historical resources more easily accessible to scholars.
Historians of American progressivism have long known of the importance of these letters. As the prominent American historian Robert M. Crunden notes in his groundbreaking cohort study of leading progressives, “Scholars should note that these letters may well contain one of the most detailed available accounts of the evolution of an important philosophical mind . . . and students of the influence of Darwin and Kant in America will find important material here. The letters deserve publication for the history both of civilization and philosophy.”1 Biographers of Mead and intellectual historians interested in the transition from Victorian America to progressive and early modernism have found the letters to be illuminating. The letters also reveal much about the history of Oberlin College and its importance to Mead and Castle as well as to higher education in America during the fin de siècle era. Because of Henry Castle’s important role as a political observer and journalist in Hawaii during the years surrounding the end of the monarchy, the letters contain valuable, even controversial insights into Hawaii’s history.
For historians of Hawaii and American education and philanthropy, the important role Castle, Mead, and their close friend John Dewey played in influencing the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation’s support for progressive kindergartens in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is sketched in provocative fashion in the letters. The latter may be especially interesting to students of Mead’s progressivism and commitment to social change. Few know, for example, that through Henry Castle and his sister Helen, Dewey was able to make contact with a pioneer foundation committed to social change and greater equity through progressive kindergartens made available in Hawaii to residents of any race, class, ethnicity, or gender. At Henry’s tragic and early death due to a steamship accident on the North Sea in 1895, the Foundation assisted Dewey’s innovative University of Chicago Lab School as it trained Hawaii’s first kindergarten teachers. For Mead, Castle, and Dewey, Hawaii itself would be the ultimate lab school for educational change in a multiracial, multicultural environment. When the Territory of Hawaii created one of America’s oldest publicly supported full-day kindergarten systems in 1943, few in the country recalled the key role Dewey, Mead, and the Castle family played in introducing experimentation to early childhood education in Hawaii. It was through the emergence of the progressive education kindergarten that Henry Castle’s and G. H. Mead’s legacy is best revealed in Hawaii.
The late nineteenth century saw a number of changes in the focus of Euro-American philosophical thought. The general thrust of these changes concentrated on becoming, rather than being. Thinkers such as John Dewey (1859—1952), drawing on the advances of anthropology and biology, gave philosophic expression to the dynamic character of experience. Many philosophers, dissatisfied with pure speculation, sought ways to make philosophy directly relevant to practical affairs. Such changes in philosophic orientation would affect many American institutions. In Hawaii, Dewey’s ideas were first introduced by Henry Castle (1862—1895) and made an early impact on the teaching practices of kindergartens in Honolulu from 1894 to 1900.
The idea of kindergartens began in Germany with Friedrich Froebel (1782—1852) and was later transported to the United States. Its first partisans were Germans who, having despaired of living in Germany after the collapse of the Revolution of 1848, pulled up their stakes and journeyed to the American Middle West. There in 1855, in Watertown, Wisconsin, Mrs. Carl Schurz, a former student of Froebel, established America’s first kindergarten. Five years later the first English-speaking kindergarten, owned and managed by Elizabeth Peabody, was established in Boston.2 In 1873, the city of St. Louis opened the first tax-supported kindergarten in the United States.3
In Hawaii, kindergartens were begun under private auspices. The first kindergarten there was established by Francis M. Damon in 1892. It was connected to the Chinese Mission of which he had charge. Because of the success of this experiment, the Woman’s Board of Missions, founded in 1878, organized four kindergartens in 1893. Separated along racial lines, they were organized for Japanese, Portuguese, Hawaiians, and a group classified as “other races.”
The Portuguese kindergarten was started on Miller Street by Reverend Henry Soares. By 1895, the Chinese kindergarten enrolled 36, the Portuguese kindergarten 53, the Hawaiian kindergarten 40, the Japanese kindergarten 28, and the “foreign” (Caucasian) kindergarten 48.4 All of these were early attempts to provide free coeducational education to underserved or unserved children of working parents.
As imperfect as these poorly funded and struggling initial kindergartens were, they represented a growing awareness in Hawaii that a heterogeneous, non-English-speaking population of children was presenting a serious problem to grade school work. Indeed, crowded classes had forced a ruling by which the Republic’s Department of Public Instruction forbade the attendance of children under six years of age in grade schools. With crowding, furthermore, came a growing concern that the ideal of universal education could never be realized. Public school enrollment reached 14,522 in 1897, while private school enrollment reached 3,954.5
Mary Tenney Castle (1810—1907), the abolitionist wife of Samuel Northrup Castle, had raised her children to accept responsibility for improving society. Educated in New England, she had been closely involved with childhood education reform, abolition, feminism, and prison reform before coming to Hawaii in 1841. In the 1890s, she and her daughter Harriet and son Henry would be early supporters of changing kindergartens organized by race. They were two of the early supporters of offering a greater number of kindergartens for Hawaii’s children. More importantly, as they saw it, traditional formalist instruction, which stressed repetition, memorization, and rigid discipline, was no longer adequate preparation for a rapidly changing world. The various private kindergartens could be rendered more effective if unified along the new and progressive direction being set by Dewey.
In 1895, supported by Mary Tenney Castle’s gift of $10,000, the various free kindergartens were unified under the direction of the newly organized Free Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association of the Hawaiian Islands (FKCAA). Its key leaders were Charles M. Hyde (1832—1899), its first president; Harriet Castle, its financial secretary and driving force; and Mabel (Mrs. Henry) Castle (1864—1950), its publicist. Other prominent members included the wives of business and civic leaders: Clara Bingham, Emma Dillingham, Cornelia Bishop, Cherilla Lowrey, Frances Hobron, Mary Whitney, and Agnes Judd.6 With the separation of the new association from its old Woman’s Board of Missions connection, a nonsectarian policy was adopted. The FKCAA’s common goal, pursued with considerable zeal, was to provide lifetime learning and moral and citizenship skills to the underserved population of children of working parents. Such schools, it was thought, would provide needed education in addition to early social skills in an increasingly economically complex and culturally diverse Hawaii.
Because of its newness, the FKCAA was soon in search of an educational methodology to implement its mission. Harriet Castle and her brother Henry were the guiding spirits of the association and would be responsible for shaping this direction through importing the pedagogical views of John Dewey, a friend of the Mead and Castle families. Although the general role of Dewey was noted in Charlotte Dodge’s history of the FKCAA, his specific link to the association through Henry Castle and his sister Harriet has not previously been examined.7 At Oberlin College in Ohio in 1879, Henry Castle became the roommate and fast friend of George Herbert Mead. Indeed, Mead married Henry’s older sister, Helen K. Castle, in 1891. It was through Mead, an outstanding philosopher in his own right, that Henry and Harriet met and came to understand John Dewey’s philosophy and to recognize how it might revolutionize early education in Hawaii.8
As undergraduate students at Oberlin College and later as graduate students at Harvard, Mead and Castle spent many hours speaking of the instrumentalist and pragmatist challenges to traditional, more static, idealist philosophical systems. Mead, who later became one of the nation’s leading pragmatist philosophers from his important post as chairman of the University of Chicago’s Philosophy Department, spent many hours testing his ideas in conversations with Henry Castle.9 Later, after his marriage to Helen Castle, he served as a frequent host to Harriet Castle and John Dewey at the Mead home in Chicago. Thus, prior to the founding of the Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association in 1895, Harriet was fully impressed with, and knowledgeable