Blow, Susan (1843-1916), was an influential American educator. She started the first successful public kindergarten in the United States in 1873. Prior to that time, most poor children under age 10 received only three years of schooling before being forced to work. Blow changed this practice by offering education to children at an earlier age.
Susan Elizabeth Blow was born on June 7, 1843, in St Louis, Missouri, to deeply religious Presbyterian parents. Her father, Henry Taylor Blow, was a wealthy businessman who served two terms as a Republican U.S. Congressman. Blow was mostly homeschooled by private tutors until the age of 16. She then attended a private girls’ school in New York City.
Blow became interested in the kindergarten movement on a trip to Europe with her family in 1870-1871. There, she learned about a method for educating young children started by the German educator Friedrich Fröbel. Fröbel, also spelled Froebel, started the first kindergarten in 1837. He was the first to use the term kindergarten, which means garden of children in German. Fröbel’s concepts for teaching kindergarten students, usually 5 years old, remain in use today.
When Blow returned to St. Louis in 1871, she used some of Fröbel’s methods while working as a substitute teacher. She suggested to the superintendent of the city’s public schools, William Torrey Harris, that the city should open an experimental kindergarten. Blow offered to direct such a kindergarten without taking a salary.
With Harris’s encouragement, Blow visited New York City to see one of the first kindergartens in the United States. The private school was run by Maria Kraus-Boelte, who was trained in Fröbel’s methods.
In 1873, Blow opened the first public kindergarten in the United States, the Des Peres School in St. Louis. A year later, she established a school for training kindergarten teachers in Fröbel‘s methods. Blow taught kindergarten classes in the mornings and trained kindergarten teachers in the afternoon.
The Des Peres School was so successful that, by 1880, public schools throughout St. Louis had adopted kindergartens. The St. Louis school district’s kindergarten program became a model for early childhood education throughout the United States.
Blow directed the Des Peres School for 11 years, until her health began to fail. She spent the last years of her life traveling across the United States, giving lectures about the kindergarten movement. She wrote five books on Fröbel’s teachings. Blow died on March 26, 1916. At the time of her death, public schools in more than 400 U.S. cities offered kindergarten programs. The Des Peres School operated until 1935.
