Both the high school and the preschool were nineteenth-century innovations. However, only after 1900 did either institution affect the lives of millions of American youngsters. Early-twentieth-century American leaders thought expanded secondary education was crucial to democracy's survival. By the 1990s, many also supported public training of children aged two to five as “central to the future of American childhood.”

That claim stirred controversy but also illustrated another chain of connections between social science theory and social policy. Politicians who said that the early years were absolutely vital to child development repeated, although often in distorted ways, ideas first promoted by psychologists. Moreover, as had youth training programs, early childhood education initiatives failed to learn lessons from their predecessors, perhaps because few remembered that any existed.

This chapter's analysis of twentieth-century educational policy for children under the age of six surveys the legacies of the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Child Protection Act and the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) nursery schools, reviews the pivotal importance of the Head Start program and assesses a late-twentieth-century middle-class embrace of preschools. But early childhood education had nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century origins that, first, require a brief examination.

The Infant Schools

In the early nineteenth century, public officials, especially in New England, promoted “infant schools.” Worried that Irish and German newcomers neglected the proper moral training of their children, Massachusetts, for instance, required towns of more than fifty families to establish classes for very young children, usually taught by respectable widows who otherwise might have needed alms.