ABSTRACT
Peabody had been searching for genuine German kindergartners for a reason. While America may have been ripe for kindergarten, it lacked qualified kindergartners who could work with children or train prospective kindergartners. For many of the early American Friedrich Frobel supporters, introducing what they believed to be the true Frobel and preserving such purity became a central goal of the 1860s and 1870s. One should furthermore consider that the non-German speakers had only limited access to Frobel’s original writings and had to rely on the few existing English writings and translations. Mathilde Kriege’s original plan had been to start a kindergarten and training program in New York. Frobel had created kindergarten, so that “children pass through the same stages of development, on a small scale, that have marked the development of the human race, and so gain similar experiences to fit them for future life work, for self-consciousness and a comprehension of the great problem of existence”.
