Influenced by the work of early nineteenth-century Swiss theorist Pestalozzi, who emphasized moral education, humane pedagogical methods, different processes for different stages of learning, and connecting learning to the real world, the word kindergarten—“child garden”—was coined by German educator Freidrich Froebel.

Froebel believed that children needed to unite their spirits and their reason and be guided by an entity other than the family towards goodness.

Kindergartens arrived in America between 1848 and 1860, were incorporated into the school system in St. Louis by 1876, and subsequently emerged as the formal context in which children make the transition from home to school. This transition can be particularly difficult for children whose backgrounds, values and practices differ from the middle-class, Anglican values and practices which inform schools. In an attempt to ease this transition, Head Start was created under Title II of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. A program of child development for four- and five-year-olds from low-income homes, it targets children in what some educational psychologists call the critical period in human development, and it focuses on mental and physical health, welfare, recreation and remediation, as well as on intellectual development. Starting in 1965, Head Start has had high enrollment, and research indicates that the program succeeds in acculturating children to the culture of schooling.

The development of kindergartens has been characterized by a combination of attempting to structure children’s entry into formal schooling and striving to address social inequities. In the late 1960s, the work of Swiss psychologist Piaget and Italian physician and educator Montessori influenced the development of kindergartens as places for children to discover and learn at their own pace. The conflict between behaviorist models and more child-centered approaches to education has yielded various models of kindergartens, but they are generally conceptualized, and often mandated, as necessary to the initiation of children into formal schooling.