History of Kindergarten

In an age when school was restricted to children who had learned to read and write at home, there were many attempts to make school accessible to the children of women who worked in factories. In Scotland in 1816, Robert Owen, a philosopher and pedagogue, opened the first infant school in New Lanark. In conjunction with his venture for cooperative mills Robert Owen wanted the children to be given a good moral education so that they would be fit for work in the mills of New Lanarck. The system that he set up was successful in producing obedient and conforming children who had been taught basic literacy and numeracy skills. Another was opened by Samuel Wilderspin in London in 1819. His work provided the model for infant schools throughout England. In 1823 he published his influential work On the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor, based on his experiences at the school. He began working for the Infant School Society the next year, informing others about his views on education. He also wrote "The Infant System,for developing the physical, intellectual, and moral powers off all children from 1 to seven years of age". Play was an important part of Wilderspin's system of education, and he is credited with the invention of the playground. Countess Theresa Brunszvik (1775–1861) was influenced by this example to open an Angyalkert (Angel garden) on May 27, 1828 in her residence in Buda. This concept became popular among the nobility and the middle class and was copied throughout the Hungarian kingdom. Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852) opened a Play and Activity institute in 1837 in the village of Bad Blankenburg in principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Thuringia, which he renamed Kindergarten on June 28, 1840 to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Gutenberg's invention of movable type. The women trained by Fröbel opened Kindergartens throughout Europe and around the World. The first kindergarten in the United States founded in Watertown, Wisconsin, by Margarethe Meyer-Schurz in 1856 was conducted in German. Her sister had founded the first kindergarten in London, England. In some systems kindergarten is called Grade 0, which is also sometimes classified as "a mixture between kindergarten and a school regime." In 1860, Elizabeth Peabody founded the first English-language kindergarten in America in Boston, after visiting Watertown and travelling to Europe. The first free kindergarten in America was founded in 1870 by Conrad Poppenhusen, a German industrialist and philanthropist who settled in College Point, NY, where he established the Poppenhusen Institute, still in existence today. The first publicly financed kindergarten in the United States was established in St. Louis in 1873 by Susan Blow. Elizabeth Harrison wrote extensively on the theory of early childhood education and worked to enhance educational standards for kindergarten teachers by establishing what became the National College of Education in 1886. The first private kindergarten in Canada was opened by the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in 1870 and by the end of the decade, they were common in large Canadian towns and cities. The country's first public-school kindergartens were established in Berlin, Ontario in 1882 (Central School) and in Toronto in 1883 (Louisa Street Public School). In 1885, the Toronto Normal School (teacher training) opened a department for Kindergarten teaching. First organisation in India, to talk about Kindergarten Curriculum is 'Preschool for Child Rights'.