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In much of Europe and North America, institutional forms of childcare and early childhood education (ECE) first emerged in response to processes of industrialization and concomitant societal upheaval in the nineteenth century. Concerns about child welfare and the need for women’s labour, new theories of child development and education and fears of moral and economic degeneration led to the development of institutions for the care and education of young children in many countries. Some, such as the infant schools in England and the United States, were projects of social control and benevolence intended to keep the toddlers of the poor and working class out of harm’s way and to imbue within them Christian morality and Protestant work ethics. Others, such as the kindergartens established by the followers of German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel in the second half of the nineteenth century, were founded out of pedagogical rather than social control or religious impulses; there the focus was on the emancipatory power of activity-based education designed specifically for young children (Nawrotzki 2005).

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,...