A Brief Photo History of Kentucky Education

The Kindergarten movement peaked during the fifty years before World War I. Kentucky was one source of national leadership from the start. Louisville and Lexington led the state's participation on the local level, but there were also some notable initiatives underway in Frankfort and Hopkinsville at an early date. Lucy Walby was a student of Elzabeth Harrison, a Fayette County native who founded and co-directed the famous Kindergarten Training School in Chicago. She spent most of her career -- from 1903 until retirement in 1931 -- as head of the kindergarten at Lexington's Maxwell School. Throughout her life, Walby was also active in the Episcopal Church, whose presence in the Three Forks area of the Kentucky River dates back to the formation of Lee County in 1870. The looped balls strewn on the floor in front of the children in this photograph was made of a soft, crocheted wool and came in all the colors of the rainbow. The first and simiplest in a series of twenty "gifts" designed by Freidrich Froebel, the balls had symbolic as well as psycho-motor significance. The piano and the circular seating arrangement, like the tender ages of the children are also in keeping with the distinctive aims and approach of the kindergarten in its classical phase.

See Martha King Alexander, Seventy-Three Years of Kindergarten in Kentucky (Nashville, 1938), Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present (Yale, 1995), and Norman Brostereman, Inventing Kindergarten (Harry N. Abrams, 1997). For more on the settlement schools -- Hindman in particular -- see David E. Whisnant, All that is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (North Carolina, 1983).



Kindergarten Class. Episcopal Mission School. Proctor (Lee County), Summer c. 1900 Lucy Walby Scrapbook. University Archives. University of Kentucky Libraries.
The Kindergarten movement peaked during the fifty years before World War I. Kentucky was one source of national leadership from the start. Louisville and Lexington led the state's participation on the local level, but there were also some notable initiatives underway in Frankfort and Hopkinsville at an early date. Lucy Walby was a student of Elzabeth Harrison, a Fayette County native who founded and co-directed the famous Kindergarten Training School in Chicago. She spent most of her career -- from 1903 until retirement in 1931 -- as head of the kindergarten at Lexington's Maxwell School. Throughout her life, Walby was also active in the Episcopal Church, whose presence in the Three Forks area of the Kentucky River dates back to the formation of Lee County in 1870. The looped balls strewn on the floor in front of the children in this photograph was made of a soft, crocheted wool and came in all the colors of the rainbow. The first and simiplest in a series of twenty "gifts" designed by Freidrich Froebel, the balls had symbolic as well as psycho-motor significance. The piano and the circular seating arrangement, like the tender ages of the children are also in keeping with the distinctive aims and approach of the kindergarten in its classical phase. See Martha King Alexander, Seventy-Three Years of Kindergarten in Kentucky (Nashville, 1938), Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present (Yale, 1995), and Norman Brostereman, Inventing Kindergarten (Harry N. Abrams, 1997). For more on the settlement schools -- Hindman in particular -- see David E. Whisnant, *All that is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region* (North Carolina, 1983).

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