‘Like sending coals to Newcastle:’ Impressions from and of the Anglo‐American Kindergarten Movements

Abstract

Developed by the German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), the Kindergarten offered a revolutionary educational program for young children. In the mid‐nineteenth century, after several decades of limited success in the German states, Froebel’s Kindergarten began to be transplanted to other countries, including the USA and England. The transplants did not grow independently of one another, however. Connections between the earliest US and English kindergartners (kindergarten teachers) contributed to transatlantic networks very much like those described by Daniel T. Rodgers in Atlantic Crossings (Cambridge, MA, 1998), an analysis of turn‐of‐the‐century transnational progressive politics. From the 1850s onward, as national kindergarten movements developed, a loose Anglo‐American network of kindergarten advocates took shape. This network ensured that the US and English kindergarten movements maintained a common identity and shared ideologies even while facing different circumstances. While the long‐term connections between English and US kindergartners had positive effects on both, participation in this transatlantic community left English kindergartners feeling behindhand compared with their American counterparts. English kindergartners’ lack of success led them to support the nursery school, a new and distinctly English version of the kindergarten that was eventually much celebrated in the USA. Rodgers’ model of reticulated transnational progressive exchange helps to explain the initiation and development of the English and US kindergarten movements as national manifestations of a transnational phenomenon.