A recent article by Barbara Beatty, professor of education at Wellesley College, highlights the challenges faced in training Froebel teachers a hundred years ago and the implications for training today’s early childhood teachers. Barbara Beatty’s history of early childhood, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present is the best in-print document for why the Froebel system was rejected in the early 1900′s. It is a balanced and well researched look at the factions and issues of the time. If you can find it, the long out-of-print book by Michael Shapiro, Child’s Garden, provides another detailed account, focusing just on the Froebel Kindergarten.

Beatty’s recent article looks at the contrast between scripted and unscripted instruction. Another thoughtful and well documented work, it casts a modern eye on the heavy-handed way Froebel teachers were drilled at the end of the Froebel era. While it does not address it specifically, it raises an important issue about the difference between a teacher’s own training and their classroom actions. Often the Froebel teachers received set instructions for their behavior while allowing children to respond creatively to the activity at hand. Froebel Kindergarten teachers were expected to respond appropriately to whatever occurred in the moment. They were highly trained, think “Navy Seals” or “Jedi Knights” of the classroom and. once trained, were usually given free reign by their employers or supervisors.

However, the instruction was rigorous and tedious, and not all teaching students were suited for the work. Coupled with the exponential growth in demand for Kindergarten, it became impossible logistically to meet both the quantity and quality goals. So the leadership of the Columbia Teachers College (William Heard Kilpatrick, Patty Smith Hill, et al) and John Dewey, of the University of Chicago, staged a coup and took early childhood education off a Froebel standard into a more “Progressive” (although factory-like) model of education.

It is possible that much of our decline in education can be traced back to this practical/philosophical shift. As the pendulum swings back toward play-based, child-centered education with a goal toward developing creative, life-long learners, we may discover that we’ve held ourselves back for an entire century.