public expense along these lines and more money for other purposes.”22 Such thinking was, of course, common among supporters of progressive reforms in education across the United States.
For Harriet, education at the kindergarten level must “develop in these citizens of today as well as tomorrow the habits, attitudes, appreciations, and skills necessary for the life in democracy.”23 Furthermore, this primary instruction would provide miniature democracies where “situations arise which give opportunity for the development of . . . habits, attitudes, appreciations, and skills necessary for life.” Perhaps most importantly, young pupils would be taught to think for themselves, to reason, to judge, and to evaluate the facts of experience. Since environments change, set and static standards of conduct would not be enough. Morality, correctly understood, “is an active attitude, not a passive one. Habit must be formed through action. We must learn to be good.” Kindergarten education, through teaching perseverance, flexibility, cooperation, initiative, self-control, and lifelong reasoning skills, would produce citizens capable of sustaining both democracy and progress in social institutions.24
Mead and Harriet Castle, like Dewey, viewed the teacher’s role as that of a skilled guide. The kindergarten teacher should create ideal situations for both sense training and discipline of thought. All instruction should recall that thinking does not occur for its own sake. Rather, “it arises from the need of meeting some difficulty, in reflecting upon the best way of overcoming it, and thus leads to planning . . . mentally the results to be reached, and deciding upon the steps necessary and their serial order.”25 With Dewey, Harriet Castle felt that this was the best preparation for pure speculation or abstract investigation. Thought, she argued with Dewey, begins with a difficulty, moves through a resolution, and may appropriately end with an abstract speculation or abstraction. In this last stage, solutions to difficulties or problems may be generalized to similar difficulties or problems.
Harriet left her most immediate stamp on the training of teachers and the education of young ones through her choice of the FKCAA’s first permanent supervisor. In 1896, while spending the summer with the Meads, she devoted her free hours to reviewing applications from aspirants responding to her letters sent to school district leaders. Harriet’s dream of finding an enthusiastic supporter of Dewey’s ideas was fulfilled when she met the brilliant Chicagoan Frances Lawrence (1876—1935) and hired her away from the Sheboygan, Wisconsin, school system on August 1. Frances would guide instruction at the FKCAA for the next thirty-nine years.
Chicago-born Frances Lawrence, an 1893 graduate of the Chicago Kindergarten College, had studied and absorbed the pedagogy of John Dewey. With Harriet’s mandate to be daring in applying Dewey’s ideas to kindergarten education in Hawaii, Superintendent Lawrence arrived in Hawaii in 1896 and made some immediate changes. For example, she abandoned paper pricking, mat weaving, and the formal use of Froebel’s “gifts” used in the early free kindergartens in favor of free play, rhythm construction, and creative art on open lanais or outside.26 These child-centered improvements would allow children to develop their senses, their imagination, and their capacity to live cooperatively with other children.
Lawrence’s reforms also included giving children free access to suitable art materials so as to encourage drawing, modeling, painting, and construction. In more traditional education, access to these materials was limited, and young artists were encouraged to imitate accepted drawings rather than to experiment. In the same way, Lawrence felt music and rhythm were important in the educational process. Her kindergartens avoided the mechanical “lessons” and emphasis on accuracy of tone characteristic of formalist education. Instead, they stressed opportunities for voluntary play, experimentation with sounds, and creative initiative. Spontaneity of response and freedom for joyous participation, rather than precision of movement and controlled or ordered action, became the aim of Lawrence’s kindergartens. These were typically taught in situations involving rhythmic play and games, in singing, and in free experimentation with simple musical instruments such as the gourd or drum. Marching games and outdoor experiences on the swing and the seesaw provided opportunities for rhythmic movement. Lawrence saw the additional benefit from this expression being the development of self-confidence and a renewed interest in learning. Her ideal was to work with nature, not against it. Like Dewey, she taught that a child’s best chance for happy, useful living lies in the effort to develop the child’s capacities, not to punish his or her deficiencies.
The same general idea was true of the social arts of drama, pageantry, storytelling, and reading. Unlike traditional kindergartens, which stressed control, memorization, and repetition of stories read by the teacher, Lawrence’s progressive sense was that children’s love of acting was natural and should be encouraged. Children were expected to invent stories and to relate them to the class. The teacher was more of a facilitator of discussion than an authoritarian figure requiring “right” answers to questions about standard stories read to a group. Furthermore, Lawrence saw that Hawaii presented special opportunities for the exercise of dramatic talent and story use.
In her concern to integrate the social arts into the academic curriculum, then, Lawrence revealed her Deweyite lack of relish for the historic separation of labor and leisure, man and nature, thought and action, individuality and association, method and subject matter, mind and behavior. For her, intelligence in the child was, as for Dewey, the purposeful reorganization, through action, of the material of experience.
After 1900, the policy of segregation would gradually be replaced with complete integration.27 This was partly because of Hawaii’s ethnic diversity and partly because of the progressive assumption that democracy would be achieved only as schooling was popularized in character as well as clientele. Democracy could not flourish, progressives tended to feel, where there was segregated education. Democracy demanded a universal education in the problems of living together and of advancing society’s interests. Segregated schools could not reflect reality in Hawaii and, therefore, could not be the center of the struggle for a better life.28
By 1900, the FKCAA had committed itself to desegregated education. It also committed itself to admit children of all ethnic groups in approximately the ratio found in Honolulu’s population. Further, since the Castle family had been joined by other generous donors, children could be admitted without consideration as to their parents’ economic or social status. For placement purposes, applicants were examined for physical size, mental age, maturation, and evidence that they could profit from the education offered. Only children of severe mental incapacity were excluded. In the twentieth century, as the application lists grew longer, the demand for more schools increased.29
Although the private sector provided the major initiative, the territorial government entered the field in 1919. In a tentative fashion, funds were provided for kindergartens at Waialua on Oahu, Kahului on Maui, and Hilo on the Big Island. In June 1921, enrollment reached 587, but fell to 52 a year later. Because of discontinued funding, and perhaps because the private sector dominated the field at no cost to the public, public kindergartens disappeared until 1943.
In addition to her guidance of the kindergarten curriculum along progressive lines, Frances Lawrence continued the training of teachers, most of whom were high school graduates, in Dewey’s ideas. In 1894, the training school represented Harriet Castle’s goal of training Hawaiian and “foreign” girls for community service. Many of the early trainees came from the Kawaiahao Seminary, which later merged with Mill’s Institute to become today’s Mid-Pacific Institute. Others later came from the Kohala and Maunaolu Seminaries. During Frances Lawrence’s thirty-year tenure, fifty-nine young women received training in Dewey’s methods and took teaching positions in kindergartens. Gradually, however, the growing task of training teachers was absorbed by the Honolulu Normal School, created in 1896 and, after 1931, by the University of Hawaii.30
By 1900, Mead and the Castle Foundation’s goal of a comprehensive progressive education for Hawaii was still to be realized. Nonetheless, when Harriet reviewed the changes in the first five years of the FKCAA, she saw a continuing
