Transcendentalism for American Youth: The Children's Books of Kate Douglas Wiggin

Abstract

EARLY in the summer of 1877, twenty-one-year-old Kate Douglas Smith was invited to become a member of Fraiulein Emma J. C. Marwedel's kindergarten training class in Los Angeles, California. Miss Smith, who as Kate Douglas Wiggin became famous for her stories of Maine childhood, accepted enthusiastically. If had been made of tinder and a lighted match had been applied to me, she said later, I could not have taken fire more easily.' Her enthusiasm was justifiable, for out of her association with the kindergarten movement came the experiences that made her an important purveyor of Transcendental ideals to American children. In class, Mrs. Wiggin soon became familiar with the theories of Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), a German educator and originator of the kindergarten. His theories rest upon two convictions: first, that improvement of the children of the present will improve the adults of the future, and second, that man and God exist in unity. The second of these in many ways justifies the first, for Froebel argues that the individual's responsibility to the child equals his responsibility to God; a parent should, therefore, bring the education of the child into harmony with the past, present, and future requirements of the development of humanity ....2 Education, to Froebel, prepares a child to become a better adult than his parents. The second conviction suggests Froebel's intellectual kinship with Romanticism. Man, he says, should be viewed and treated as related to God, to nature, and to humanity; as comprehending within himself unity (God), diversity (nature),