Materials as Texts in the American Kindergarten, 1870-1920

This paper explores the embodiment of the kindergarten philosophy in learning materials (e.g., blocks), and its impact on teachers in training and children and teachers in classrooms in the period 1870 to 1920. Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten, wrote very little about his system, and his earlier philosophical work, The Education of Man (1826), was written in an obscure style and little read by the middle of the nineteenth century. The kindergarten concept, left without a definitive text, depended more on Froebel’s materials for its meaning. Maria Kraus-Boelte, who trained hundreds of kindergartners (kindergarten teachers) at her New York City school between 1873 and 1913, was clear on this point: ‘The principles of [Froebelian] education cannot be fully mastered, especially in relation to methods, unless illustrated by their application, and these can be done only where they are practiced’. [1] This understanding had a profound impact on kindergartners’ training, in which practise teaching generally came before knowing theory, if theory came at all. As a supplement to training by teaching children, which began almost at the start of their program, instructors guided adult students in play with the gifts in the same way, as were the children. As Kraus-Boelte explained, Froebel’s materials were understood to reveal their meaning through direct manipulation. In this this way they were his most important ‘texts’, and a component of the Froebel ‘travelling library’. [2] The paper considers kindergarten’s meaning-imbued materials in two contexts – in the teacher-training classroom and in the children’s classroom – focusing on the way systematized practice with materials disciplined the bodies of both children and teachers. [1] Mrs. John Kraus-Boelte [Maria Krause- Boelte] Characteristics of Froebel’s Method - Kindergarten Training. New-England Journal of Education 5, no. 6 (1877), 69. [2] Thomas S. Popkewitz, ‘Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Traveling of Pragmatism in Education - An Introduction,’ in Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey , ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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