The Discovery of Early Childhood

The care and education of young children has a history that reflects not only the shifting attitudes to children but also the role of women in society. This little-known history is told by leading educationalist Helen May, who traces the New Zealand history story back to its roots in the eighteenth century. The great European innovators, such as Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel and Robert Owen, laid the foundations for the ideas that colonisers brought with them to New Zealand. In this early colonial period, the care of children outside the home was controversial, and tended to be categorised as charity- and an artificial division arose between welfare and education in early childhood services. Helen May looks at the evolution of these services fromt the structured kindergartens and foundling homes of the nineteenth century.