CONTROVERSIES OVER KINDERGARTEN PLAY IN THE GILDED AGE AND PROGRESSIVE ERA

Dewey's ideas about play were grounded in controversies over play in the kindergarten pedagogy of Friedrich Froebel. Froebel's Romantic, bucolic imagery of children was appealing in urbanizing, industrializing America. Images of children playing in gardens, planting seeds, frolicking with baby animals, and the rest of the kindergarten's sentimentalized naturalism evoked rural living perceived as simpler, healthier, and truer to America than city life. As Americans left Robert H. Wiebe's “island communities” and moved to cities, Froebel's vision of childhood reminded white middle-class Americans of what they thought they had lost. Froebel's philosophy of harmony and unity helped quell anxieties about social, economic, political, and labor unrest and rapid demographic change as income inequality soared, depressions wreaked havoc, workers organized and struck, and foreigners crowded into slums and onto city streets. The play of protected, Anglo white children from well-to-do families represented natural innocence and purity, unlike poor, black, and immigrant children who worked at jobs increasingly seen as unfit for the young. As Froebel wrote in The Education of Man (translated into English in 1887), children's play was the “purest, most spiritual activity of man” and “typical of human life as a whole—of the hidden natural life in man and all things.”Footnote ³

Froebel's scripted play activities were more representative of early nineteenth-century formalism than Progressive Era modernism. His methods and materials, developed in the 1830s, were based in German naturalistic philosophy, not the increasingly empirical philosophy and psychology of progressive education. A detailed, nonverbal symbol system, Froebel's “gifts” and “occupations,” sets of wooden blocks and activities such as weaving patterns and paper cutting, were to be played with in dictated, structured ways. In a popular 1877 kindergarten guide, the directions for one of the gifts ran to 92 pages, with 554 steps that teachers were to instruct children how to follow exactly. This was the “letter” of the Froebelian kindergarten, the rigid sequence that Dewey and many progressive kindergartners disputed and rejected.Footnote ⁴

The kindergarten movement exemplified Daniel T. Rodgers's “Atlantic crossings.” The movement spread in the United States from private to public, characterized by the blurred private-public “functional expansionism” of many institutions during the Progressive Era. American kindergarten leader Elizabeth Peabody heard about the kindergarten from liberal German emigres who had started German-speaking kindergartens in the Midwest. When Peabody traveled to Germany in 1867 to learn more about Froebel's methods, she encouraged German kindergartners (what the teachers were called, not the children) to come to the United States to start private kindergartens and training schools. Attended by children from the well-off families that dominated America in the Gilded Age, some from the “upper ten” described by Michael McGerr and others, the kindergarten movement benefited from urban elites, who gave it the imprimatur of status. The middling classes learned about kindergartens, too, often from the Chatauqua movement, which added a Kindergarten Department in 1881; and from a growing number of kindergarten lectures, publications, and other media.Footnote ⁵

The growth of philanthropy helped extend kindergartens to the lower classes in the 1880s and 1890s. Some of the accumulated wealth from what Alan Trachtenberg calls the “incorporation” of America supported “free” kindergarten associations, which ran charity kindergartens for children of the poor. Industrialists founded kindergartens at their plants and mines, examples of the “industrial paternalism” that Andrea Tone describes. Some of these kindergartens served to control and discipline poor children and teach manual training as much or more than promote play. Meant in part to calm labor unrest, this “business of benevolence,” as Tone calls it, was accelerated by perceived threats to the social order. After laborers protested poor working conditions, President John Patterson of National Cash Register in Dayton, Ohio, started kindergartens in the early 1890s, around the time of the deadly Homestead strike at Andrew Carnegie's steel mill near Pittsburgh. Hoping to pacify workers and create a docile labor force, Patterson said that since “92% of them will earn their living by manual labor, it is certainly proper to give them that early training which will make them the best workmen when they are grown.”Footnote ⁶

Like many other late nineteenth-century reforms, kindergarten was a women's movement. It created a new occupation and advocacy activities for women of different income levels and racial backgrounds. Magnates’ wives Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Jane Stanford, Louise Whitfield Carnegie, and others backed charity kindergartens and training schools where female kindergartners practiced the Froebelian methods upon which their claims for transforming lives, preventing crime, curbing alcoholism and child neglect, and Americanizing immigrant children and families rested. In 1877, Pauline Agassiz Shaw used her husband's Calumet and Hecla mining fortune to fund charity kindergartens in the Boston area, which in 1888 were incorporated into the Boston Public Schools. Charity kindergartens were subsumed into public schools in some other cities, as well.Footnote ⁷

Like many white Anglo women, African American women were divided over kindergarten pedagogy. Consonant with the vocational pedagogy of many programs for children of color, the kindergarten at Hampton Institute focused on manual training. Mrs. Booker T. Washington supported a manual training kindergarten at Tuskegee. African American women's clubs promoted kindergartens through the Kindergarten Department of the National Association of Colored Women, founded by Mary Church Terrell and Colored Women's Clubs around the country. Some African American kindergarten supporters, such as Josephine Silone Yates, who wrote for the Colored American Magazine, argued that black children benefited from traditional Froebelian kindergarten play, not manual training.Footnote ⁸

Kindergartners increasingly disagreed about the kind of play Froebel's “genuine” methods prescribed. They raised concerns about teaching academics, manual training, deviation from Froebel's original play activities, and other issues. Elizabeth Peabody condemned kindergartens that altered Froebel's methods, especially those that introduced young children to academic subjects, such as Anna Coe's “American Kindergarten,” with geometry and other school subjects that Coe said appealed to American parents. Peabody fought to protect the kindergarten from economic commodification and modification, as the Milton Bradley Company in Springfield, Massachusetts, began selling kindergarten publications and materials, some with academic content, such as alphabet blocks. She fretted about the marketing of kindergarten materials in popular exhibits at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and other expositions, where, as Sean Dennis Cashman and others depict, many new ideas were disseminated. Peabody also worried about the effects of rapid expansion as the kindergarten movement grew, such that by 1898, when Dewey added the Sub-primary Department to the laboratory school, there were almost 3,000 private and public kindergartens, most in major cities and their spreading suburbs.Footnote ⁹

PROGRESSIVE KINDERGARTEN PLAY AND THE SUB-PRIMARY DEPARTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LABORATORY SCHOOL

When John Dewey arrived to teach at the University of Chicago in the summer of 1894, he could see from his office what remained of the temple of Progressive Era material culture, the fabled “White City” of the World's Columbian Exposition, which ran from May to October of 1893. The Children's Building, with its model kindergarten, had been one of the popular exhibits. Dewey did not miss the Pullman strike, which began in May of 1894. On July 4, he visited the strikers, and was deeply moved by their protest and plight. Dewey could see the continuing impact of the economic panic of 1893 and ensuing depression, from which he was protected at the University of Chicago, newly founded in 1890 with money from John D. Rockefeller on land donated by Marshall Field, which Dewey viewed as a bastion of capitalism.Footnote ¹⁰

With his progressive politics, Dewey felt more at home at Hull-House, the settlement house founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, where he was inspired by Addams's ideas and work. On the board of Hull-House, Dewey became close friends with Addams, and in 1896 gave the inaugural lecture for the Hull-House Children's Building, with its kindergarten and other children's programs. Addams, who influenced Dewey's thinking, was a great believer in the value of play. Her radical social experiment, the nexus of progressive reform in Chicago and locus of interconnected Progressive Era reforms nationally, was a model for Dewey's belief in the role of community in democratic education and society.Footnote ¹¹

Dewey soon became involved in a radical education experiment of his own, the University of Chicago Laboratory School, where he developed many of his ideas about education, democracy, and the importance of play. When Dewey, who had been brought to the new university by President William Rainey Harper to head the Philosophy and Psychology Department, told Harper about his vision for a laboratory school, Harper jumped on the idea, and included a Pedagogy Department, which Dewey chaired. The laboratory school started in January of 1896 with sixteen students and two teachers and reopened in October of 1896, with thirty-two children aged six to eleven. When Dewey got special funds from a kindergarten supporter and the school moved to a larger private house in October of 1898—it was not housed on campus at the School of Education building until 1903—the Sub-primary Department was added. It had three classes: Group I for four-year-olds, Group II for five-year-olds, and Group III for six-year-olds, enrolling twenty-four children, about half boys and half girls, who attended mornings from 9:00 a.m. to 11:45 p.m.Footnote ¹²

As with many of Dewey's pedagogical ideas, his views on Froebel's kindergarten and play came in part from women teachers, and their trainers. As Larry Prochner and Anna Kirova describe, Georgia Price Scates, head teacher of the Sub-primary Department from 1899 to 1900, wrote about kindergarten play in ways similar to how Dewey did. Scates was trained by Anna Bryan, a charity kindergartner who had spoken out about problems with Froebel's restrictive views on play. Bryan had been influenced by Alice Putnam, daughter of the founder of the Chicago Board of Trade, who organized the Chicago Free Kindergarten Association and taught the kindergarten training class at Hull-House; and by Elizabeth Harrison, who had trained under Putnam at the Chicago Frobel Association. Putnam brought progressive education pioneer Francis W. Parker to Chicago in 1883 to head Cook County Normal School, where Putnam taught the kindergarten class, and Dewey became director in 1902 after it had merged with the University of Chicago Pedagogy Department. Bryan started a Free Kindergarten Association in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1887, where she ran a charity kindergarten. She began adapting Froebel's methods to meet the needs of the poor children she was teaching by having them build and play with things they knew from their daily lives, the first major break with Froebelian orthodoxy.Footnote ¹³

Bryan's ideas about the importance of “free play” helped transform the kindergarten movement. In an influential address, “The Letter Killeth,” to the National Education Association in 1900, Bryan warned against making Froebel's methods a “prescribed, formal line of teaching, instead of tools to be skillfully and discriminatingly used.” Distinguishing between “free play” and “dictation play,” she said that the key to meaningful learning was for a child's consciousness to pass through “not a passive, literal sequence, but an active, creative one.” Bryan, whose talk was illustrated by her trainee and future progressive kindergarten leader Patty Smith Hill, argued that children needed to experiment and solve problems themselves, rather than being told what to do and being given answers by the teacher. Bryan showed how teachers, by careful planning of the environment, could lead children to work out ideas themselves more freely than in a traditional Froebelian kindergarten. Instead “of teachers furnishing moves to be copied, the child himself created the moves by the suggestiveness and relatedness of ideas.” The child would thus be “led to consciously work out the thought; to compare, measure, relate, judge, to determine the kind of form required by the necessities of the case, and thus to arrive at a conclusion.”Footnote ¹⁴

Bryan's ideas about the role of teachers in guiding free play were apparent in many aspects of the curriculum in the Sub-primary Department at the laboratory school, where Dewey derived some of his ideas that appeared in Democracy and Education and other works. In their book on The Dewey School, laboratory schoolteachers Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards acknowledged their “great indebtedness to Miss Anna Bryan” for “numberless suggestions regarding both materials and objects for constructive work.” In the June 1900 issue of the first volume of the laboratory school's publication, The Elementary School Record in which Dewey wrote about Froebel, Bryan's student Georgia Scates wrote about the Sub-primary Department, saying that a “child lives in his play.” Scates argued, as Dewey did, that the benefits of play were not that a child was completely free, but that a child thought she was free. A child was led to believe that she had come up with a subject herself, and then gained experience by working out her own and the teacher's ideas. In play, Scates wrote, a child took “hold of a subject” in a way that “he seems to have originated it” and then “in his own individual way works out a teacher's ideas, and thus gets the benefit of the experience of others.”Footnote ¹⁵

In Scates's vision of free play, children got the impression that they were voluntarily acquiring knowledge, even though in part it came from subjects and materials teachers planned and placed in the classroom. This perception of free agency nurtured the sense and exercise of willing, active participation that James E. Block argues Dewey posited at the heart of liberal democracy. Block talks about the “crucible of consent”: institutions and child-rearing practices through which American children acquired the sense of voluntary engagement and socialization necessary for a participatory, orderly democracy. Children's play, Scates and Dewey believed, should be subtly guided by teachers and the classroom environment in individually and socially appropriate ways. This was one of Dewey's high hopes for play. He believed it could resolve the dilemma of voluntary consent and social control in a democratic society.Footnote ¹⁶

Scates's discussion of discipline, a practical dilemma for teachers, revealed how classrooms that appeared to be free could inculcate the kind of socially responsive, responsible behavior that Dewey thought was so important. Minimizing teacher-imposed rules and allowing children to work out their own rules, Scates argued, could do away with the need for coercive discipline, or almost do away with it. A kindergarten, Scates wrote, should be a “social atmosphere” as “much like a home as possible,” with “freedom and as few rules as the surroundings will permit.” It should be an environment that would give the child “an opportunity for forming laws and rules of his own,” which the child would obey more readily than rules “that seem to be merely imposed by the teacher.” Coercive classroom discipline would be as unnecessary as possible. The establishment of a “feeling of good-fellowship, and sense of justice” would “do away with the need for ‘discipline’,” Scates asserted, but with a hedge. Teachers should know, she added, that “at times” they would be “forced to use ‘discipline’,” and when they did “it must be applied in a just, firm way.”Footnote ¹⁷

Scates admitted that planning a kindergarten with guided free play required more work for teachers than simply following Froebel's dictated play. Having children build a cupboard or hat rack, for instance, required more work than putting “a box of gifts before a child and demanding that he follow minute directions in order to evolve some sequence of play from which he is expected to get wonderful principles.” Nor were Froebel's specially designed games useful for “social and intellectual” development, because dictated Froebelian play was not real play, Scates implied. The “traditional games of childhood, together with those in which children dramatically work out their other occupations, seem more helpful for social and intellectual ends, and also for the spirit of Froebel (if not to his letter) than so-called ‘symbolic’ games.” What mattered was that the children themselves gained from play, not what the teacher thought they were gaining. In Froebelian games, “only the teacher appreciates the idea (the educative part),” Scates wrote, the children only get “physical and emotional excitement, which is exaggerated in order to offset the mechanical routine arising from ‘play’ under external dictation.”Footnote ¹⁸

Dewey expanded fulsomely on the pros and cons and uses of different types of play in his article “Froebel's Educational Principles” (reprinted as Chapter V in The School and Society in 1900), in the same June 1900 issue of The Elementary School Record as Scates's description of the Sub-primary Department. Play was the basis for how children learned, Dewey argued, but it had to be free play, not overly adult-structured play. “Play” designated the child's “mental attitude in its entirety and in its unity,” he wrote. It was not a waste of time, “trivial,” “futile,” or, as some saw it, “positively evil.” On the contrary, children's spontaneous activities were the “foundation stones of educational methods.” The problem with Froebelian pedagogy was that it was an adult-”prescribed system,” Dewey said, with “strained and artificial explanations.” This “abstract” symbolism gave children “artificial” materials instead of letting them play with “real” materials, such as letting them do cooking, dishwashing, and other activities, which for children were “surcharged with a sense of the mysterious values that attach to whatever their elders are concerned with.” The “subject matter” of the Sub-primary curriculum came from children's home and community life, simple activities that Dewey said children “naturally” tended to “reproduce in imaginative form.” These simple activities provided a “sense of continuity” that was the “basis of attention and of all intellectual growth.” This home-based play connected with the next stage of school, First Grade, and to other subjects, and passed “naturally” to “more distinctively intellectual topics.” Viewing play as the basis of intellectual development and connection to intellectual topics were among Dewey's important hopes for play.Footnote ¹⁹

Dewey explicitly called for “free play” but modified what he meant by free. He argued that teachers should guide children's play in socially positive ways. Always seeking a middle ground and resisting fixed dualisms, Dewey thought that children's play could be emancipated from adults’ prescriptions and still accomplish adult-defined educational purposes. “Nothing was more absurd,” he stated, “than to suppose that there is no middle term between leaving a child to his own unguided fancies and likes or controlling his activities by a formal succession of dictated directions.” Finding this middle ground was the role of an observant, “sympathetic” teacher. “There was no ground,” Dewey said, to think that a “teacher should not suggest anything to the child until he has consciously expressed a want in that direction.” What teachers suggested must “fit in with the dominant growth mode of the child,” however.Footnote ²⁰

Dewey thought that teachers should take advantage of play. They should use play to “reproduce on the child's plane the typical doings and occupations of the larger, maturer society,” with one major exception. Play should be free from the central adult roles of supporting oneself and others economically, Dewey argued, evincing some of his leeriness about work and social status. Play should be free from “economic pressure,” from the “necessities of getting a living and supporting others—and from the fixed responsibilities attaching to the special callings of the adult.” When children's “individual tendencies and activities” were “organized and directed through the uses made of them,” they promoted training in the “co-operative and mutually helpful living” that Dewey agreed with Froebel was the “primary business of school,” and one of Dewey's great hopes for play.Footnote ²¹

GUIDED FREE PLAY, PLAY AND WORK, AND DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION

When Dewey left the University of Chicago in 1904 for the Philosophy Department at Columbia University, in part over a disagreement about his wife's appointment as director of the laboratory school, he continued to think about the role of free but guided play, and the relationship of play and work. In New York, he became involved in another center of Progressive Era reform, Greenwich Village; another settlement, Henry Street, started in 1893 on the immigrant-flooded Lower East Side; with another influential settlement house reformer, Henry Street founder Lillian Wald; and another settlement house education program for young children, Caroline Pratt's Play School. Begun at Hartley House, affiliated with Henry Street, as a playgroup in 1913, Pratt's class became the Play School in 1914 (later the City and Country School), one of the most radical of all play-based education experiments. Unlike Dewey's laboratory school, Pratt's school was entirely play based, in keeping with her philosophy of “creative pedagogy.” Pratt wanted to liberate individual children's artistic expression, in ways many Greenwich Village cultural and political rebels and artists desired. She also wanted to attract the children of poor, Lower East Side immigrants, but found that they rejected her insistence on not teaching academics to young children. Greenwich Village bohemians did not object, and happily enrolled their children at her school, which Dewey visited.Footnote ²²

Dewey had become so well known as a play advocate himself that he was asked to write entries on “Play” and “Play and Education” in the benchmark Cyclopedia of Education, published in 1913. Here again he called Froebelian play the root of all education, and linked play, work, and societal needs. Froebel had rediscovered the “basic principles of the method of instruction,” Dewey said. Dewey posited a natural linkage of play and work in which work “in a psychological sense” was “inevitably preceded by play” and grew “insensibly out of it.” The “natural” relationship of play and work was critical, he argued, for the individual and for society. Part of Dewey's solution to the tension between individual freedom and social control was guided free play and the connection between play and work. For Dewey, as children's play transitioned naturally into work, the needs of the child and the needs of society coalesced. Teachers planned environments and activities in which children as individuals were motivated to play at and be introduced to things they would do and study as adults, “co-operatively.” Play and the “natural transition from play into work is the only means of reconciling the development of social efficiency with that of individual fullness of life,” Dewey argued, a high hope for play indeed.Footnote ²³

Eager to see progressive education experiments in action, Dewey and his daughter Evelyn visited and wrote about different progressive schools around the country, doing fieldwork that became part of the basis for Democracy and Education. The Deweys’ book, Schools of To-Morrow, published shortly before Democracy and Education in 1915, contained a chapter on “Play,” with detailed descriptions and photographs of Caroline Pratt's school and other progressive schools. In what had become a trope, the Deweys criticized Froebel's fixed kindergarten system, but also praised Froebelian-inspired play for teaching children about “the world they live in” and for helping them “learn about the work and play of the grown-up world.” They noted that the kindergarten movement was changing and becoming more progressive. They complimented “Modern kindergartners” for beginning to use play “not only as a method of making work interesting to children, but for the education values of the activities it involves, and for giving the children the right sort of ideals and ideas about every day life,” another hope for play.Footnote ²⁴

One of the “modern” kindergartners the Deweys were referring to was probably Patty Smith Hill, leader of the progressive wing of the kindergarten movement. Hill, Anna Bryan's student, bested orthodox kindergartner Susan Blow in 1904 to teach the kindergarten course at Columbia Teachers College, where Dewey knew many professors. Hill designed larger building blocks and other materials that replaced some traditional Froebelian materials. The Deweys were less positive about another new play-based preschool pedagogy: Montessori. They criticized Maria Montessori's play-based methods for being unscientific, “artificial,” and not giving children “freedom” to “create,” echoing the harsh criticism of Montessori in a 1914 book by Dewey's acolyte, Teachers College professor William Heard Kilpatrick.Footnote ²⁵

In the final chapter of Schools of To-morrow, on “Democracy and Education,” the Deweys laid out many of the ideas that appear in Democracy and Education, along with political arguments about the importance of play. They talked about “learning by doing” and included politically radical ideas about education reform and equality. Progressive schools such as those they had observed, the Deweys asserted, were spreading, “rapidly coming into being in large numbers all over the country,” demonstrating the “ideal of equal opportunity for all that is to be transmuted into reality.” Coming from the University of Chicago Laboratory School, however, with its staff of well-educated, highly competent teachers, the Deweys underestimated the difficulty of creating the kind of empowering classrooms and schools they argued were needed to achieve their vision of equal opportunity. Their assessment of the future of progressive education proved to be overly optimistic. Public schools in the early twentieth century increasingly adopted the standardized text- and test-based methodology of another Progressive Era Teachers College professor, E. L. Thorndike. Thorndike's pedagogy, with adult-directed teaching, seemed easier to use in rapidly growing classes overflowing with immigrant children with widely varying skills, languages, and cultural backgrounds than Deweyan progressivism did.Footnote ²⁶

In Democracy and Education, published in 1916, Dewey expanded his views on play, play and work, and education into a full-blown theory of intellectual and social development, with implications for societal and social class tensions. He praised Froebel for calling attention to the idea of growth, but criticized Froebel even more sharply than before, calling “abstract symbolism” as “arbitrary and externally imposed a scheme of dictation as the history of instruction has ever seen,” about the harshest criticism one can imagine from Dewey. In a chapter on “Play and Work in the Curriculum,” Dewey criticized the Froebelian kindergarten yet again, for its aversion to “raw” materials. Children needed to start with “crude material” and manipulate it purposefully to “gain the intelligence embodied in finished material,” Dewey wrote. Classic Froebelian kindergarten activities such as gardening, for instance, could be both a means of learning about social situations and academic subjects. To be socially beneficial, activities needed to be carried out for their own sake, unrelated to “pecuniary gain,” and free from “the pressure of wage-earning.” Pursued this way, weaving, woodworking, and other activities were “truly liberalizing,” Dewey stated. They also introduced children to academic subjects, “pursued for the sake of discovery,” and to “deliberate intellectual investigations.”Footnote ²⁷

Dewey emphasized that play and work overlapped and that the psychological and economic distinction between play and work should not be confused. Play and work were not “antithetical,” any such “sharp contrast” was harmful, he said, and was created by “undesirable social conditions.” Play was valuable in and of itself, as an activity, and as a producer of subsequent activities. When children were young, there was “no distinction of exclusive periods of play activity and work activity, only one of emphasis.” When work became drudgery, Dewey argued, under “unfree economic conditions,” people wanted to play, but often fell into “perverted” play, such as gambling and drinking, or “idle amusement.” Instead, education should provide “wholesome recreation” and train people to want to seek wholesome recreation. As activities became more complicated, they “gradually” passed into work. If not “free and intrinsically motivated,” free of “false economic conditions,” however, activities degenerated based on social class. Play became “idle excitement for the well to do.” Work became “uncongenial labor for the poor.” In another high hope for play, work infused by play became a form of art, Dewey stated. “Work which remains permeated with the play attitude is art, he wrote, “in quality if not in conventional designation.”Footnote ²⁸

DEWEY AND THE CONTINUING DISCOURSE OF PLAY IN KINDERGARTEN AND PRESCHOOL EDUCATION

Dewey's ideas about play were influential as the kindergarten movement spread and the nursery school movement began. Dewey played a role in the adoption of public kindergartens around the country, as a board member and later president of the National Kindergarten Association, the organization that led the public kindergarten crusade. Patty Smith Hill at Teachers College, who became the leader of the nursery school movement and first president of the National Association for Nursery Education (now the National Association for the Education of Young Children), carried the notion of guided free play well into the twentieth century. Dewey became friends with prominent nursery school advocate Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who took Dewey's course for which Democracy and Education was the text. With Caroline Pratt and Harriet Johnson, Mitchell founded the Bureau of Education Experiments in 1916 in Greenwich Village (now Bank Street College of Education), where numerous experiments on play were conducted.Footnote ²⁹

As kindergartens moved into the public schools, they were under increasing pressure to adapt to demands for academic readiness for First Grade, though there was resistance. As developmental psychology became a defining force in preschool education, especially that of G. Stanley Hall, Dewey's psychologies and philosophies blended with Hall's in a developmental paradigm that imbued preschool education. In the first half of the twentieth century, many public kindergarten teachers still used blocks and left long periods of time for free play. In the second half of the twentieth century, with developmental and academic paradigms in competition, kindergartens were pushed to add more academic readiness, especially after the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Newspaper coverage in California, for instance, documents top-down state pressure for kindergarten academics beginning in the 1950s. With the growth of global economic competition in the 1980s, heralded by the U.S. Department of Education's A Nation at Risk report in 1983, pressure for academics ratcheted upward, accelerated by the standards and accountability movement in the last two decades of the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁰

In the early twenty-first century, after the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, time for child-chosen play in most public kindergartens diminished. In a 2016 study by Daphna Bassok, Scott Latham, and Anna Rorem based on national survey data, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade,” 54 percent of kindergarten teachers in 1998, before No Child Left Behind, reported that children spent at least one hour a day in child-selected activities. In 2010, kindergarten teachers reported that only 40 percent of children did. In 1998, only 15 percent of kindergarten teachers reported that children spent three or more hours in teacher-directed, didactic, whole-class activities; in 2010, 32 percent of teachers did, doubling kindergarten children's academic work and reducing time for play.Footnote ³¹

Under less academic pressure than public kindergartens, most nursery schools for three- and four-year-olds held on to Dewey's and Hall's developmental paradigm. In the early days of the nursery school movement in the 1920s and 1930s, it was often all play, all of the time, as at Pratt's nursery school that the Deweys observed. In the 1970s, when Jean Piaget's cognitive developmental psychology became dominant, the philosophy of “developmentally appropriate practice,” which stipulated that children construct knowledge by learning through play, became the mantra of preschool education. With the advent of No Child Left Behind, nursery schools, too, came under pressure from the shove down of academics to prepare very young children for kindergarten. At the same time, a play advocacy movement evolved to stem the diminution of play in kindergartens and preschools. Books on the importance of play, such as former University of Chicago Laboratory School kindergarten teacher Vivian Gussin Paley's 2004 A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play burgeoned. The release of the Common Core State Standards in 2010 requiring that children be taught basic literacy skills including being able to do some reading in kindergarten, provoked a new storm of protest.Footnote ³²

What might Dewey have thought about the state of play in the United States today? Throughout his writings on play, including Democracy and Education, he stated many high hopes for guided free play and criticized the rigid structure of Froebelian kindergarten play. In education and classrooms, play was one of the “basic principles of instruction.” Play, especially about home and community life, was “naturally” interesting to children and gave them the impression that they had “originated” a subject themselves. Play led children to work out valuable ideas introduced by their teachers. Play gave children analytical skills to “pursue deliberate intellectual investigations.” Play led children to more “distinctively” intellectual topics. Play decreased the need for coercive classroom discipline.

Societally, play in classrooms, Dewey argued, was directly connected to individual and social goods and goals. Tensions worked out in classrooms and schools carried over to working out tensions in life outside of classrooms and schools. The right kind of play gave children the “right sorts of ideals and ideas in everyday life.” Play helped children achieve their individual “fullness of growth.” Work infused by play was a form of “art.” Play, free from “economic pressure,” introduced children to future roles in adult society. Play, which “insensibly” transitioned into work, was the “only way” to reconcile the “development of social efficiency with that of individual fullness of life.” This last, coupled with Dewey's emphasis that children gain the perception that they originated ideas themselves in their play, freely, even though their play was not completely free, was one of the most important functions of play. The sense of choice, of free agency that children derived from play, was central to resolving the dilemma of how to achieve active participation in society along with voluntary self-discipline. Feeling free while following social rules was crucial to creating and maintaining the liberal democracy Dewey envisioned. A lot of big things to ask of play, and they all started with little children!

It is hard, if not impossible to know if Dewey thought that his hopes for play could be enacted in kindergartens and preschools during the Progressive Era, or if the reconciliation between the individual and society that he posited was realistically possible. He sounded hopeful. The kind of guided free play on which Dewey's hopes were based was difficult to enact and sustain. Given his high hopes, Dewey likely would have had grave worries about the reduction in time for play in kindergartens and preschools today. Given the importance of young children's play, we should have grave worries, too, as we reflect on Democracy and Education.