Kindergarten: Garden Pedagogy from Romanticism to Reform

Abstract

Designed gardens and excursions into the outlying landscape were important educational components of the original kindergartens begun by Friedrich Fröbel in the early nineteenth century. Contact with nature via gardens and excursions provided vital keys to understanding Naturphilosphie, and would ultimately reveal a child's divine essence. A quintessential application of romantic thinking, kindergartens intertwined ethereal and material worlds in an educational endeavor that appealed to the rising middle class eager to overcome the absolute rule of the Prussian monarchy. By the early twentieth century, the incorporation of kindergartens into the pubic school systems of North America coincided with the rationalism of an emerging industrial society, a growing unskilled immigrant population, and deleterious urban conditions. Professionals, eager to enfranchise themselves in the world of science, elaborated Fröbel's garden work and excursions as a method of reform. Children's gardens were cultivated for economic profit and natural phenomena were identified, dissected, and consumed making children educationally “fit” for the burgeoning capitalist nation. The following essay traces the garden and excursion components of the kindergarten from its romantic origins to its reform application, illuminating how changes in garden pedagogy reflect and reinforce broader views held by society.