Five Things History Teaches Us About Kindergarten That Are Also Important Today

The history of kindergarten isn’t about cute classrooms and finger painting. The real story of kindergarten is far more interesting and useful for some of the education debates we’re having right now. Here are five things worth knowing.

1. Kindergarten was built on play from day one.

The word kindergarten comes from German and literally means “a child’s garden,” a place where children and their learning grow. When Friedrich Froebel opened the first one in Germany in 1837, he didn’t design it around worksheets or sight words. He built it around play, design, discovery, and nature. Froebel believed everything is interrelated, so learning should be interdisciplinary rather than chopped into isolated subjects. That foundational idea that play is how young children learn is not a soft, modern luxury. It’s the original blueprint.

2. We once knew three-year-olds belonged in early learning, and then we forgot.

Here’s a fact that may surprise you: American kindergartens began as programs for children aged three to six. In the early decades, we recognized the benefits of having three-year-olds in an early learning setting. Somewhere over the last few decades, we lost that thread. As we argue today about preschool access, universal pre-K, and what “school readiness” means, it’s worth remembering that kindergarten pioneers already understood something we keep rediscovering: the early years matter enormously, and starting intentional learning early benefits children and families.

3. Kindergarten’s history is also a story of who got left out.

Kindergarten history is not all gardens and songs either. As public education expanded, children of color, girls, and children with disabilities had limited access or none at all. In much of the South, Black children weren’t offered kindergarten for decades. New Orleans served white children beginning in 1876, but didn’t offer Black children a kindergarten option until the 1940s. And much of the progress that did happen for Black children came from within the Black community itself, through leaders like Anna Evans Murray, who fought to fund kindergartens in Washington, DC, and to train Black kindergarten teachers when segregated training schools shut them out. When we talk about equity in early education today, we’re continuing a fight that’s well over a century old.

4. The “play versus academics” debate isn’t new; it’s been raging for 100 years.

If today’s tension between play and rigor feels exhausting, know that it’s not a new argument. Back in 1994, early childhood expert Lilian Katz described the kindergarten debate as a pendulum “raging back and forth.” Even Froebel’s own followers split into camps: conservatives who wanted to preserve his exact methods, progressives like John Dewey who wanted to innovate, and moderates in between. What strikes me is something Dewey understood: Froebel himself would likely have welcomed a new and better understanding of how children learn, rather than insisting on rigid adherence to his original activities. The lesson isn’t to pick a side of the pendulum. It’s about continuing to question and understand: how do children learn best, and how do we best teach them?

5. The biggest shift happened fairly recently, and it’s reversible.

The kindergarten many of us picture faded in recent memory, not in the distant past. Leading up to and after No Child Left Behind in 2002, the pressure of testing and accountability pushed more rigid reading and math down into kindergarten, and play areas, blocks, science, art, and music got crowded out to make room. “No time for play,” some administrators said. But here’s why I find the history hopeful rather than discouraging: a shift made so recently can be unmade. Play, oy, and deep learning weren’t displaced by some immovable force. These essential elements of learning were displaced by choices. And we can choose to do something different. 

School and district leaders are the ones who decide whether classrooms have room for blocks and discovery, or whether they don’t. State and local education leaders are either the architects or the demolitionists of the conditions where joyful learning can happen. And some schools and school districts have already made, or are beginning to make, better choices for kindergarten. This is what I’ll focus on in my next post.