Kindergarten Pioneer

Background.

Looking back over the course of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's life, every important development in her early years seems to have prepared her for a life in educational reform and a role as America's foremost advocate of kindergarten education. Her mother, Elizabeth Palmer, was an "independent, well educated" woman who managed a boardinghouse for students in Atkinson, New Hampshire, and went by the name of the "Walking Dictionary" because her extensive reading enabled her to answer all questions put to her by the boarders. Palmer married Nathaniel Peabody, a teacher at the academy, in November 1802 and moved to Andover, Massachusetts, where they administered the North Andover Free School. In 1804 they moved again, to Billerica, Massachusetts, where Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was born on 16 May. There Elizabeth's mother established a boarding school for girls but abandoned it after two years and moved again...