NURSERY SCHOOLS. — That the education of man must begin in earliest childhood is a requirement that can be traced throughout the history of pedagogy. From Aristotle to Quintilian, from the pedagogues of Humanism to Comenius and Rousseau, to name the most prominent, all agree that the education of the child would be seriously compromised if it did not begin at the tenderest age. Yet properly speaking, nursery schools are, one might say, a wholly modern institution, appearing in Europe only toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. This does not mean, however, that throughout the entire course of the history of education and educational institutions there were no pedagogical needs or initiatives aimed at gathering children up to the age of six or seven into special premises, both to protect them and to provide them with some instruction. It need not be noted here how the care of childhood is, in many respects, a product of Christianity; not that the ancient world lacked care and love for children, but only Jesus exalted children to Himself, extolling their purity and innocence. “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me” (Mt. 18:5). Thus, from the Middle Ages onward, we find good examples that testify to the particular care Christians devoted to the education of children. In 787, the priest Dateo founded in Milan a hospice for poor children, an institution that lasted until 1456. In this hospice, the youngest were cared for by wet nurses, while the older ones were instructed in singing and basic knowledge. Other benefactors of childhood likewise founded similar institutions over the years, such as St. Jerome Emiliani in the early sixteenth century in Venice and other cities; St. Joseph Calasanz in Rome and its surroundings in 1597; the priest Lorenzo Garaventa, who founded in Liguria in 1770 a hospice for abandoned children; not to mention the work carried out in Paris by St. Vincent de Paul around 1638 and, in Rome, by Tata Giovanni, as the charitable Roman mason Giovanni Borghi (1732–98) was commonly called. In the seventeenth century, among his many fruitful insights, Comenius also conceived of a true kindergarten, a “schola materni gremii,” which aimed to impart, in simple form and through sensory intuition and play, the first elements of moral and religious life and the rudiments of knowledge (cf. O. Cicogna Argentini, s.V. in Dizionario delle scienze pedag., Milan 1929).
The prevailing notion that early education was the responsibility of the mother had the effect of preventing the emergence, until the threshold of the contemporary age, of a true and proper school system capable of gathering and educating children up to the age of six. There is no doubt that in many families the education of young children was impossible because mothers, whether incapacitated or occupied throughout the day by work—often outside and far from home—were unable to care for their children, who, left to themselves, were forced to live more in the streets than in the home, naturally exposed to all the bad examples that could come from that environment. To prevent this, custodial rooms began to appear here and there in various European countries; while they sought to avoid one problem, they created others, for these tender creatures were gathered, for the most part, in rooms that were not always hygienic, confined to cramped spaces and benches, and supervised by staff who were not always adequately prepared—good at custody, perhaps, but not at education.
To have in Europe a nursery school that combined both the purpose of care and that of education, we must wait until the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first truly educational institution of this kind was founded in Alsace by Jean Frédéric Oberlin (q.v.) of Strasbourg, a Protestant pastor who, with the collaboration of Louise Schepler (1763–1837), established from as early as 1769 various nursery schools in the villages of his parish of Waldersbach, entrusting their care to village women who had been previously trained for the task. The first nursery school was inaugurated in 1771. Gradually, they spread to the various villages of the parish. In these nursery schools, children were taught singing, basic elements of history and geography, and episodes from the Bible were read to them; they were also trained in simple crafts. The women sat among the children, entertaining them with stories and fairy tales, organizing their games, guiding them in making paper objects, and showing them pictures of animals, plants, and other figures. Oberlin held that one should speak to children only about things that fell within their sensory experience. The children’s lives, moreover, were to unfold, as much as possible, in the open air so that they might always be able to enjoy and observe nature in its various phenomena. Through contact with the instructors and in their mutual relationships with one another, the children were to learn proper social behavior and to become accustomed to replacing their dialect with the national language.
Another philanthropist to whom the foundation of a. at the beginning of the 19th century is Owen (v.), who in 1800 established in his cotton mill at New Lanark the first of his a. (infant schools) for children from the age of two upwards, subsidising those educational works which he believed contributed to the advancement of the people. Owen was prompted to found the a. by the fact that many of his female workers were obliged, in order to attend to their work in the factory, to leave their young children unattended at home. The institution founded by Owen, which thus arose from humanitarian motives, subsequently took on an entirely educational purpose. In Owen’s a. no religious instruction was imparted, so that, according to Owen, children of all religious denominations might be enabled to attend. In order to prevent the children from committing unworthy acts and to instil in them habits of kindness and goodness, the children were kept under constant supervision. In Owen’s a. learning was intuitive. Owen, who had visited Pestalozzi’s school, wished that the children should learn about bodies and their properties by being shown the objects themselves or their models. Conversations in Owen’s a. took place in a familial manner so as to better contribute to learning. Play was cultivated as a diversion and pastime. In Owen’s a., however, as later in Aporti’s, the teachers were unable to free themselves from the use of books and from erudite teaching, so that at a certain point Owen felt the need to entrust (1815) the a. to one of his workers, Joseph Buchanan, who, by virtue of his good nature and intelligence, had better understood the nature of the institution and its aims. Buchanan, who loved children, resolved many problems of child education precisely through his love for children, problems which outside of the love and sacrifice of the teacher can scarcely find a solution. Buchanan later (1810) went to London where he opened the first a. and shortly afterwards a school for the training of a. teachers. Owen’s method was perfected by another apostle of child education, Samuel Wilderspin. Meanwhile, the institution took root in England, where a society for infant schools was formed, its number rising to 200. In the Infant Schools, as indeed in all analogous institutions in Europe before Fröbel, there persisted, in general, the defect of paying too much attention to the institution to the detriment of proper education. This defect was one that an Italian, Pietro Giordani, was to highlight when, writing in 1844 to Niccolò Puccini, he noted that the purpose of the a. is ‘morality, not vanity’, and that through them one seeks to make ‘good the poor children’, ‘not to make doctors or rather parrots, overburdening and oppressing those minds still closed with the most vain and useless chatter’.
The initiative of Oberlin, and above all that of Owen, was not without imitators, and it can be said that in all parts of Europe and in various countries of America, especially in the first half of the 19th century, there was a rush to found a. which took various names, such as Salles d’asile in France, Guardians’ Schools in Belgium and Denmark, Bevar School in Holland, Infant Schools in England and in the United States of America, and asili d’infanzia in Italy. Moreover, infant institutions are not lacking in Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Portugal.
The French Salles d’asile may, at first, be considered as a derivation of Owen’s schools, though they later diverged by imposing some limit on the instruction given to children. The first a. in Paris was founded by Pastoret (1766–1843), who promoted a women’s committee for the establishment of Salles d’asile, sending one of the directors to England to visit Buchanan’s institute and to study its method. Another Frenchman at this time, Cochin, mayor of the 12th arrondissement of Paris, set about studying Buchanan’s method, of which he supervised the translation of the...
A petition addressed to the King of Sardinia was signed, among others, by Farina himself, Camillo Cavour, Cesare Alfieri, and Carlo Boncompagni, seeking permission to establish a society for infant schools. The petition, personally opposed by the aforementioned Count della Margherita, was received by the king in 1839, though with the stipulation that the custody and education of the children be entrusted to religious corporations. Still with reference to the establishment of a. in Piedmont, one cannot fail to recall briefly the work undertaken by Carlo Tancredi Falletti, Marquis of Barolo (1782–1838), and his wife Giulietta Colbert de Maulévrier (1785–1864), who attempted to open an a. in 1825, succeeding, as Silvio Pellico attests, fully in 1829, inspired by the Salles d’asile of Pastoret which the marquises had visited in Paris. Barolo, who had a realistic view of the a. and their function in the early formation of children, published in Turin in 1832 a pamphlet On the Education of Childhood in the Indigent Class. Brief Notes Dedicated to Charitable Persons. The Barolos wished that the conduct of the a. be entrusted to nuns because of the spirit of sacrifice which such a mission requires, and for this purpose founded the Congregation of the Sisters of Providence, later known as the Sisters of St Anne. Still in Piedmont, other a. institutions were not lacking: in 1833, Countess Eufrasia Valperga Masino opened an a. in her palace in Turin, and in 1838 King Carlo Alberto himself opened another a. near the Royal Palace, entrusting its direction to the Sisters of St Anne.
In Naples, every attempt to establish a. can be said to have been fruitless owing to the aversion which it encountered in the government. Giacomo Savarese laments this state of affairs when, writing on 10 June 1840 to Vieusseux, he notes that every possible obstacle was placed in the way of the a., and that the most senseless and stupid indifference to the public good could be brought to bear against a useful innovation.
Even in Sicily, a prince of Scordia made an attempt, though it remained fruitless, to open a., which were only realised in 1860.
After the political setbacks of 1849, kindergartens gradually declined in various places, but the seed had been sown and could not fail to bear good fruit. Once national unity had been achieved, infant schools flourished throughout Italy, extending even to the territories of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the former Duchy of Modena, where the institution had previously taken less root. In the year 1871–72, Italy had 1,099 public kindergartens with 130,806 enrolled children.
Meanwhile, a reform of the infant school was becoming necessary. Fundamentally, despite its various aspects, the institution shared a common foundation: the concern to engage young minds in acquiring an education that could not, however, be the sole purpose of this institution. Play, even if honored and considered important, remained merely a diversion and pastime, not the central activity of a child’s life.
Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel undertook a successful reform of the method in infant schools. Drawing from Pestalozzi’s doctrine, which he observed in Yverdon, Fröbel became deeply convinced of the child’s freedom, which manifests itself fully in play as an intimate act of the child’s life. Human nature is realized through action, and in play—which is the child’s unique mode of action—the child places itself at the center of its world and experiences it as its own creation. Through this activity, the child becomes a creator and, in doing so, imitates and can come to know God, the creator of all things. The child’s life is best expressed in contact with nature, and thus the Fröbelian institution was founded on the garden and was indeed called *Kindergarten*.
Fröbel’s kindergartens spread rapidly across Europe. In Italy, the Fröbelian method encountered the *aportiano* method, contributing certainly to better psychologically attune it to the nature of the child.
The baroness Berta von Marenholtz-Bülow (1810–93) became the leading advocate of the Fröbelian method. In her various works, she explained the master’s thought and emphasized play as the most suitable activity for children at different stages of development. She also stressed the need to guide the child toward work as the best way to develop artistic spontaneity. After Fröbel’s death, Marenholtz-Bülow traveled to London, Paris, Belgium, and Switzerland, spreading her mentor’s ideas and promoting the founding of kindergartens wherever she went.
In Italy, interest in kindergartens was not lacking. Indeed, Abbot Iacopo Bernardi and Giuseppe Sacchi (q.v.) studied the new method, while the pedagogist Abbot Rayneri was sent abroad around 1858 by the Piedmontese government, at the suggestion of Apporti, to visit several kindergartens and report on them, as he duly did, to the Sardinian minister of public instruction at the time. A few years later (1863), Gaetano Cammarota traveled, on behalf of the Italian government, to Switzerland to visit the two kindergartens there, one in Geneva and the other in Lausanne. In 1867, the priest Carlo Uttini (q.v.) successfully experimented in his infant school in Piacenza with some Fröbelian procedures adapted to the Italian mentality.
Around 1870, kindergartens in Italy gained significant momentum, largely due to the zealous efforts of Adolfo Pick (q.v.), a German by birth but Italian by choice, who championed the Fröbelian method in Italy. In Venice in 1871, he inaugurated the kindergarten “Vittorino da Feltre,” which also produced some of the best female kindergarten teachers of the time. Also in Venice in 1868, Adele Levi della Vida had founded a kindergarten where teachers were also trained.
However, in the final years of the last century, Fröbelian kindergartens gradually became rigid in a formal mechanism that seemed to hinder rather than promote children’s spontaneity and freedom. Thus, at the beginning of the current century, a reform of the kindergarten was undertaken, particularly through the work of Rosa Agazzi (q.v.) and Maria Montessori (q.v.). The latter with her *Case dei bambini* [Children’s Houses], the former with her *Nuovo asilo* [New Kindergarten] in Mompiano (Brescia), assisted effectively by her sister Carolina and by P. Pasquali, director of the Brescia schools. Agazzi added to the Fröbelian principle of the child’s activity the necessity of placing the child in a position to act, reducing the school to an essential moment of life, indeed to a true act of life that is expressed above all in work. The mechanical world of Fröbel was replaced by a world of reality, one that the school itself presents through contact between children, between children and the teacher, and between them and the environment. A school that becomes a society and thus a practical and moral act.
Montessori’s method, as she herself outlines in her two works—*Il metodo della pedagogia scientifica applicato all’educazione infantile nelle case dei bambini* (Città di Castello, 1909) and *L’autoeducazione* (Rome, 1917)—is founded on the principle of “freedom,” the child’s self-directed activity, virtually guided by the teacher through a prepared environment (*case dei bambini*) where the child can “polarize its attention” and discover its own errors in using various objects and the specially prepared “materials” (inserts, carved letters, etc.). Montessori’s method has often been interpreted in a naturalistic sense, in the manner of Rousseau, but it is also susceptible to a correct interpretation and implementation in religious instruction (cf. M. Montessori, *I bambini vivi-venti nella Chiesa*, Naples, 1922), as maintained by Fr. Mario Barbera (*Le case dei bambini e il metodo Montessori*, Rome, 1927; and in *La Civiltà Cattolica*, 1919, 11: 37, 219, 430; 1922, IV: 451; 1930, 11: 238).
The organization of kindergartens in Italy saw state intervention, first through the Ministry of the Interior and later through the Ministry of Public Instruction. With Royal Decree no. 2185 of October 10, 1923, a legal qualification was established for female kindergarten teachers after a three-year course at the “School of Method,” along with programs for the “preparatory grade” or “maternal school”: religion, prayer, religious songs, spontaneous drawing, recitation, gymnastic games, hygienic habits, simple manual work exercises, gardening, basic knowledge, and the correction of popular prejudices and superstitions.
Other notable initiatives include the infant schools of Montese and Rovigliano, founded for the children of farmers by Alice and L. Franchetti, where the cultivation of nature was central and children engaged in gardening and farm work; the kindergarten attached to the *Scuola rinnovata* [Renewed School] of Giuseppina Pizzigoni in Milan, where gardening was combined with fostering children’s initiative and self-discipline; and the kindergarten of Rina Nigrisoli in Portomaggiore (Ferrara), where nature was experienced in a Pascolian spirit through outdoor games and field cultivation.
Outside Italy, noteworthy experiments include those of John Dewey (q.v.) in the United States and Ovide Decroly (q.v.) in Belgium. Dewey’s kindergarten is based on children’s instinct for association and action. Decroly aimed to prepare the child for life by creating a natural and unconventional environment so that there would be no gap or discordance between school and life.
From 1870 onward, kindergartens in Italy grew steadily in both number and enrollment. For example, in 1881–82 there were 2,516 kindergartens with 243,972 enrolled children; in 1901–1902, 2,314 kindergartens with 355,594 children; by 1921–22, there were 5,902 kindergartens with 397,610 children; and by 1941–42, there were 10,633 kindergartens with 755,489 children (cf. *La politica e la legislazione scolastica in Italia dal 1922 al 1943*, Milan, 1947, pp. 422–23).
For rural kindergartens, see **SCUOLE RURALI**. — See Pl. XVII.