kindergarten and religion

Kindergarten was created by educator Frederich Froebel in Germany in the late 1800s. The word means "Children's Garden" or "Garden of Children." At that time, it was believed by most people, including educators, that in the early years of life, children's minds were passive and not much mental development was taking place. Preschoolers were typically ignored or frequently abused if adults felt they were too susceptible to Satan's influence. Froebel and some other enlightened educators and philosophers saw children differently. The field of psychology was brand new, and many of these early psychologists subscribed to the Empiricist philosophy of Englishman John Locke. Locke's famous dictum was that a child's mind is "a blank slate on which experience writes," and he believed that this "writing" begins at birth. Thus, Froebel and other progressive thinkers saw the importance of enhancing mental activity prior to school years. Froebel envisioned the Kindergarten as a place of "play and activity" which would generate mental growth. Many very conservative preachers disagreed and saw the main idea of preschool years as the time to "beat the devil out of them." This view has not disappeared from the scene. Although nowadays, virtually every public education system has funding for statewide kindergarten, when I was in Arkansas as recently as the early 1970s, many conservative, fundamentalist ministers waged a vigorous and nasty fight against state funded kindergarten, on the same basis as Froebel's early opponents. After Froebel's successful experiment, the belief in preschool education spread throughout Europe and North America. In  the United States and Canada, the banner for kindergarten was carried to a great extent by the Methodist Church, and many of those early kindergartens were housed in Methodist churches.