Kindergarten Origin: Who Invented It and Where the First Ones Opened

Kindergarten was born in Blankenburg, in Thuringia, where Friedrich Froebel opened a school for small children built around play. In Cremona, in northern Italy, a priest named Ferrante Aporti had already begun teaching small children to read a few years before. From there the story runs through the Agazzi sisters and Maria Montessori to Italy’s state nursery school of 1968 and the preschool of a 2003 law.

Before kindergarten: a mill village in Scotland

Something similar already existed in Scotland. In the industrial village of New Lanark, Robert Owen finished his Institute for the Formation of Character in 1816 and a school for the children the following year. While he ran the mills, children younger than 10 could not be employed there. Toddlers were looked after in a nursery as soon as they could walk, so their mothers could go back to work: the New Lanark Trust calls it, in practice, the world’s first workplace nursery. From 3 to 6, children moved up to the infant school, which focused on socialization. Pupils learned to share and to be kind to one another. Music and dance took up a lot of the day, and corporal punishment was banned.

Who invented kindergarten?

Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), written Fröbel in German, came up with the idea. Kindergarten is German for a garden of children. He had taught in Frankfurt, at a school that followed Pestalozzi’s methods. He had lived in Switzerland for some years when, in 1836, he came back to Germany and turned to children too young for school, designing toys for them to learn with.

Where was the first kindergarten?

In Blankenburg, Thuringia, though the year depends on whom you ask. The German Historical Institute and the Watertown Historical Society put the opening in 1840. The research library for the history of education at the DIPF dates it to 1837, and an article from 1937 marked the centenary counting from that year.

The DIPF library notes that Froebel saw play and activity as decisive for how a young child develops. He designed a set of play gifts, the Spielgaben, each with detailed instructions, and wrote nursery rhymes and songs. Kindergarten children spent a lot of time outdoors in nature, and their days mixed songs and poems with games that worked both body and mind. From 1842 women could train as kindergarten teachers on courses held in Blankenburg.

In August 1851 the Prussian ministry of religious affairs banned Froebel’s kindergartens, labelling them “atheistic and demagogic”. They were allowed again only in 1860, eight years after his death.

In the second half of the 1800s many of his students moved to the United States. Margarethe Meyer Schurz, born in Hamburg, had learned the principles of kindergarten from Froebel in person. In 1856 she started a small class in the family home in Watertown, Wisconsin, with about five children. In 1860 Elizabeth Peabody opened the country’s first English-language kindergarten in Boston. In September 1873 Susan Blow launched St. Louis’s first public kindergarten and ran it unpaid for eleven years; by 1879 the city’s public schools had 53 kindergarten classrooms.

Who was Ferrante Aporti?

Ferrante Aporti was born in 1791 in San Martino dell’Argine, in the province of Mantua, and was ordained a priest in 1815. At the Cremona seminary he taught church history and biblical exegesis, and from 1821 he was in charge of the province’s elementary schools. He first called his schools for little children infant schools; only later did they take the name that spread across Italy, asili infantili.

Accounts differ on when the first one opened. The Cremona State Archive says scholars of Aporti spent a long time arguing over that very date, and the sources place it like this:

Date	Who gives it	What it refers to
15 November 1827	Andrea Franzoni, in 1927	Aporti’s first infant school in Cremona
1827	Catholic Encyclopedia, 1907	An early infant school for poor children
1828	Cremona State Archive	First teaching trials with the young priest Alessandro Gallina; from December, the school in Palazzo Barbò
1828	Plaque on Via Palestro, Cremona	Italy’s first infant school, credited to Gallina as director
March 1829	Treccani	The opening of the first infant school

Gallina himself, though, when an article gave him all the credit for the first school, asked for a correction and acknowledged Aporti’s role.

The archive documents add that the Palazzo Barbò school charged fees, so it served families who could pay. Encouraged by the results, Aporti put forward a plan for poor children in 1830. Cremona’s first charity infant school, free of charge, opened on 18 February 1831 with 42 pupils, all boys; a girls’ section followed in 1832.

Practical example: if a test asks when Italy’s first infant school opened, the safest answer names Cremona and Aporti and explains that the proposed dates run from 1827 to 1829. 18 February 1831 is a separate milestone: the opening of the first charity school, the free one for the children of the poor.

To guide his teachers, Aporti had a manual for infant schools printed in Cremona in 1833, followed by a primer for young children in 1837. Similar schools then opened in several Italian cities. Writing in 1927, Andrea Franzoni said the institution and the manual spread throughout the peninsula despite opposition from various governments, and conservative circles of the time fought him as well. Treccani judges that his work mattered most for building a sense of national unity and liberal ideas during the Risorgimento, and ties his reputation to the schools more than to his books, among them the Elementi di pedagogia of 1847.

From July 1848 Aporti lived in exile in Piedmont, and that year he entered the Senate of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Also in 1848 the Piedmontese government chose him for the archdiocese of Genoa, but the pope did not ratify the choice. In 1849 he became head of the council of the University of Turin, where his course on teaching method drew large audiences. He died in Turin in 1858.

In 1927 the city of Cremona marked the centenary of the first school with a plaque calling him the first founder of infant schools in Italy. That same year the Fascist regime recast Aporti in political terms, as a forerunner of Fascism.

What children did in Aporti’s schools

Emma Gasperi, of the University of Padua, writes that in Italy the infant school was a school from the outset, whereas in other European countries it began as a place for minding children. In the infant schools of 1828-29, working-class children learned to read, write and count and studied the catechism; girls also did housework. Aporti gave the schools this academic side because he knew many of those poor children would never attend any other school.

The Cremona State Archive holds the timetable Aporti approved in November 1829, designed for children from two and a half to six. A month later Gallina wrote to him about the children’s physical, moral and intellectual progress.

Reading stayed on the timetable for decades. In 1880 the charity schools of Cremona were still teaching it, with a phonic-syllabic method; in 1890 Costantino Soldi, a member of the schools’ board, proposed dropping reading and writing for children under five.

Daily life had its own routines. Children ate their soup in shifts. In 1874 the school’s doctor proposed buying twice as many spoons, and another doctor, Francesco Robolotti, advised against it. During the cholera epidemic of 1837 the charity schools also took in children orphaned by the disease.

When Froebel’s ideas reached Italy

Froebel’s ideas spread to Italy in the second half of the 1800s. According to Gasperi they brought in an infant school closer to what children need, although Italians mostly applied them as a method. In Cremona, in 1889, the teachers of the infant schools went to lectures by Adolfo Pick, who promoted the German educator’s thinking.

The Agazzi sisters and the scuola materna

Rosa Agazzi was born in Volongo, in the province of Cremona, on 26 March 1866, and worked all her life alongside her sister Carolina. Their first posting was at Nave, near Brescia, in the 1889-90 school year. The infant school given to Carolina had 180 children and was housed in a large converted stable.

In 1895, with the encouragement of Pietro Pasquali, head of Brescia’s municipal elementary schools, they founded their first nursery school at Mompiano, a farming village on the edge of the city. In 1902 the Mompiano school was named a model rural infant school and began to receive visitors. By around 1919 teachers were travelling from Trieste to Brescia to train in the method.

Gasperi pictures early childhood education at the end of the 1800s as squeezed between the intellectualism of Aporti’s model and the formalism of Froebel’s, and sees the Agazzi sisters searching for a third way. Their method rests on learning by doing: games and building went hand in hand with the practical jobs of daily life, done indoors as well as in the garden. Children played at trades, at jobs in the workshop and the vegetable plot, and at housework. Each little one was paired with an older classmate who helped them.

Practical example: a child arrives at school with pockets full of buttons, ribbons, pebbles and bottle caps. Rosa Agazzi leaves them with the child and turns them into material for the lesson. The Agazzi method calls these pocket objects cianfrusaglie.

In Rome, on 6 January 1907, Maria Montessori opened the first Casa dei Bambini, or Children’s House, in the San Lorenzo district, then a very poor neighborhood. The class was set up inside public housing run by the Istituto dei beni stabili, headed by the engineer Edoardo Talamo. Montessori, one of the first women in Italy to earn a medical degree, had worked with children with intellectual disabilities before bringing her method to all children. In her classes children worked with materials she had made to her own specifications, in rooms scaled to their height, with independence as the goal.

Who	Where and when	For whom	What happened there
Ferrante Aporti	Cremona, 1827-1829 depending on the source	Children from two and a half to six; from 1831 also a free school for the poor	Reading, writing, sums, catechism
Friedrich Froebel	Blankenburg, 1837 or 1840	Children below school age	Play gifts, songs, poems, nature
Rosa and Carolina Agazzi	Mompiano (Brescia), 1895	Children of a farming village	Learning by doing, everyday tasks, pocket objects
Maria Montessori	Rome, San Lorenzo, 1907	Children living in public housing in a poor district	Purpose-made materials, child-sized classroom

From state nursery school to preschool in Italy

Law 444 of 18 March 1968 created the state nursery school, the scuola materna statale, for children aged three to six. According to Gasperi, the name scuola materna, tied to the Agazzi sisters’ work, was adopted on that occasion. The law gives the new school the aims of education, personal development, care and preparation for compulsory schooling, alongside the family. Enrollment is optional and attendance is free.

Law 53 of 28 March 2003, known as the Moratti reform, describes an Italian education system that starts with the scuola dell’infanzia, the preschool stage, followed by the first cycle (primary and lower secondary) and the second cycle. The law gives preschool three years and the task of supporting children’s emotional, motor, cognitive, moral, religious and social development. Its reorganization was set out in Presidential Decree 89 of 2009.

As of October 2026, Italy’s Ministry of Education and Merit presents preschool as the first step on the path through education, part of an integrated system for children from birth to six. It lasts three years and takes children aged three to five, and nobody is required to enroll. State preschool charges nothing for attendance, but families pay for meals, transport and extended hours.

Practical example: a girl born on 20 December turns three before 31 December, so under the Ministry’s rules she can enroll in preschool for the school year in which that birthday falls.