"Let Us Live with Our Children": Kindergarten Movements in Germany and the United States, 1840-1914

Abstract

Friedrich Froebel, founder of the kindergarten, like other prophets was honored chiefly outside his own country. When the kindergarten, which had become a popular cause among the liberal reformers of 1848, was banned in Prussia in 1.851, kindergarten activist Bertha von Marenholtz-Bulow wrote, “We must seek to gain over foreign countries, so that we may open the way from them for the cause in Germany…. How sad that this is so, and that there is so little independence in our own country.” The foreign country to which this German idea was most successfully transplanted was the United States. After some initial hesitation, the public school authorities in most American states proved quite hospitable to the kindergarten, and by 1914 most American urban school systems had incorporated kindergarten classes on a public, though noncompulsory, basis. In the land of its origin, by contrast, the kindergarten had found far less acceptance. “A great disadvantage,” lamented Eleonore Heerwart, president of the German kindergarten teachers' organization in 1897, “is the isolation of the kindergarten; it gets little help from parents and no help at all from the schools, while in other countries its incorporation into the school has occurred quite naturally.” How can we explain the fact that the kindergarten, in theory and in practice, found greater support in America than in Germany?