The keynote of his interpretation of child life was He at once set to work to make a self-active school where children could actually learn through activity — through play. As a result, we see a curriculum, not of the three R's simplified for children of the pre school stage as in England and France, but one made up of songs, games, dances, pictures, nature, art and manual training to meet the native tendencies of young children. These were given an honorable place in the curricu lum, and respected as highly as the reading and writing approved by all education. Thus the school was transformed; the silent child was allowed to sing and talk; the suppressed child to work and play. The schools under his care were a combination of workshops, studios, playgrounds, laboratories and gardens, where children were singing, playing, talking, looking at pictures, listening to stories, gardening, painting, drawing, modelling, sewing and weav ing. While this is commonplace to-day, the transformation was very largely due to Froebel. It is due to his influence, more than to any other educator, that the still child began to move, to act, to think, to work, to play; the silent child to sing, to talk, to ask questions, and thus we see the emphasis of education laid upon activity, growth, development, freedom, happiness and interest.
Froebel's extraordinary sympathetic insight into children stood him in good stead at a period when little was known of the science of child study as we know it to-day. He made many mistakes in applying his theories, but a new epoch was undoubtedly the result of his effort.
The kindergarten was brought to America by a student of Froebel, Miss Meyer, who afterward married Carl Schurz. Through Mrs. Schurz's work with her own children Miss Elizabeth Peabody of Boston became inter ested. Miss Peabody was a member of the celebrated Peabody family of Massachusetts one sister marrying Nathaniel Hawthorne, the other, Horace Mann. She was prominent in the transcendental group of thinkers in the Concord School of Philosophy which in fluenced many of the pioneer workers in the kindergarten field. Dr. William T. Harris, Miss Susan Blow and Dr. Denton Snyder, as well as Miss Peabody herself, were profoundly in fluenced by this school of thought, and all in turn devoted themselves to the promotion of the kindergarten idea. After reading Froebel's theories in 1867, Miss Peabody opened a kinder garten in Boston, but without any training. While her kindergarten was pronounced a suc cess by her patrons, to her it was not a true embodiment of the theories of Froebel as she interpreted them. For this reason she closed her kindergarten and sailed for Germany to study at the fountain source. In the mean
time . Miss Maria. Boelte, a young woman trained by Froebel's widow in Germany, was called from London to New York, where she opened a kindergarten in 1872. This was a great success, and finally developed into a training school for kindergartners. Madame Kraus Boelte, after her marriage with Dr. John Kraus, had charge of the work with both chil dren and normal students for many years. She, in New York, Miss Elizabeth Peabody in Bos ton, Miss Susan Blow in Saint Louis and Alice Putnam in Chicago, were'the best-known pioneer leaders in the introduction of the kindergarten into America, where it spread with unprecedented rapidity and success. The United States still leads in its appreciation and care of children at the pre-school age, there being between five and six hundred thousand children in the kindergartens in this country in the statistics of 1916. It is a part of the public school system in all of our large cities, and the majority of the cities of the second, third and fourth class.
The training of kindergartners was for many years in the hands of private normal schools, but in the last decade most city and State normal schools in the United States have opened kindergarten departments, and a goodly number, of the universities as well. This has proved to be an effective means in unifying the kindergarten and primary work. In the past the kindergarten child who entered the primary was at a serious disadvantage, due to the dif ferent educational ideals held by the teachers of both kindergarten and primary. This great difference in ideals was gradually altered as the kindergarten went into the public schools. That the kindergarten, in time, reconstructed the practice in primary education is a generally accepted fact by students of educational his tory. Self-activity came to be the cardinal principle in elementary education as well as in the kindergarten, and in many modern schools the kindergarten and primary are so closely organized that a child passes from one to the other without waste of time or energy in ad justing himself to the new work peculiar to the primary grade. These happy changes are due to several causes — first, to the training of kindergartners in city and State normal schools and in universities, with other teach ers, instead of the isolated private schools of the early days. Second, to an increasing effort to train teachers of young children in both kindergarten and primary. In the third place, to a movement in favor of training super visors in both kindergarten and primary, so that the schools may have the advantage of one supervisor who is an expert in each field.