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The idea of universal pre‐kindergarten now enjoys nearly universal support. It is important at this juncture to understand what legacies we have inherited from the past, and what lessons we might learn from it. We must look beyond the lessons that advocates have already learned—namely that preschool should be framed in terms of education, provided to all children, and attached to K‐12 education—to recognize the complexity of fulfilling the promise of preschool.

The education reform movement of the 1980s drew preschool closer to the world of public education, leading to the spread of public pre‐kindergarten programs. Research on the long‐term benefits of quality preschool for disadvantaged children put preschool education on the national agenda of K‐12 education reform and bolstered the fortunes of the Head Start program. At the same time, advocates also pushed child care back onto the federal agenda, prompting unprecedented political debate over children's policy and securing a new federal commitment to supporting child care for low‐income families. Some reformers urged bringing preschool “into the education tent,” seeing the public K‐12 system as a more secure home for early childhood education. Nevertheless, the relationship between private providers and public school educators was often marked by mistrust and competition.

Leaders in four states, inspired in different ways by the intersection of economics and education reform, dramatically expanded publicly‐supported pre‐kindergarten in the 1990s. In Georgia, Gov. Zell Miller latched onto the idea of pre‐kindergarten as a means of improving education and boosting his state's economy; he ultimately made the program universal, creating a broad constituency. In Oklahoma, pre‐kindergarten was part of the reform demanded by the state legislature when the K‐12 system faced a fiscal crisis. Here education officials and legislators took the lead, quietly expanding their school‐based program to make it universal. In New York, early childhood advocates mobilized to implement a universal program at a time of economic growth, but were stalled for a number of years by fiscal crises and the opposition of their governor. New Jersey's preschool expansion, on the other hand, was driven by a court's ruling that the state must provide more funding to children in its most disadvantaged school districts. Each of these states helped lay the groundwork for a movement for “preschool for all.”

In many countries around the world, boys are not faring as well as girls academically. The lack of success that young boys are experiencing is a gender equity issue, and calls for the intentional focus and concerted effort that has worked so well over the past several decades to address inequities in girls’ education. This chapter synthesizes research from the United States and from countries around the world that documents the difficulties that boys are experiencing in school and the strategies that are being employed to remedy the situation. It focuses in particular on how boys are faring in the increasingly academic, teacher-directed approach to early childhood education. Drawing on evidence from programs from nations and states around the world, it goes on to propose strategies to reduce the negative educational outcomes that disproportionately affect boys during the early years and beyond.

This chapter focuses on the women's benevolent institutions. They were in place in 1880 dispensing aid on a regular basis. By ministering the poor, benevolent ladies understood the degree of dependency that was created through increased industrialization and growth. Catholic women's religious orders were the first to build benevolent institutions in Galveston. Ursuline nuns accompanied Bishop John Mary Odin to Galveston and formed the Ursuline Academy and convent. They acted as nurses. They converted their convent to a military hospital during the Civil War. Galveston's middle- and upper-class women sought to capitalize on the wave of pride and donation to build institutions of their own — for children and old women. Lasker Home for Homeless Children and the Johanna Runge Free Kindergarten pulled women toward a greater sense of civic and community responsibility. These institutions were temporary shelters for children whose family was unable to offer an education.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya describes what she was like at five years old. She describes her physical features and recounts how she would run on tiptoe, making holes in her shoes. She naively loved Delibes's waltz from Coppélia and watched a cadet band played it on Sretensky Boulevard during holidays. She attended kindergarten located in the present Moscow City Council building. She had her first trip to the theater when she was five to watch the play entitled Don't Joke with Love.

This chapter discusses the Stanley internees' activities during internment at the camp. It describes how kindergarten and transition classes were set up in St Stephen's College Hall for children five to eight years old, as well as junior school classes for eight to twelve year-olds and senior school for those up to eighteen. It notes that for the first few weeks the American children received separate instruction, but beginning in April 1942, the schools were combined. It observes that with more than two hundred children in the Camp as well as teachers and administrators from the Education Department, the University of Hong Kong and a number of primary, middle, and other schools, it is not surprising that very early on internment plans were made for education. It reports that Lancelot Forster was the chairman of the Education Committee which was subsequently formed and held weekly meetings throughout internment.

Unlike colonial medical care, colonial classroom teaching continued to be restricted mostly to Eurasian females with teacher training as the focus. A new European Code was introduced in 1883 in north India that created official legal boundaries that formalised the racialization of colonial female teaching aimed principally at producing Eurasian teachers. A new influx of European women professionals to India began after the opening of the Suez canal in 1869. They deployed new networks of limited interaction. Now identified by name by the raj, these women professional teachers set about capturing an emerging middle class female student market, transferring accomplishments education more directly from Europe. The transference forced them to negotiate new feminine cultural terrain in India and, in this competitive market, compete with each other in ways that showed strong variability in their willingness to accommodate new teacher training approaches, particularly Froebel kindergarten philosophy. This chapter also identifies luminaries from this European cohort who were able to indigenize European pedagogy for the benefit of young learners who were Indian girls.

Asserting the right to childhood, women in California added free kindergartens to the charitable landscape, starting in the late 1870s. They followed Friedrich Frobel, Elizabeth Peabody, and Caroline Severance to argue children learned through play; they also wanted to socialize working class children. After locating the kindergarten movement in global culture, the story returns to San Francisco where Kate Wiggin opened a free kindergarten in Tar Flat, the first on the West Coast. The charitable public eagerly supported it, and other women followed in Oakland, including Elizabeth Betts, Wiggin’s student at the California Kindergarten Training School. As the Women’s Christian Temperance Union escalated its campaign in California, Betts repurposed a saloon, turning a disreputable male preserve into a woman’s space, the West Oakland Free Kindergarten. During the devastating 1890s depression, as a new mood flowered in California politics and the Women’s Congress convened, Elizabeth Watt decided to expand the school.

The educational report for 1937 was a mixed one. The declining population at Riverdale led to the termination of the kindergarten class. The continued emphasis on vocational training made little sense in an era when activists had taken to the streets to open up Harlem's workforce to all professions. One question was why they insisted on offering vocational classes when these skills offered limited marketable opportunities. The skimpy record indicates that despite the institution's aloofness from Harlem, community leaders sought to make the children happy. The Colored Orphan Asylum's challenge was to provide adequate resources for children still at Riverdale and for those who were boarded out with families. The boarding home committee faced difficulty in finding adequate foster care homes, both because most blacks had low incomes and because the Negro sections in the greater New York City area offered “poor and inadequate housing condition.”

This chapter examines the relationship between local conditions and national organization building at the turn of the twentieth century in two major cities: Atlanta and New York City. It examines how different local conditions produced various organizing strategies and emphases and traces how these dissimilar local features of racial justice organizing fostered contrasts in the organizing models of national organizations. Continuing with this theme, the chapter analyzes the early organizational model of the National Urban League and assesses the contours of its agreement with the NAACP to "divide jurisdiction" by each specializing in distinct sets of issues and strategies.

This chapter argues that the role of the National Association of Colored Women in early law-related civil rights activism should be reconceptualized to emphasize the importance of African American club women's work in pushing the boundaries of the public/private divide. These activists built private social welfare institutions to serve African Americans' communities excluded from the benefits of the emerging social welfare state—as a first step that utilized the avenues for agency presented by the political conditions of the times—and then often followed up these efforts with requests that the public institutions of the state take over or fund institutions built through private, voluntarist efforts.

This chapter examines the history of kindergarten education in Great Britain. It explains that Friedrich Froebel's system of teaching very young children through play, song, dance, and outdoor pursuits was introduced in Britain in the kindergarten for children opened by Johannes and Bertha Ronge in Tavistock Place in Bloomsbury in the 1850s. The chapter discusses Bertha's training under Froebel and how the Ronge came to acquire a location for their school in Bloomsbury.

This chapter analyzes how the discourse of emotional intelligence intersects with national curriculum efforts such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core, as well as how these discourses play out in an actual kindergarten classroom. Emotional management dovetails with physical regulation to teach young children how to manage themselves for their own success; the chapter shows how this involves the expression rather than suppression of emotions and thus intersects with neoliberal notions of self-management. This chapter lays the groundwork for the later argument about educational media, showing how kids’ television programming prepares kids for a successful school experience.