Materials as Texts in the American Kindergarten, 1870-1920
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it