First Class
Written By Pete Nelson
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Nearly two centuries ago, an innovative German educator created the ideal school for young children. A dad goes on a mission to see if such a school still exists.
Plus: 11 ideas for making a good school great.
The open house at our son Jack's prospective kindergarten left us . . . "underwhelmed" might be the kindest way to put it. Lord knows teachers have it hard enough, and administrators do the best they can on hacked budgets, but as the parents of a fledgling grade schooler you want to walk away from that first visit thinking, "I love this place!" We couldn't pretend. When we bought our house we were told that the reason property values were so low had much to do with the uneven quality of the town's schools. Now we knew just how much.
At the time, we rationalized. "It's only kindergarten, let's try it for a year." But are there really any throwaway years where education is concerned? And kindergarten, a child's initiation into the world of formal learning, seemed crucial to helping our son get off to a good start, rather than stumble out of the gate.
The search for the perfect kindergarten
By then it was early August, and we really had to scramble. We crammed in as much research as we could, and in the end decided our perfect school would combine elements of several early childhood philosophies. We liked the way Waldorf schools, based on the educational theories of Rudolf Steiner, emphasized immersion in the physical world, teaching about nature and using nature to teach about everything else. We knew that Jack, our little worm-whisperer, would thrive in such a setting.
We also admired the Reggio Emilia approach, which pays close attention to a kid's natural affinities and energetically plays off them with songs, games, creative play, and so on; Jack's preschool had a Reggio Emilia bent and it really worked for him. His fascination with bugs, for example, led to a series of lessons on insects and the creation of pipe-cleaner spiders.
Then there's our local Montessori school, which allows children to develop at their own speed, letting kids of mixed ages study and learn together. This seemed particularly right for our son, who both looks up to older boys and shows a great natural compassion for younger kids. We'd heard of schools where administrators boast, "We teach our kids in kindergarten what other schools teach in third grade," and thought that absurd. We didn't want to rush the academics. In contrast, we liked the didactic materials that the Montessori schools use, the simple blocks and beads and wooden forms, and how children use the materials to cultivate critical thinking. (Maria Montessori was an Italian psychologist whose methods were originally designed to foster the cognitive development of mentally handicapped children.)
The beauty and simplicity of the Reggio Emilia and Montessori classrooms also drew us in. The public school classroom we'd visited, the one that left us underwhelmed, was cluttered, all four walls papered baseboard to crown molding with flash cards, letters both block and cursive, numbers, shapes, colors, names, dates, maps, and posters of animals and presidents and flags, distractions everywhere you looked.
I went online, looking for our dream school. I expected it would be beyond the Boolean capacities of my search engine. To my surprise, I found the perfect kindergarten, one that combines all of the elements we were looking for. That was the good news. The bad news was, if Jack was to attend this ideal kindergarten, we were going to need a time machine, seeing as it existed in 1837.
It turns out all the best parts of the well-known pedagogies now in use in private and public elementary schools share a common ancestor: a forgotten German educator named Friedrich Froebel (pronounced FRUR-bull), the man who invented kindergarten and, with it, the concept of early childhood education nearly 175 years ago.
