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The kindergarten, which offered an innovative approach to early childhood education, was invented in the German-speaking world and arrived in the United States along with German political exiles in the 1850s. In both the United States and Germany, activist women worked to develop and promote this new form of education. Over the course of three generations they created one of the most successful transnational women's movements of the nineteenth century. In this book, Ann Taylor Allen presents the first transnational history of the kindergarten as it developed in both Germany and America between 1840 and 1919.
List of contents
- Preface
- Introduction: An Entangled History
- Chapter 1: Pestalozzi, Fröbel, and the Origins of the Kindergarten
- Chapter 2: Growth and Transplantation: The Kindergarten in Germany and America, 1848-1870s
- Chapter 3: The Kindergarten in the City and the World
- Chapter 4: Who Is the Child? Science and Pedagogy
- Chapter 5: School or Day-Care Center? Patterns of Institutionalization
- Chapter 6: "The Perfect Development of Womanliness": The Making of a Kindergartener
- Chapter 7: The German-American Relationship and Its End, 1880s-1920s
- Conclusion: An Unfinished Agenda
- Notes
- Bibliography
About the author
Ann Taylor Allen is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Louisville. During a career of forty years, she taught students of different age groups, backgrounds, and interests, developing her department's first course on women's history in the early 1970s. Her books include Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890-1970: The Maternal Dilemma and Women in Twentieth-Century Europe.
Summary
The kindergarten--as institution, as educational philosophy, and as social reform movement--is one of Germany's most important contributions to the world. Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and his German student Friedrich Fröbel, who founded the kindergarten movement around 1840, envisioned kindergartens as places of education and creative engagement for children across all classes, not merely as daycare centers for poor families. At first, however, Germany proved an inhospitable environment for this new institution. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions, several German governments banned the kindergarten as a hotbed of subversion because of its links to women's rights movements. German revolutionaries who were forced into exile introduced the kindergarten to the United States, where it soon found roots among native-born as well as immigrant educators.
In an era when convention limited middle-class women to the domestic sphere, the kindergarten provided them with a rare opportunity not only for professional work, but also for involvement in social reform in the fields of education and child welfare. Through three generations, American and German women established many kinds of contacts
In this elegant book, Ann Taylor Allen presents the first transnational history of the kindergarten as it developed in Germany and the United States between 1840 and World War I. Based on a large body of previously untapped sources in bothcountries, The Transatlantic Kindergarten shows how a common body of ideas and practices adapted over time to two very different political and social environments. Since the end of the First World War, early childhood education in the United States and Germany has followed the patterns laid down in the nineteenth century. However, as Allen's nuanced analysis suggests, the provision of public preschool education is still an unfinished and much discussed project on both sides of the Atlantic.
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[A] valuable work of both new research and synthesis that culminates decades of labor.
