Elizabeth Peabody

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, (May 16, 1804-January 3, 1894) was a teacher and educational reformer, founder of the Kindergarten system in the United States, and an advocate of Native American rights and education. She was a prominent figure with the Transcendental Movement publishing their literary journal The Dial. In 1849, in the periodical Aesthetic Papers she published excerpts of Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. She supported important writers of that era such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller with her bookstore and publishing house that she operated in Boston, the seat of cultural and intellectual thought in America in the mid-1800s. She was also instrumental in bringing to publication Paiute Indian activist, Sarah Winnemucca's autobiography Life Among the Paiutes.

Early Life and Influences

She was born in Billerica, Massachusetts. Peabody's father was the dentist Nathaniel Peabody and her mother was Elizabeth Palmer. She had two brothers; her sisters were Sophia Amelia Peabody (who married Nathaniel Hawthorne) and Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, (who married educator Horace Mann.)

In childhood she was influenced by her mother's educational and moral philosophy which was strongly rooted in Unitarianism.

Educational Philosophy and early experiments

One of her mentors was Dr. William Ellery Channing who is usually called the "father of Unitarianism," and uncle of the transcendalist poet with the same name.

From 1834-1835, she worked as assistant teacher to Bronson Alcott at his famous experimental Temple School in Boston. The school was forced to close when parents withdrew their students due to Alcott's coming "dangerously" close to teaching students about sex education or what was euphemistically referred to in those times as "the facts of life."

After the school closed, Peabody published Record of a School, outlining Alcott's philosophy of early childhood education which held that teaching should elicit truth and morality from children rather than merely instill factual information. Alcott and Peabody were both practicioners of the Socratic method which advocates using questioning to lead students to deeper thought and higher learning.

It was in her shop, The 13 West Street Bookstore in Boston, that the transcendentalists "conversations" were held, organized by Margaret Fuller, and attended by Lydia Emerson, abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, and Sophia Dana Ripley, a founder of the experimental community Brook Farm, among others.

Advocate for Kindergartens

In 1839, she decided to return to her interest in early childhood education and decided to focus on the establishment of kindergartens in the public school system which she did with "missionary zeal." ref

At the time of the opening of her own kindergarten in 1860, the concept of providing formal schooling for children younger than six was largely confined to German practice.T hrough her own school, and as editor of the Kindergarten Messenger (1873-77), Peabody helped kindergarten education become an accepted institution in the United States. She also wrote numerous books and articles in support of the cause.

The extent of her influence is apparent in a statement submitted to Congress on February 12, 1897, in support of free kindergartens:

The advantage to the community in utilizing the age from 4 to 6 in training the hand and eye; in developing the habits of cleanliness, politeness, self-control, urbanity, industry; in training the mind to understand numbers and geometric forms, to invent combinations of figures and shapes, and to represent them with the pencil—these and other valuable lessons… will, I think, ultimately prevail in securing to us the establishment of this beneficent institution in all the city school systems of our country.

(Source: Library of Congress Today in History: May 16)

Later life and work

Peabody wasw also an advocate of antislavery and of Spiritualism. Abolitionist minister Theodore Parker praised her as "a woman of most astonishing powers ... many-sidedness and largeness of soul ... rare qualities of head and heart ... A good analyst of character, a free spirit, kind, generous, noble."