LETTERS. 6 ALS re fundraising for kindergarten.
By a Transcendentalist and Pioneer in Early Education;
An Unknown Chapter
Peabody, Elizabeth. Six autograph letters signed, to Judge Lincoln F. Brigham and Charles Clifford. Concord, Mass., 1877-1880.
8vo.; 42 pages in all, closely written but readable; approximately 7000 words; in very good condition.
Judge Brigham was a trustee related to the family by marriage. The letters to him are dated Jan. 1, 1877, Dec. 26, 1878, and July 27, 1879. The letters to Clifford, a lawyer, are dated Aug. 18, 1879, Dec. 25, 1879 and Jan. 4, 1880.
A coherent and apparently complete group of letters, each concerned with Elizabeth Peabody's attempt to secure a bequest of real estate from the will of the late William Swain, a shipping and oil magnate, that would be used to establish a model kindergarten at his former home in New Bedford, for the purpose of training future kindergarten teachers. At stake (in addition to a stipend) was a splendid house and grounds ideally suited to Froebel's concept of the kindergarten. Unfortunately, the will was vague with respect to Mr. Swain's intentions. The single-minded purpose of these letters was to convince Brigham and Clifford of the importance of the kindergarten movement to American society, and to assure them that both Mr. Swain and Mrs. Swain (still living at the time of the first letter) would be favorably disposed.
This is a unique, unpublished source – and an important one that documents a final chapter, virtually unnoticed in the standard literature, in Peabody's lifelong devotion to education of the young, and particularly to the kindergarten movement in America, of which she was the founder, having established the first American kindergarten in Boston in 1860.
The entire correspondence seeks to convey this concern to the trustees, and to convince them of the social importance of bequeathing the house and garden for a training school and model kindergarten. She speaks often of the perfect director, her alter ego, Mrs. Aldrich. "She is such a god-send ... her work will transform New Bedford in the course of one or two generations." During their early years in the kindergarten movement both women, aware of their limited understanding of Froebel's method, had gone to Germany to study under Froebel's disciples, first Elizabeth Peabody, in 1867-68. "Having seen the authentic school, those established by ... Froebel ... `she felt that she must give the rest of her life to the work of abolishing the mischief she had done, and of spreading the true thing in her native land'” (Letters, by Ronda, p. 353).
To impress upon the trustees the importance of the kindergarten, Peabody frequently articulates the grand principles of her educational philosophy. One of the founders of Transcendentalism, she was involved in education from the outset, as a disciple of Bronson Alcott. Eventually she adopted a Christian social philosophy that forsook the cultivation of adult introspection for the education of the young. The essential reform needed to bring about the ideal society was "mankind's educating its children truly" (The Dial, 1841). Here are a very few of the many examples that reveal a universal vision—a system valid for all classes, all races, and all places—and, at age 75, her unflagging zeal. Referring to a school that closed its doors to a "colored child," kindergarten, she says, "must be established on a broader basis than a private school in order that it should regenerate society as Froebel proposed, by giving the whole young generation a true moral inspiration, doing justice to all human relations." Of the work of Miss Blow in St. Louis, it is a success because "no bunglers have been at work but well trained kindergartners." Mrs. Aldrich, her choice for the New Bedford school, has been trained in the "study of Froebel's psychology of childhood and method of keeping in equipoise the assertion and generosity of the young soul as it learns to deal with nature ... and its c
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