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understand the child’s nature and respect the dignity of the child’s personality? Did the teacher personify the highest cultural values so that children had a model they could emulate? Preservice experiences should help teachers become sensitive to children’s needs and give them the knowledge and skills to create caring and wholesome learning environments. Froebel encouraged kindergarten teachers to resist contemporary trends to introduce academic subjects into kindergartens as a premature pressure that comes from adults, often parents, rather than children’s needs and readiness.20
FOCUS How did Froebel use idealist
4-5c Influence on Educational Practices Today
philosophy in his concept of childhood? Why did he emphasize children’s play as contributing to learning? In your educational experience, were there teachers who used Froebel’s principles? Do you plan to incorporate Froebel’s ideas into teaching?
Kindergarten education grew into an international movement. German immigrants imported the kindergarten to the United States, where it became part of the American school system. Elizabeth Peabody, who founded an English-language kindergarten, worked to make the kindergarten part of the American school system.21 Froebel’s innovative ideas are now well integrated into American early childhood education.
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social Darwinism Spencer’s ideology applied Darwin’s biological principles of the “survival of the fittest” and competition to individuals in society.
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was an English social theorist whose ideas were very popular and influential in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spencer based his social and educational philosophy on his interpretation of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.22 According to Darwin, species evolved naturally and gradually over long periods of time. Members of certain species survived and reproduced themselves by successfully adapting to changes in the environment. As their offspring inherited these favorable adaptive characteristics, they too survived and continued the life of the species. Those unable to adapt—the unfit—perished.23 Spencer, a key proponent of social Darwinism, applied Darwin’s biological theory to society and believed that the fittest individuals of each generation would survive because of their skills, intelligence, and adaptability.24 For Spencer, competition, a natural ethical force, motivated the best-equipped members of the human species to climb to the top of the socioeconomic ladder. Winning the competitive race over slower and duller individuals, the fittest would inherit the earth and populate it with their intelligent and productive children. The unfit—lazy, stupid, or weak individuals—would slowly disappear. Competition would improve the human race and result in gradual
20 For a discussion of academic pressures on children, see Shama Olfman, All Work and No Play: How Educational Reforms Are Harming Our Preschoolers (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). 21 Bertha von Marenholtz-Bulow, How Kindergarten Came to America: Friedrich Froebel’s Radical Vision of Early Childhood Education (New York and London: The New Press, 2007). 22 For a succinct and clearly written exposition on Darwin, see Mark Ridley, How to Read Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). 23 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1883, Nora Barlow, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993); David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); Charles Darwin, From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin’s Four Great Books (Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Edward O. Wilson, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005). 24 Reprints of Spencer’s works are Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1996); Spencer, Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects Everymans Library (New York: Dutton, 2012); Spencer, Collected Writings (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1996); Spencer, The Principles of Psychology (London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1996).
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