Patty Smith Hill was an American composer and teacher. She devoted her career to the development of nursery education, and was also a founder of the National Association for Nursery Education.
Background
Patty Smith Hill was born on March 27, 1868 in Anchorage, Kentucky, United States. She was the third of four daughters and fourth of six children of Doctor William Wallace Hill and Martha (Smith) Hill. Her father, a Princeton graduate and a Presbyterian minister, had been editor of the Presbyterian Herald before the Civil War, then turned to the education of young women, first as principal of the Bellewood Female Seminary in Anchorage, Kentucky, then as president of the Female College at Fulton, Missouri. He and his wife, a well-educated Southern woman, encouraged their daughters as well as their sons to pursue careers in order to achieve economic independence and personal fulfillment.
Education
Hill was aided by her parents to seek higher education, and attended the Louisville Collegiate Institute and, after graduating in 1887, enrolled in the only kindergarten training class in Louisville, started that year by Anna Bryan. In the summer of 1896, she and Anna Bryan went to Clark University to study under psychologist G. Stanley Hall and pedagogist William Burnham.
Hill was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by Columbia University in 1929.
Career
Hill took charge of the school's demonstration kindergarten and, with Bryan's urging, regarded it as an educational laboratory, leaving behind a strictly Froebelian approach and trying new methods and materials. Hill accompanied her mentor to a National Educational Association meeting in 1890 where they presented some of their innovative ideas and word circulated quickly about their exciting classes and provocative experiments. Three years later, after Anna Bryan's return to her home city of Chicago, Patty Hill became head of the Louisville Training School for Kindergarten and Primary Teachers, a position she held for twelve years.
Her work in Louisville attracted such wide attention that, in 1905, she was invited by Dean James Earl Russell to accept a post at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Russell had chosen her carefully as the person to challenge Susan Blow, the conservative, aging champion of adhering strictly to the Froebelian system of kindergartening, who was then a member of the Teachers College staff. As a popular, attractive lecturer with a dynamic personality, exciting new ideas, and the support of Dean Russell, Patty Hill quickly succeeded in spreading and implementing her progressive ideas about the kindergarten. She thought that the kindergarten, which was originated by Friedrich Froebel in Germany in the early nineteenth century, had become rigidly formalized in the United States by the beginning of the twentieth century. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, kindergarten teachers had been fifty years ahead of their time educationally in stressing the need for beautiful rooms and school grounds, excursions, music, games, and well-educated and well-prepared teachers; by the time the kindergarten movement won both public and educational acceptance, Froebel's ideas had been formalized to excess. Hill believed that Froebel had used his materials in a natural, innovative manner in his daily contact with children and that it was time to return to a more fluid procedure in the classroom in order to search in new directions for the best activities and methods for preschool learning.
Throughout her career, Hill constantly sought the experience, help, advice, and stimulation of those in the forefront of education. For example, with the aid of Colonel Francis Parker, the head of Cook County Normal School and an early progressive educator, she worked to unify the kindergarten and primary curricula, hoping to avoid wasteful gaps, but vociferously fighting the growing tendency to inflict upon kindergarten children such disciplines of the primary curriculum as beginning reading. She fought an uphill battle to provide kindergartens with the kind of psychological and medical help stressed so heavily in her studies with Hall and Burnham. At the same time, she became involved in nursery school education, hoping that, without traditions or public school affiliation, the nursery school could provide the best of prekindergarten care to two- to four-year-olds and establish a strong foundation of mental and physical health and well-being. She relied heavily on John Dewey's concept of socialization in education and his use of the project method. She saw how much a child could learn, for example, in the process of playing with and building things for a favorite doll. However, her realization that a more quantitative approach was valuable to educators led her to lean more toward behaviorism in the newer kindergarten program of the 1920s and 1930s.
After keeping careful records of children's individual and social progress in the Teachers College laboratory kindergartens between 1915 and 1921, Hill asked her colleagues, in particular Edward Lee Thorndike, for help and criticism in evaluating the record sheets. They replied that the values were too qualitative and that they needed more "objective outcomes. " This behavioristic approach to education as formulated by men like Thorndike urged educators to see the purpose of education as changed behavior, that is, to develop desirable habits and traits in children. Accordingly, Hill enlisted the aid of three to four hundred specialists in early childhood to devise a list of specific habits that children should form and the activities and subjects to develop these habits. Published in 1923, this "habit inventory" soon became the basis of many kindergarten curricula.
Hill did not abandon her humanistic approach to kindergarten education and she warned teachers against a tightly structured approach to each day's classroom work and against the effort to be too empirical, advising that "There are values that still escape our formulas". She saw the need for new songs, stories, games, and materials that would maintain a child's attention without coercion from the teacher. She designed new blocks for children, so large that they could actually play inside the structures they built, and she wrote songs for young children in collaboration with her sister, Mildred Hill, including the well-known "Happy Birthday to You. " Written originally in 1893 as "Good Morning to You, " this song was sung without permission in the 1921 Irving Berlin and Moss Hart Broadway production As Thousands Cheer.
A successful plagiarism lawsuit ensued. Hill had a long and productive career at Teachers College, serving as the major spokesman in preschool education for several decades. Without a formal college degree she became a full professor in 1922, one of the first three women at Teacher's College to be so designated and after retirement in 1935 she became one of the first women to be named professor emeritus from Columbia University. After 1935 she concentrated her attention on the Hilltop Community Center in New York City, which a few years earlier she had helped to organize.
At the age of seventy-eight, she died of a long illness at her home in New York.
Membership
Hill was a member, President, and lifetime support of the Association for Childhood Education International.