Wheelock, Lucy

UXL Encyclopedia of World Biography, (2003)

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.

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.