This article examines the work of Lady Nancy Astor (1879–1964) in campaigning for nursery education and nursery schools in Britain from the late 1920s until the Second World War. Arguably no elected politician in England at any time, including the present, has identified themselves more closely with the cause of nursery schooling in Britain. Historiography that focuses on the impact of exceptional “pioneers” is frequently hagiographical and emphasizes the actions of charismatic figures at the expense of contexts and the hidden political, economic, and social forces operating within them. The main assumption underlying the approach here is that individuals are themselves shaped by social relations and that their capacity to impact on events depends on the structure of social relations and their place within them. This formulation, although derived mainly from debates within Marxist theory, shares affinities with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who saw society as constituted by fields in which agents endowed with varying amounts of economic, cultural, and symbolic capital compete for scarce material and symbolic goods in “a general economy of practices.”

The Russian Revolution of February 1917 displaced the autocracy of the Romanov royal family and aimed to establish a liberal republican Russia. The Bolsheviks, who came to power a few months later in the revolution of October 1917, announced that their new policy in education “had no analogy in history.” Their reforms sought to establish a Marxist-based education system, in an attempt to raise new citizens for a new, communist society. Above all, the Bolsheviks regarded education as a means to engineer the ideal human being, the “new man” and the “new woman.”

Head Start, the federal program that provides preschool education, health, and social services for children from poor families, is one of the United States' most popular government programs. Created in 1965, it has endured as a symbol of commitment to children, serving just fewer than one million children a year in neighborhood sites across the country. Most accounts of Head Start's history do not start much before 1964 when Sargent Shriver, charged with directing Lyndon Johnson's antipoverty campaign, decided to focus funds on young children. Neither Shriver nor most of those he consulted in planning the new program were particularly conscious of earlier efforts to combat poverty by educating young children. Nevertheless, the program they designed carried forward important aspects of turn-of-the-twentieth-century free kindergartens and day nurseries, as well as the nursery schools sponsored by the federal government in the 1930s.

As examples from this issue show, early education practice around the world has long been intertwined and the care and education provided for young children in most places draws at least in part from non-indigenous sources. A review of the articles reveals numerous parallels and even direct linkages between U.S. early childhood advocates and educators and each of the countries highlighted. Similarities are to be found, for example, in their patterns of development and in the impediments faced by the advocates and founders of day nurseries, kindergartens, and nursery schools in each country. Collaboration between early childhood educators in the United States and their counterparts around the world, beginning in the 1800s with ocean voyages and postal mail, has grown today with the use of modern technology and the continuation of consultative visits by U.S. experts to many lands.

As a historian of early childhood education in German-speaking Europe, I am struck by the outstanding role that Friedrich Froebel, or rather his ideas, played in all the countries described in the six essays. This is not really new since even the first historiographic articles in German-speaking countries already pointed out Froebel's role internationally. The worldwide spread of Froebel's educational teachings remains the subject of German research to this day. And yet it is still so remarkable to see how Froebel's philosophy of education—which had its origins in the spirit of romanticism and which seems strange even to German audiences—has succeeded in establishing itself in different cultures and for different reasons. Just think of Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century (James C. Albisetti), of post-revolutionary Russia ruled by the Bolsheviks (Yordanka Valkanova), of Great Britain, France, and the United States. Even in Asian countries we can find evidence of Froebel's influence, for example, in Korea and in Japan (on Japan, Kathleen Uno). In spite of the differences between these countries and their cultures, Froebel's pedagogy has succeeded in playing an influential role in all of them. Extant institutions for the care and education of preschool children developed into modern kindergartens under the influence of Froebel's teachings. In the end it was always about making it possible for young children to learn and, at the same time, taking into account the very special way learning occurs in these early years as an active, action-based and almost effortless kind of learning. Froebel found an answer to this problem. With his gifts he gave the answer in a simple and yet brilliant manner which was, despite its origins in German idealism, apparently unrelated to culture.