Urban reform and the schools: Kindergartens in Massachusetts, 1870-1915

Abstract

In the decades after the Civil War, no individual did more to popularize the kindergarten in America than Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Her advocacy was an "apostolate," kindergartening a religion, a "Gospel for children." All children, Peabody and her associates believed, were self-centered. In their earliest years they discover their bodies, senses, and power to act. 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."1.