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This book explores networks and knowledge transfer of new education ideas across an international selection of experimental schools—kindergartens, nursery schools, and one school for children from primary to early secondary—which were at the vanguard of progressive educational ideas in the early twentieth century. This chapter sets out the conceptual framework, appraises the key tenets of the twentieth century’s new education pedagogy in the early childhood realm, and seeks clues for what this pedagogy meant for teachers and teaching and the new possibilities and problems for teacher education, education policy, and the very fabric of classroom settings. The schools are illustrative of the variety and commonality of approaches and ideals around reimagining teaching and the teacher.

Across Europe and North America (and in other parts of the world to which we can claim no expertise), we have witnessed in recent decades a spectacular development of institutions and arrangements designed for the education and care of young children (those under compulsory school age) outside the family. In no society have young children ever been raised by their parents alone, but, with a few exceptions, collective education and care in the past took place within networks of individuals who knew each other and who were tied to each other by complex social obligations (e.g. networks of kin or neighbourhood solidarity). The early childhood education and care (henceforth ECEC) which has come to define the life of young children in contemporary societies is of a wholly different nature: it is always regulated and often directly supplied by the State; its establishment has most often been the result of intentional policies pursuing specified social goals; and the individuals providing the services do so for money and not on the basis of personal ties with the parents or children.

The German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel lived from 1782 to 1852. The pedagogy that made Froebel famous was encompassed in his Kindergarten, a set of strictly defined methods and activities for the education of young children, which he developed and refined in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Froebel’s Kindergarten reached England in the mid‐1850s, where it attracted a small but enthusiastic group of followers and practitioners. By 1900, Froebel’s followers in England had become awakened to movements in child study and psychology and Froebel’s prescriptions did not hold up to ensuing criticism. In most histories of English education, the story of Froebelian education in England stops there, with the so‐called death of Froebelian early childhood pedagogy and its replacement with an eclectic range of pedagogies and institutions based variously on the work of Sigmund and Anna Freud, Margaret McMillan, John Dewey, Susan Isaacs, Maria Montessori and others. This article picks up this dropped thread,...