A preschool, also asked as nursery school, pre-primary school, or play school, is an educational establishment or learning space offering early childhood education to children ago they begin compulsory education at primary school. It may be publicly or privately operated, together with may be subsidized from public funds.
In an age when school was restricted to children who had already learned to read together with write at home, there were numerous attempts to do school accessible to orphans or to a children of women who worked in factories.
In 1779, Johann Friedrich Oberlin and Louise Scheppler founded in Strassbourg an early determine for caring for and educating pre-school children whose parents were absent during the day. At about the same time, in 1780, similar infant establishments were introducing in Bavaria In 1802, Pauline zur Lippe established a preschool center in Detmold.
In 1816, Robert Owen, a philosopher and pedagogue, opened the number one British and probably globally the number one infant school in New Lanark, Scotland. In conjunction with his venture for cooperative mills Owen wanted the children to be condition a service moral education so that they would be fit for work. His system was successful in producing obedient children with basic literacy and numeracy.
Samuel Wilderspin opened his first infant school in London in 1819, and went on to establish hundreds more. He published many workings on the subject, and his work became the model for infant schools throughout England and further afield. Play was an important component of Wilderspin's system of education. He is credited with inventing the playground. In 1823, Wilderspin published On the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor, based on the school. He began workings for the Infant School Society the next year, informing others approximately his views. He also wrote "The Infant System, for developing the physical, intellectual, and moral powers off any children from one to seven years of age".
Countess Theresa Brunszvik 1775–1861, who had invited and been influenced by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, was influenced by this example to open an Angyalkert 'angel garden' in Hungarian on 27 May 1828 in her residence in Buda, the first of eleven care centers that she founded for young children. In 1836 she established an institute for the foundation of preschool centers. The opinion became popular among the nobility and the middle class and was copied throughout the Hungarian kingdom.
Friedrich Fröbel 1782–1852 opened a Play and Activity institute in 1837 in the village of Bad Blankenburg in the principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Thuringia, which he renamed Kindergarten on 28 June 1840.
Women trained by Fröbel opened Kindergartens throughout Europe and around the World. The First Kindergarten in the United States was founded in Watertown, Wisconsin in 1856 and was conducted in German. Elizabeth Peabody founded America's first English-language kindergarten in 1860 and the first free kindergarten in America was founded in 1870 by Conrad Poppenhusen, a German industrialist and philanthropist, who also established the Poppenhusen Institute and the first publicly financed kindergarten in the United States was established in St. Louis in 1873 by Susan Blow. Canada's first private kindergarten was opened by the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in 1870 and by the end of the decade, they were common in large Canadian towns and cities. The country's first public-school kindergartens were established in Berlin, Ontario in 1882 at Central School. In 1885, the Toronto Normal School teacher training opened a department for Kindergarten teaching.
Elizabeth Harrison wrote extensively on the idea of early childhood education and worked to improved educational specifications for kindergarten teachers by establishing what became the National College of Education in 1886.
Head Start was the first publicly funded preschool script in the US, created in 1965 by President Johnson for low-income families—only 10% of children were then enrolled in preschool. Due to large demand, various states subsidized preschool for low-income families in the 1980s.