Marcy Whitebook, director emerita of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, was recently interviewed about the history of child care and about its future. Here’s an excerpt of what she said. 

Barbara Zheutlin: ECHOES [The Early Childhood History Organizing Ethos and Strategy project] demonstrates that child care and education programs initially evolved based on the needs of families. How did “care” and “education” get divided?

Marcy Whitebook:

When kindergartens and nurseries were getting started, parents didn’t have enough money to pay for the care and education of their youngest children. The early advocates saw that they needed public funding, even in those very earliest years, if they were going to be able to pay for care for the youngest children. But the public schools in most states had a narrow definition of education, they only recognized reading, writing, and arithmetic as “education.”

Why was kindergarten such a radical idea when it was started?

People didn’t think that little children could learn. So, the idea that you could teach young children was radical. And kindergarten introduced the idea that children learn through playing. Many didn’t understand that through play, children were learning.

What surprised you about the early years of kindergarten?

I was amazed to discover that kindergarten was originally intended, and then often offered, to 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds.

So, why do we think that kindergarten is only for 5-year-olds?

Unfortunately, to get kindergarten established in the public schools, those advocating for kindergarten had to compromise. They had to accept that kindergartens in public schools would primarily be for 5-year-olds, because including younger kids would have meant more kids, which would have cost more money.

So, advocates made a budget-driven compromise, and we are all living today with the consequences. We are still fighting to get early care and education for children under age 5 in this country.

Another surprise was learning that it took 150 years to get kindergartens into the public schools. For those of us trying to get accessible child care, this is truly sobering.

— “Women’s work? We need to make child care a national priority,” by Barbara Zheutlin, Berkeley News, March 30, 2023