Wheelock, Lucy

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Lucy Wheelock

American educator Lucy Wheelock (1857–1946) was one of the leading advocates in the kindergarten movement in the United States. A firm believer in the benefits of early childhood education, Wheelock established a school in Boston, Massachusetts, that trained the first generation of kindergarten teachers in the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century America.

Wheelock came from an old New England family. She was born on February 1, 1857, in Cambridge, Vermont, the second of six children in her family. Her father Edwin was a graduate of the University of Vermont, and his parents had been among the first settlers of the Vermont town of Eden. Edwin Wheelock was a minister in the Congregationalist church, the same denomination that played an important role in early New England life in its Puritan era, and he was a leading figure in local and state politics. Wheelock's father was also Cambridge's superintendent of schools, and was elected to both the Vermont house and state senate.

Was Eager to Learn

Wheelock's parents valued education for all their children, including their daughters, which was a rather progressive idea at the time. Wheelock's mother, Laura Pierce Wheelock, was a teacher and ran a school in their home for a time, where Wheelock received her first lessons in reading, writing and math. At age 12, she entered the Underhill Academy in the Vermont town by that name, and a year later went on to Reading High School near Boston. She also traveled into the city for French lessons. After she graduated in 1874, she taught school in her hometown for a year, and then decided she would like to enter a nascent women's school, Wellesley College, which was offering four-year degrees.

Wheelock was not yet ready for college work, despite her high school diploma, and in 1876 headed to the Chauncy-Hall School in Boston, an elite private academy that had just begun to admit female students. Her family was not wealthy, but her father knew the Chauncy-Hall headmaster, and Wheelock's tuition fees were waived in return for office work. She never made it into Wellesley, for at Chauncy-Hall she became enthralled with its new kindergarten laboratory school. In her unpublished autobiography, Wheelock wrote that "the one thing that makes life worth living is to serve a cause, and the greatest cause that can be served is Childhood Education," she said, according to an article by Catherine C. DuCharme in Childhood Education. "From the first day of my kindergarten experience I dedicated my life to such service."

The kindergarten concept was barely forty years old in the United States at the time. It had originated in Germany, the term coined by noted educator Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852). He had endured a sad childhood. In 1837, Fröbel started a "Play and Activity Institute" in Bad Blankenburg, a spa town in the state of Thuringia. He renamed it a kindergarten, or "garden for children," around 1840. Though it was somewhat regimented, Fröbel's classroom offered young children an opportunity for learning via interaction with other children, songs and games, and independent playtime. He also devised a set of geometric blocks known as Fröbel's Gifts, which could be assembled in various combinations to form three-dimensional structures. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) owned a set of them as a child, and later wrote that they greatly later influenced his ideas for buildings.

Found Well-Connected Mentor

Fröbel's ideas caught on in Germany, especially after well-born and even royal women took them up. At the castle of one benefactor, he ran a school that granted its women graduates the Kindergaertnerin or "kindergarten teacher" title, which was the first professional degree for women in Europe. His ideas came to the United States via a wave of German immigration, and one of his former students founded the first American kindergarten in 1838 in Columbus, Ohio, which had many German-Americans. Another German-born woman, Margarethe (Margaretta) Meyer Schurz, founded a similar school in Dodge County, Wisconsin in the 1850s.

These first kindergartens were German-language schools that served local immigrants. The first English-language kindergarten was founded in Boston in 1860 by Elizabeth Peabody, a pioneer in early childhood education and follower of Fröbel who soon became a mentor to Wheelock. After her visit to the Chauncy-Hall kindergarten, Wheelock sought out Peabody, who suggested she enroll in a kindergarten-teacher training school that Ella Snelling Hatch ran in Boston. It was a one-year course, and Wheelock and another woman were its only students. She returned to Chauncy-Hall in 1879, fully trained in Fröbel's theories, and became an assistant in the kindergarten school and eventually oversaw it.

Wheelock varied from Fröbel's model and drew some criticism from the more criticism from the more conservative adherents of the kindergarten movement. As a kindergarten teacher, she installed a sandbox in her classroom, and wrote her own songs and stories for the children. Her reputation spread, and she was often asked to lecture in communities that were considering starting their own early-childhood classes in their public school systems. In 1888, when the Boston city council voted to launch a kindergarten program, Wheelock was invited to train the necessary teachers. Chauncy-Hall would play host to this program, which had few qualified teachers for the age group. There were just six students in Wheelock's first class of teacher-hopefuls, but her program quickly caught on and became an appealing profession for middle-class women. Two years later, in 1890, "Miss Wheelock's Kindergarten Training School" was founded as an independent institution.

Promoted "The Ideal Republic"

Wheelock believed strongly in the notion that early-childhood education provided the foundation for a stable society. In 1891, she reminded educators at a convention of the American Institute of Instruction about the value of kindergartens. "The ideal kindergarten is the ideal republic," she said, according to DuCharme's Childhood Education article. "Its little citizens are trained to self-activity, self-control, and the 'due freedom' which comes from a regard for the rights and happiness of others."

Wheelock used one of Fröbel's books, Mother Play, as her main textbook, and adhered to his two main ideas: that children needed self-activity for intellectual growth, which involved seeing, thinking and acting for his or herself, and she also supported the idea of continuity—that there should be no break or gap between kindergarten and the primary grades. She also advocated involving mothers in early education, and they could reinforce in the home the benefits of the kindergarten curriculum. She became well-known nationally. A founding member of the International Kindergarten Union (IKU) in 1893 and its president from 1895 to 1899, she also served as chair of the 1908 National Congress of Mothers, the forerunner of the Parent Teacher Association.

The usefulness of kindergarten was still an open debate. In 1912, Wheelock told an audience at the National Education Association in Washington that "the advocates of the theory that the young child is a 'little animal,' and should be left free to carry out his animal impulses in some convenient back yard, forget the scarcity of back yards in a congested city district," she said, according to DuCharme's Childhood Education profile. "They also ignore the worldwide proof of the claim that those who guide the first seven years of a child's life may make of him what they will. The state may later have to pay $255 a year to protect itself from the neglected child," likely referring to the cost of prison, noting that a kindergarten year cost the state about one-tenth that figure.

Grew into Four-Year College

Despite skeptics, the kindergarten movement expanded rapidly, as did Wheelock's school over the years. In 1914, it opened in a new home on Boston's Riverway, and by 1929 was offering a three-year course that required graduates to spend time as student teachers. Wheelock remained head of the school until she retired in 1940. Before she departed, she arranged for its incorporation as a nonprofit institution, Wheelock College, which began granting standard, four-year bachelor of science degrees in 1941. She died of coronary thrombosis at her Boston home on October 2, 1946.

Wheelock left behind an impressive body of written work on early education. She authored dozens of articles for the Journal of Education and other professional publications, and co-wrote Talks to Mothers in 1920. She also translated children's stories from German, most notably two volumes by Johanna Spyri, the author of Heidi, a story that was the basis for a much-loved 1937 movie starring Shirley Temple. Wheelock did not translate that title, but brought Spyri's Red-Letter Stories and Swiss Stories for Children to an English-speaking readership. She also translated some of Fröbel's writings.

In 1937, she commemorated the hundredth anniversary of Fröbel's first kindergarten in a New York Times article. "In the modern school for 4 and 5 year olds," she wrote, "where children cover the floor with construction projects, with blocks as big as bricks, there is little external reminder of the old-time kindergarten where youngsters sat in a stiff circle or waited at their little tables with folded hands for a signal to open boxes of tiny blocks or geometric toys." She added that early-childhood ideas had become somewhat less structured, but "the daily program still shows, however, the kindergartners' agreement with Fröbel that 'play is a child's serious business' and is his introduction to the business of life."