Patty Smith Hill

• Patty Smith Hill
• Born: May 27, 1868
• Died: May 25, 1946

Leader of the kindergarten and nursery school reform movement, was born in Anchorage, Kentucky, the fourth of six children and third daughter of William Wallace Hill, a Presbyterian minister, and Martha Jane (Smith) Hill, a native of Danville, Kentucky, who had completed a private course of study at the all-male Center College. William Hill had been an editor of the weekly Presbyterian Herald before the Civil War and then turned his attention to women’s higher education. In 1861 he became principal of Bellewood Female Seminary in Anchorage, and then president of Synodical Female College in Fulton, Missouri, until shortly before his death in 1878. Patty Hill grew up in an intellectual, creative, free, though not undisciplined, household, where each child was permitted to develop his independent potential. Her parents strongly believed that girls should have a career as a realistic alternative to marriage.

She was thus encouraged to seek higher education, and she enrolled in Louisville Collegiate Institute, completing a classical education course in 1887. After graduating she entered the first class of Anna E. Bryan’s kindergarten training school—having grown up in a large family, she had become interested in working with small children. Anna Bryan had rejected the work of Fredrich Froebel, which concentrated on a set curriculum of play materials and games. Instead, she experimented with ideas and methods based on children’s natural play habits. She influenced her young protégé, and, after completing the course in 1889, Hill became head of Miss Bryan’s demonstration kindergarten. These two women attended the National Educational Association meeting in 1890, presenting their educational theories, which stressed meaningful play experiences that were real to children and that were based on the child’s natural play instincts. Hill viewed kindergarten as the first stage in which children learned the basic elements of life as they solved problems they met in their play activities. Thus, creative, problem-solving, unrestricted projects had to be provided for the young child. Moreover, in her opinion, there was a need for a flexible classroom atmosphere for preschool learning, rather than the strict formalism of Froebel’s approach.

When Bryan moved to Chicago in 1893, Hill became the head of the Louisville Free Kindergarten Association and its training school, and under her leadership the school gained a national reputation. The two women continued to collaborate, and in 1896 they attended a summer institute run by G. Stanley Hall, a leader in the child-study movement, at Clark University.

In 1904 James Russell, dean of Teachers College at Columbia University, invited her to lecture jointly in the spring 1905 term with Susan B. Blow, a disciple of Froebel’s. Hill so impressed her audiences during their lively debates on educational methods and theories that she was invited back the following term, and in 1906 was appointed to a permanent faculty position. For the next thirty years she used Columbia as a forum to develop and spread her views. Although she relied heavily on a planned-projects methodology developed by John Dewey, in the 1920s her work led her to become increasingly interested in behavioralism. This school of thought believed that teachers should regard the purpose of education as developing desirable traits and habits in children.

In 1910 Hill was selected head of her own department of early childhood education. She was the main spirit behind the curriculum developed for the Horace Mann Kindergarten at Columbia University. This school, which became a research laboratory on education, explored and established guidelines for young children’s realistic learning experiences that were an alternative to Froebel’s standards. The resulting reformed curriculum was published in 1923 in A Conduct Curriculum for Kindergarten and First Grade. It contained an inventory of habits that children needed to develop and the projects that were required to instill each trait in a child. This list became a basic reference tool in American kindergartens.

Hill worked with other leaders of the educational reform movement throughout her career. She and Francis W. Parker, head of the Cook County Normal School in Chicago, collaborated to unify the kindergarten and elementary school curriculums and fought the move to push reading into the kindergarten classroom. She also worked to develop prekindergarten education as the groundwork for the mental and physical health of each child. Additionally, Hill created a set of large-scale building blocks, which bear her name, that permitted children to play inside the structures they built. With her sister, she wrote songs for young children including “Good Morning to All,” better known as “Happy Birthday to You.”

Patty Hill’s belief in the need to study children empirically led her to help found the Institute of Child Welfare Research at Teachers College in 1924. In 1925 she induced Columbia University to offer a course in nursery school education, and she was one of the founders of the National Association for Nursery School Education. She was also a member of the executive board of the International Kindergarten Union, serving as its president in 1908 and that of its successor the Association for Childhood Education. Hill edited a series on childhood education, frequently contributed articles to professional journals, and wrote two bulletins, Kindergarten Problems and Experimental Studies in Kindergarten Education.

Retiring from her teaching post in 1935, she was one of the first women to be named professor emeritus. She then worked with several agencies in New York City on problems of slum clearance and formed the Hilltop Community Center for underprivileged children and parents in the Morningside Heights area of Manhattan. She died in New York City, two days before her seventy-eighth birthday, after a long illness. She was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville, Kentucky.

Patty Hill’s papers are at the Filson Club, Louisville, Kentucky. Her writings include The Kindergarten (1913); “Kindergartens of Yesterday and Tomorrow,” The Kindergarten-Primary Magazine (1916); “The Functions of the Kindergarten,” National Education Association (1926); and Nursery School and Parent Education in Soviet Russia (1936). The best modern accounts of her life can be found in A. Sayder, Dauntless Women in Childhood Education 1856-1931 (1972) and Notable American Women (1971). See also C. M. Jammer. “Patty Smith Hill and Reform of the American Kindergarten,” in Doctor of Education Progress Report, Teachers College (1960). For her experiences at Teachers College see L. Cremin, A History of Teacher’s College Columbia (1954) and J. E. Russell, Founding Teacher’s College (1937). An obituary appeared in The New York Times on May 26, 1946.