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Developed by the German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), the Kindergarten offered a revolutionary educational program for young children. In the mid-nineteenth century, after several decades of limited success in the German states, Froebel's Kindergarten began to be transplanted to other countries, including the USA and England. The transplants did not grow independently of one another, however. Connections between the earliest US and English kindergartners (kindergarten teachers) contributed to transatlantic networks very much like those described by Daniel T. Rodgers in Atlantic Crossings (Cambridge, MA, 1998), an analysis of turn-of-the-century transnational progressive politics. From the 1850s onward, as national kindergarten movements developed, a loose Anglo-American network of kindergarten advocates took shape. This network ensured that the US and English kindergarten movements maintained a common identity and shared ideologies even while facing different circumstances. While the long-term connections between English and US kindergartners had positive effects on both, participation in this transatlantic community left English kindergartners feeling behindhand compared with their American counterparts. English kindergartners' lack of success led them to support the nursery school, a new and distinctly English version of the kindergarten that was eventually much celebrated in the USA. Rodgers' model of reticulated transnational progressive exchange helps to explain the initiation and development of the English and US kindergarten movements as national manifestations of a transnational phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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, examining the English neo-Froebelian movement after the death of Froebelian methods by the start of the twentieth century. Based on analysis of the organizational records and publications of the Froebel Society, National Froebel Foundation, NSA and other professional groups connected with early childhood and progressive pedagogy, this article identifies several turning points in the institutional and ideological trajectory of neo-Froebelians in the most turbulent and decisive period of twentieth-century English pedagogical and policy debate. More specifically, this article shows that Stuart Hall’s theories of identity politics—as well as Eric Hobsbawm’s and Terence Ranger’s concept of invented tradition—can help us make sense of the apparently paradoxical persistence of ‘Froebel’ discourse in interwar and 1940s progressive English educational discourse despite what appeared to be a complete disavowal of Friedrich Froebel, the man and his pedagogy on the part of those wielding his name. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]