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⁶ Over the last fifteen years, historians have begun to look more closely at the infant schools. See Tank, Robert Melvin, “Young Children, Families, and Society in America since the 1820s: The Evolution of Health, Education, and Child Care Programs for Preschool Children” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1980); Jenkins, , “Infant Schools”; May, Dean and Vinovskis, Maris, “A Ray of Millennial Light: Early Education and Social Reform in the Infant School Movement in Massachusetts, 1826–1840,” in Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1700–1930 , ed. Hareven, Tamara K. (New York, 1977), 62–99; Kaestle, Carl F. and Vinovskis, Maris A., Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Eng., 1980); Beatty, Barbara R., “‘A Vocation from on High’: Preschool Advocacy and Teaching as an Occupation for Women in Nineteenth-Century Boston” (Ed.D. diss., Harvard University, 1981).Google Scholar

⁷ Dain, Norman, Concepts of Insanity in the United States, 1789–1865 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1964), 96; see also Grob, Gerald, Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

⁸ My brief overview of the infant school movement relies largely upon evidence from the Boston infant schools, for which the most data are available.Google Scholar

⁹ May, and Vinovskis, , “Ray of Millennial Light,” 69–76; Schultz, , Culture Factory, 272; Infant School Society of the City of Boston, Fifth Annual Report, in Schultz, , Boston Primary Schools, 202; Kaestle, Carl F., Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, 1983), 48.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Jenkins, , “Infant Schools,” 6; Schultz, , Culture Factory, 270; Kaestle, , Pillars, 48; May, and Vinovskis, , “Ray of Millennial Light,” 68; Brubacher, , Problems of Education, 119–20; Curti, Merle E., The Social Ideas of American Educators (Paterson, N.J., 1959), 36, 56.Google Scholar

¹¹ Jenkins, , “Infant Schools,” 11–24.Google Scholar

¹² Kaestle, , Pillars, 47–48, 49–50; Jenkins, , “Infant Schools,” 72, 148–50.Google Scholar

¹³ Kaestle, and Vinovskis, , Education, 53.Google Scholar

¹⁴ This figure applies to all schools in Massachusetts, not just the infant schools. Kaestle, , Pillars, 48; Moran, Gerald F. and Vinovskis, Maris A., “‘The Great Care of Godly Parents’: Early Childhood in Puritan New England,” in History and Research in Child Development , ed. Smuts, Alice B. and Hagen, John W. (Chicago, 1986), 31.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Apparently the public school committees did not discuss publicly their reasons for this age limit, but the reasons are very likely related to the same set of developments that caused the decline of infant schools in Massachusetts in the early 1830s. See Jenkins, , “Infant Schools.” 89–96, 125–33; Tank, , “Young Children,” 28.Google Scholar

¹⁶ May, and Vinovskis, , “Ray of Millennial Light,” 63, 69–77.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Boston Recorder and Scriptural Transcript , 9 July 1829; Infant School Society of the City of Boston, Fifth Annual Report (1833), 7.Google Scholar

¹⁸ This publicity also led to the establishment of infant schools for children of the well-to-do. May, and Vinovskis, , “Ray of Millennial Light,” 83.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Infant School Society of the City of Boston, Third Annual Report (1831), 12; “Review,” American Journal of Education 3 (June 1828): 347; May, and Vinovskis, , “Ray of Millennial Light,” 82; Dain, , Concepts of Insanity, 96–97. Both the infant schools and the kindergartens employed female teachers almost exclusively in the common belief that, as Catharine Beecher wrote in 1847, “the formation of the moral and intellectual character of the young [should be] committed mainly to the female hand” (“The Peculiar Responsibilities of American Women,” in Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women , ed. Cott, Nancy F. [New York, 1972], 172). The infant schools' threat to the family stemmed from the age of the children enrolled rather than from the gender of the teacher. However, the role of women was emphasized much more in the kindergarten movement than in the infant school movement; by that time middle-class women had succeeded in enshrining their private family virtues into the public realm of education. For useful discussions of women's role in the kindergarten movement, see Allen, Ann Taylor, “‘Let Us Live with our Children,”’ 23–48; Allen, Ann Taylor, “Spiritual Motherhood: German Feminists and the Kindergarten Movement, 1848–1911,” History of Education Quarterly 22 (Fall 1982): 319–39. See Beatty, , “‘A Vocation from on High”’ for a discussion of women's role in the infant schools and kindergartens in America.Google Scholar

²⁰ “Infant Education,” Ladies' Magazine 2 (Feb. 1829): 89; “Infant Schools,” Ladies Magazine and Literary Gazette 5 (Apr. 1832): 180.Google Scholar

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²² First quotation from Allen, , “Spiritual Motherhood,” 320–21; Pestalozzi quoted in Gutek, Gerald Lee, Pestalozzi and Education (New York, 1968), 86; Keagy, J. M. M.D., “Suggestions to Parents,” American Journal of Education 2 (1827): 166; Humphrey, Heman (1840) quoted in Kaestle, and Vinovskis, , Education, 58–60; “Account of the System of Infant Schools,” American Journal of Education 1 (1826): 17; Kaestle, and Vinovskis, , Education, 54–55.Google Scholar

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²⁴ These figures are fully explained in May, and Vinovskis, , “Ray of Millennial Light,” 86–88.Google Scholar

²⁵ Brigham, Amariah, An Inquiry Concerning the Diseases and Functions of the Brain, the Spinal Cord, and the Nerves (New York, 1840), 290; Brigham, , Remarks, 15; “Review of Brigham on the Influence of Mental Cultivation upon Health,” American journal of Education 8 (Feb. 1833): 90; Brigham, , Remarks, 50; Review of Robinson, George, On the Prevention and Treatment of Mental Disorders, in American Journal of Insanity 16 (July 1859): 115–21; Dain, , Concepts of Insanity, 91.Google Scholar

²⁶ May, and Vinovskis, , “Ray of Millennial Light,” 85; Infant School Society of the City of Boston, Sixth Annual Report (1834), 7; Jenkins, , “Infant Schools,” 9; Moran, and Vinovskis, , “Great Care,” 32; May, and Vinovskis, , “Ray of Millennial Light,” 85.Google Scholar

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²⁸ Froebel, Friedrich, Mutter- und Kose-Lieder, quoted in Weber, , Kindergarten, 15; Allen, , “Spiritual Motherhood,” 321–22.Google Scholar

²⁹ May, and Vinovskis, , “Ray of Millennial Light,” 94; Weber, , Kindergarten, 36; Thomas, , “Romantic Reform,” 668; Hewes, , “Compensatory Early Childhood Education,” 19.Google Scholar

³⁰ Recent scholarship on the spread of the kindergartens supports the contention that equal weight should be given both to intellectual trends and to social change in accounting for educational innovation. The case of Massachusetts and Michigan kindergartens, persuasively argued in Robert Tank's dissertation, “Young Children, Families, and Society in America since the 1820s,” suggests that kindergartens were more successful in Michigan towns and cities than in urban Massachusetts—this despite the fact that turn-of-the-century Michigan was primarily agricultural, rural, and populated by native-born Americans. Furthermore, Michigan's educators saw the kindergartens not as a vehicle for combatting social ills, but as a way to promote healthy and balanced development for the children of rich and poor alike. See Tank, , “Young Children,” 54–90.Google Scholar

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⁴⁶ According to Horace Mann, these inefficient methods afforded each child about 20 minutes of the teacher's time each day—40 minutes of instruction daily, and 320 minutes of sitting still. Brubacher, , Problems in Education, 225.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ May, and Vinovskis, , “Ray of Millennial Light.” 80.Google Scholar

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⁴⁹ May, and Vinovskis, , “Ray of Millennial Light,” 63; Barnard, Henry, “Kindergarten and Child-Culture Papers: Plan of Publication,” American Journal of Education 30 (1880): 1. Barnard's AJE made the first explicit reference to the kindergarten in 1870; the 1880 issue was devoted almost entirely to promoting the kindergarten, a testament to how quickly the movement caught on in the United States. Idem, “The System of Public Instruction in Prussia,” American journal of Education (1870): 616.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Her biographer, Ruth Baylor, dwells mostly on Peabody's promotion of the kindergartens in the latter part of Peabody's life. Baylor has followed her subject's lead in interpreting past events in Peabody's life only as they “made her ready for the acceptance of the theories of … Froebel,” (51) thus glossing over developments in Peabody's thought over time. Baylor does not mention involvement with the infant schools. For a very brief discussion of Peabody's changing ideas, see Beatty, , “‘A Vocation from on High,”’ 77–81.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Ronda, Bruce A., ed., Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: American Renaissance Woman (Middletown, Conn., 1984), 51; McCuskey, Dorothy, Branson Alcott, Teacher (New York, 1969), 49–54.Google Scholar

⁵² McCuskey, , Bronson Alcott, Teacher, 82; Beatty, , “‘A Vocation from on High,”’ 42–49.Google Scholar

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⁵⁴ Baylor, , Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, 85.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Peabody, Mary Tyler and Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide: With Music for the Plays (New York, 1870), 58.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Ibid., 9.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Peabody, 1874, quoted in Baylor, , Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, 158, 92.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Peabody, Elizabeth, Lectures in the Training Schools for Kindergartners (Boston, 1886), 145–46.Google Scholar