed, was not simply a method of education but a movement of mystical significance. Her advocacy was an “apostolate,” kindergartening a religion, a “Gospel for children.” Like Froebel, Peabody spoke of absolutes and universality. She dealt with Truth, the Child, the Home, Family, and Motherhood, and offered to stem the hedonistic tendencies of childhood. All children, Peabody and her associates believed, were self-centered. In their earliest years they discover their bodies, senses, and power to act. Their mothers' tenderness heightens their impulses toward selfishness. They demand immediate satisfaction. Without an agency external to the family in which socialization among peers and to society's mores occurs, childhood would thus ultimately become self-destructive. It was here that the kindergarten became necessary, allowing the child “to take his place in the company of his equals, to learn his place in their companionship, and still later to learn wider social relations and their involved duties.” “A kindergarten, then,” Peabody wrote, “is children in society—a commonwealth or republic of children—whose laws are all part and parcel of the Higher Law alone.”