Susan E. Blow mother of Kindergarten

Susan E. Blow was the founder of the first successful public school Kindergarten in St. Louis, Missouri and founded a training school for other teachers in 1874. She ended here career at Columbia Teachers College, NYC.

As stated by Miss Blow,

"Only what he himself has perceived of the visible and tangible properties of things can serve as the basis of thought, and upon the vividness and completeness of the impressions made upon him by external objects will depend the clearness of his inferences and the correctness of his judgments."

In other words, children should be learning from real experiences. Putting wood shops in schools, real objects, real tools is one easy way to bring real experience to students completely lost in abstraction.

But now, with computers, we can throw 3 hundred years of pedagogy, based on close scientific observation of children safely aside, right?

These days, schools are attempting to make greater use of high speed internet, faster computers, and virtual reality games to create a sense of involvement. That should allow for tremendous cost savings as teaching is outsourced to developing nations. Won't that be fun? Imagine turning your little darling over to tech support.