Background
Peabody was born on May 16, 1804 in Billerica, Massachusetts, United States.
(Peabody opened a girls' school in 19th century New Englan...)
Peabody opened a girls' school in 19th century New England, ran a bookstore, was a historian and introduced the German kindergarten movement to the US.
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Peabody was born on May 16, 1804 in Billerica, Massachusetts, United States.
In Salem, Elizabeth’s mother established a school for children and pioneered an innovative approach to early childhood education that would make a lasting impression on her daughter.
Elizabeth’s father instructed her in Latin, and she eventually learned ten other languages.
Looking back over the course of Elizabeth Palmer Pea-body’s life, every important development in her early years seems to have prepared her for a life in educational reform and a role as America’s foremost advocate of kindergarten education.
“It seems to me, ” she remarked some years later, “that the self-activity of the mind was cultivated by my mother’s method in her school.
Not so much was poured in—more was brought out. ”
Peabody’s life as a reformer was shaped very profoundly by the reform impulse that animated Boston’s social and intellectual elite from the 1830 through the third quarter of the nineteenth century.
Channing and Alcott.
Peabody came of age just as this schism reached its peak, and as a young adult she straddled both sides of the debate, maintaining relationships with individuals who were at the center of the controversy.
Probably the single individual who exerted the greatest influence upon Peabody was William Ellery Channing.
“He treats children with the greatest consideration, ” she wrote in 1825, “and evidently enjoys their conversation, and studies it to see what it indicates of the yet Unfallen nature.
He will never tire, I see, of the observation of children of which I am so fond…. ”
Her lifelong association with schooling and close acquaintance with some of the foremost educational reformers (including Horace Mann, with whom she was romantically involved before he married her sister Mary) made Peabody receptive to the early childhood education concepts being imported by German immigrants after midcentury.
In 1860 she opened the first kindergarten in America.
She advocated the system of Friedrich Froebel, bringing teachers from Germany and organizing both public and private institutions.
“No miracle, but only brought up in a kindergarten, ” Schurz replied, “a garden whose plants are human. ”
She directed the school until 1867, when she traveled to Germany in order to study Froebel’s work firsthand, and, after her return fifteen months later, devoted the next twenty-five years of her life to this revolutionary approach to childhood education.
In addition to her tireless work on behalf of the kindergarten movement, Peabody was associated in the post-Civil War period with the causes of freedmen’s education and Indian rights, and she continued her involvement with Boston’s intellectual reform milieu.
(Peabody opened a girls' school in 19th century New Englan...)