Kindergarten
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Kindergarten. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
literally, a child garden. A school for young children. The fundamental idea is education through toys, known as gifts, busy work, plays, games, and songs. The kindergarten age is from four to six,--before most children are mature enough to undertake ordinary school work with profit. A cheerful room is required. The pupils are provided with small chairs. These they place at the two sides of a long, low table for busy work, such as cutting, folding, pasting, weaving, sewing, clay work, brush work in color, straw work, mounting leaves, stringing berries, and many other occupations. Wooden splints and slats, pasteboard circles and triangles and squares, rings, cubes, spheres, and building blocks are provided as well. The main part of the room is occupied usually by a large painted ring, around which the children arrange their chairs cosily for games, songs, story telling, and the like. The kindergarten system is an outgrowth of a German movement led by Pestalozzi for a kindlier atmosphere in the schoolroom. It is a reaction against the harsh, unsympathetic, callous, not to say tyrannical and even brutal teaching too prevalent the world over a century ago. The immediate founder of kindergartens was Friedrich Froebel, a German educator. In 1837 he established a school of this sort in Blankenburg, Thuringia. Henry Barnard, who had just returned from the London Exposition of 1854, was the first American to call public attention to the kindergarten. On his appointment later as United States commissioner of education, he returned to the subject. The first American kindergartens were established in a quiet way by Germans at Columbus in 1858, Hoboken in 1861, and New York in 1864. Elizabeth Peabody, of Massachusetts, is regarded as a pioneer advocate of the kindergarten in America. She not only encouraged the founding of numerous private and charity kindergartens and the first public kindergarten, but she founded the American Froebel Union and for years sustained a kindergarten magazine. Boston opened the first public American kindergarten in 1870. St. Louis was the first city to establish kindergartens on a large scale. The St. Louis system began in 1873. It now includes about 125 kindergartens. Boston employs a supervisor for this work. Kindergartens are now recognized widely as a legitimate part of public school work. A kindergarten is considered a necessary feature of a normal school . The Winona Normal of Minnesota shares with Wisconsin the honor of establishing a model kindergarten in 1880. Some of the more noted private kindergartens are those maintained in connection with the training departments of Pratt Institute, New York, the Teachers' College of Columbia University , and the College of Education of Chicago University. Charity kindergartens are maintained by many city churches and organizations. It is estimated that about 300,000 children attend American kindergartens, public, private, and charity schools included.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a system of education for infants and young children, devised by Frederick Fröbel (1782- 1852), by whom, in conjunction with Ronge, it was first carried out at Hamburg, in 1849. Knowledge is imparted in an attractive form, chiefly by simple object lessons, by toys, games, singing, and work-plaiting, weaving, folding, and cutting out paper. Corporal punishment is excluded. The kindergarten system is popular in the United States, and a part of the public school system in all large cities.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's put the figure at "about 300,000 children" in American kindergartens in 1910, the kindergarten was still a reform being argued for; today it is a near-universal grade, attended by roughly four million American five-year-olds each year, and required by law before first grade in many states. Collier's 1921 description of learning "chiefly by simple object lessons, by toys, games, singing" has largely given way to reading and number instruction, much of it work once done in first grade, with full school days now more common than the half-day session. Fröbel's "gifts" — the cubes, spheres and wooden slats catalogued so carefully by Aiton's — survive mainly in Montessori-style and Waldorf classrooms and in museum collections rather than in ordinary public schools. The four-to-six age range has also shifted downward into separate pre-kindergarten and transitional programs, so kindergarten now usually means the year of age five.
Written for this edition, 2026.