the general role of Dewey was noted in Charlotte Dodge’s history of the FKCAA, his specific link to the association through Henry Castle and his sister Harriet has not previously been examined.7 At Oberlin College in Ohio in 1879, Henry Castle became the roommate and fast friend of George Herbert Mead. Indeed, Mead married Henry’s older sister, Helen K. Castle, in 1891. It was through Mead, an outstanding philosopher in his own right, that Henry and Harriet met and came to understand John Dewey’s philosophy and to recognize how it might revolutionize early education in Hawaii.8
As undergraduate students at Oberlin College and later as graduate students at Harvard, Mead and Castle spent many hours speaking of the instrumentalist and pragmatist challenges to traditional, more static, idealist philosophical systems. Mead, who later became one of the nation’s leading pragmatist philosophers from his important post as chairman of the University of Chicago’s Philosophy Department, spent many hours testing his ideas in conversations with Henry Castle.9 Later, after his marriage to Helen Castle, he served as a frequent host to Harriet Castle and John Dewey at the Mead home in Chicago. Thus, prior to the founding of the Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association in 1895, Harriet was fully impressed with, and knowledgeable of, the Dewey-Mead orientation to philosophical analysis and pedagogy. Through personal correspondence, reading, and lengthy discussions with Mead, Dewey, and her brother Henry, Harriet became convinced that early education should reflect the new view of human development being discussed in the highest corridors of academia.10
With Dewey, Mead and Castle understood that if education was to be relevant and meaningful in a modernist era, it would need to be transformed. Moreover, they wanted education to constantly expand the range of social situations in which individuals perceived issues and made and acted upon choices. They wanted schools to inculcate habits that would enable individuals to control their surroundings rather than merely adapt to them. Traditional formal education, which emphasized memorization and conformity to lessons taught by an authoritarian teacher, was incapable of providing an education that would improve society by making it more “worthy and harmonious.”11 No longer isolated from the reality of a quickly changing society, the progressive school would become “an embryonic community life” active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society. As Dewey said:
When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious.12
Dewey’s educational theory included a condemnation of “the old school” for the passivity of its methods and the rigid uniformity of its curriculum. For too long the educational center of gravity had been “in the teacher, the textbook, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself.”13 The essence of the new pedagogy was to shift this center of gravity back to the child. The business of the new school would be to
not only facilitate and enrich the growth of the individual child, but also to supply the same results, and for some, technical information and discipline that have been the ideas of education in the past.14
Throughout the 1890s, Harriet Castle traveled to leading kindergartens on the mainland and visited with leaders of the incipient movement of progressive education and teacher training. In 1897, she toured Chicago’s famed Hull House as a guest of Jane Addams and Addams’s assistant, Alice Holden. Harriet was particularly interested in the efforts of the distinguished Hull House staff to apply some of the innovative ideas of Dewey to educational conditions in Chicago.15 Most importantly, she grew increasingly confident that Hawaii could also have success with Dewey’s educational innovation.16
As financial secretary for the FKCAA, Harriet was responsible for raising funds to make the organization viable, as well as for selecting personnel and preparing the annual report. In both her fund-raising and her personnel selection, she played a crucial role in setting the path for the organization for years to come. Her influence would prove to be crucial to the FKCAA’s implementation of Dewey’s ideas.
In her appeals to local businessmen, gifts to progressive kindergartens were presented as good investments and “a saver of future tax expenses for jails, prisons, and almshouses” in Hawaii. Further, adequately funded kindergartens were good influences against the “great cloud of anarchy that has been slowly gathering and spreading over the civilized nations of the earth.”17 One appeal, written to prospective donors in February of 1895, concluded that “we long to gather in all of the little ones whom we constantly see about the city, but our borders are so limited.”18 Other letters would give emphasis to the need by concluding, “The hope of the world lies in the children.”
After Henry’s death in 1895, Harriet’s interest in training teachers for progressive education began in earnest in 1896. In that year, she participated in the Chicago Froebel Association’s Training School for Kindergartners led by John Dewey. In this month-long seminar, she received intensive study in Dewey’s pedagogy and psychology. The Meads hosted her during her lengthy stay, and one can imagine that the day’s expert instruction became the evening’s source of penetrating discussion.
Harriet’s notes, which for a period were used to guide FKCAA education, emphasized the role kindergarten teachers could play in producing independent future citizens. Obedience was a means, not an end. Further, teachers must guide their immature charges, but the true object of education would be the development of reasoning, thinking individuals responsible for their own behavior. Most specifically, to become this thinking, reasoning, intelligent, self-directing individual, the child must begin by assuming responsibilities as soon as he or she is able to do so, adding to them from year to year. At ten, with but slight supervision, the child should be able to take care of his or her body, take baths, dress and undress, put clothes away, and keep possessions in order.19
In an important pamphlet prepared by Harriet to support her plea for funding, she gave clear expression to her faith in Dewey-style education. The pamphlet, entitled “The Kindergarten and the Public School,” was prepared after a lengthy 1897 tour of Columbia University Teachers College and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Both institutions were early leaders in the field of progressive education. The pamphlet was widely distributed to donors, community leaders, and prospective leaders alike. In it, Harriet argues that the object of the kindergarten is to develop the whole child in a balanced fashion. For her, the foundations of this method are the facts attested to by science and experience. These, as she saw it, were:
1. The brain grows with the greatest rapidity between the ages of three and seven. The increase of later years is small compared with its growth in these years.
2. Two weeks practice of holding objects in his right hand will make the infant in his first year right handed for life.
3. This is the age of sense perception; the child learns from what he sees, hears, tastes, touches, and smells; and, therefore, as his environment is, so will he be.
4. If the child is saved to a good life, there will be no grown-up man to punish.
5. Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.20
The pamphlet quotes authorities who supported Mead’s vision of a kindergarten. For example, William T. Harris, U.S. commissioner of education under President Grover Cleveland (1893—1897), had claimed that “two years of the child’s life in the kindergarten will start into development activities of muscle and brain which will secure deftness and delicacy of industrial power in all after life.”21 Harriet added her own observation that the kindergarten would lead to permanent character changes. Specifically, kindergarten would mean “fewer saloons and better homes, fewer policemen,
