Pestalozzi’s ideas held important implications for evolving ideals of intensive mothering and domestic pedagogy. Children required much more “hands on” attention and instruction, and parents were consequently to constantly look for opportunities for learning in the “natural” setting of everyday life. This domestic literacy work was important not only for the development of the individual child, but, from Pestalozzi’s perspective, for solving the problems of an unjust and exploitative world. When he wrote Leonard and Gertrude in 1781 (translated and published in the United States in 1885), it was to illustrate “how the world might be regenerated through education; the mother, Gertrude, being the chief teacher” (1885, p. xviii). He outlined a method for mothers to teach children to talk, which, in close reading, seems more a curriculum for teaching literacy. It involved careful and precise instructions to mothers on how to teach sounds, then words, then sentences.

These painstakingly detailed directions to mothers emerged from Pestalozzi’s concern for the “gap that has arisen in the maze we call human culture,” through the inability of the “lowest classes” to speak, which he understood as the ability to make oneself understood to (and understood by) the ruling classes (Pestalozzi, 1885, p. 112–113). For example, according to Pestalozzi, “[the Indians’] lack of ‘proper’ speech…breed[s] a degraded race of men as sacrifices to their idols” (p. 112). In this way, his instructions in the proper use of “literate language” were also a means of distinguishing upper class families from “the lower classes” (p. 112–113). Here, domestic pedagogy served as a bridge between the sanctity of the domestic sphere and the legitimization of class and race supremacy. As has been noted earlier in this chapter, this suggests again that advice to mothers for teaching literacy to their children had the object not only to teaching children to read and write, but also to legitimize and maintain social class privilege and race supremacy discourses.

Pestalozzi’s ideas found new life and purpose in the work of Froebel, a student of his. As discussed in Chapter Three, Froebel’s influence upon the creation of the contemporary kindergarten movement is well documented (Dehli, 1994; Griffith, 1995; Griffith & Smith, 1990). His ideas about children’s learning were, like Pestalozzi’s, embedded in the normalization of traditional gendered divisions of labour associated with the “normal family” as well as intensive mothering and domestic pedagogy. A leader in the popularization of Froebel’s ideas was American, Andrea Hofer Proudfoot, editor of the Kindergarten Magazine and author of A Mother’s Ideals (1897), an advice manual for mothers that popularized the work of Froebel within the context of the burgeoning maternal feminist movement. Proudfoot called for Froebel’s ideals of the “new family” and the Kindergarten to become part of mothering practices and the everyday routines and relationships in homes:

[In his work] we get a glimpse of ideal family life in the Kindergarten, and if we have nothing better to build up to in our homes, we can make no mistake in aiming at that. Let us visit the kindergarten and learn its simplest lessons and emulate them in our homes. (Proudfoot, 1897, p. 135)