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His name is little known to the general public.\u00a0However,\u00a0\u00c9milie Brandt<\/a>\u00a0(1879-1963) had a decisive role in early childhood care and its development in the first half of the 20th\u00a0century<\/sup>\u00a0in France.\u00a0Her unique journey invites us to follow her from Alsace to Nice, passing through Paris and Haute-Marne, sowing in her path a number of kindergartens and schools for “kindergarteners” in which the pedagogy is created and recreated, like so many incubators from which, in the 1970s in France, the\u00a0profession of early childhood educators<\/a>\u00a0was born .<\/p>\n \u00c9milie Brandt evolves in the wake of the pedagogues of the historic movement of\u00a0New Education<\/a>\u00a0which had the ambition to change education to change the world.\u00a0While the republican school model put in place by Jules Ferry makes it possible in France to welcome and instruct any child from the age of six, that the nursery school is organized to welcome younger children, on the model asylum rooms renovated by\u00a0Pauline Kergomard<\/a>\u00a0, other structures were created at the turn of the 19th\u00a0to<\/sup>\u00a020th\u00a0century<\/sup>\u00a0on the model of the kindergartens of the pedagogue\u00a0Friedrich Froebel<\/a>\u00a0, whose first Kindergaten opened in Prussia in 1837.<\/p>\n It is in this context that the work of \u00c9milie Brandt fits, who could be described as an early childhood entrepreneur given the number of structures she has created.\u00a0A major player in the development of vocational training in early childhood, she was convinced of the importance of the sensory element in learning and bequeathed to us a pedagogy giving a central place to experimentation, in a welcoming and benevolent environment. .<\/p>\n What characterizes kindergartens is on the one hand the pedagogy which gives a central place to play, considered as a vector of learning, and on the other hand the environment, close to the family model, and at most close to nature, to allow the full development of the child.\u00a0At the start of the 20th\u00a0century<\/sup>\u00a0, described as the “century of the child” by the Swedish writer\u00a0Ellen Key<\/a>\u00a0, doctors, pedagogues and scientists seized on education to revolutionize educational practices and\u00a0think about the happiness of children in life. school<\/a>\u00a0.<\/p>\n The way we look at the child evolves: from now on, he is considered as a person in his own right.\u00a0The time has come to implement the educational Copernican revolution,\u00a0as asserted by the Geneva psychologist Edouard Clapar\u00e8de<\/a>\u00a0.\u00a0However, it will be necessary to wait for\u00a0Fran\u00e7oise Dolto<\/a>\u00a0and the second half of the 20th\u00a0century<\/sup>\u00a0for this revolution to concern the baby.<\/p>\n But let’s go back to 1907, when \u00c9milie Brandt, a young Alsatian woman trained at the Froebel Institute in Berlin, arrived in Paris and proposed to\u00a0Abb\u00e9 Viollet<\/a>\u00a0, founder of numerous social works in the 14th\u00a0arrondissement<\/sup>\u00a0, to create a garden of children to accommodate the children of working-class families in the neighborhood.<\/p>\n Very quickly, this structure, organized according to Froebelian methods, acquired a School of Family Education which participated in training gardeners in conjunction with prestigious institutions such as the Coll\u00e8ge S\u00e9vign\u00e9 and the girls’ high school in Versailles.\u00a0During this same period, \u00c9milie Brandt also founded a kindergarten in Barr, the city of her childhood, in an outbuilding of a hotel, intended for poor children in the valley.<\/p>\n In 1910, it is in Thivet, in the Haute-Marne, that we find \u00c9milie Brandt.\u00a0She recounts her experience in a\u00a0Kindergarten Manual<\/em>\u00a0, published by Armand Colin in 1913. The book is full of practical details, there is a week’s timetable, reported in a methodical and meticulous way.\u00a0From the very first sentences, she explains what she means by the spirit of the Froebelian method: Examples of \u201ctalks\u201d around a central idea, here wheat, or even lessons in geography and arithmetic, show how \u00c9milie Brandt relies on the events that punctuate daily life to lead children towards learning.\u00a0It thus responds through practice to the theories of pedagogues who advocate the globalization of learning, starting from experimentation, without decompartmentalising subjects, with a view to making sense of it.<\/p>\n In conclusion to the book, she specifies that the child, after having attended kindergarten, will have the advantage over his schoolmates of possessing “a whole series of general notions”, of having “learned to to observe for himself, to hear, to touch what surrounds him\u201d, just as much as to \u201ccompare, to reflect, to form his judgment\u201d.<\/p>\n Her career then led Emilie Brandt to Strasbourg, where she created a new school<\/a>\u00a0in the 1920s\u00a0, transferred to Limoges during the Second World War and which was established in Neuilly at the end of the war, then in Levallois in 1952. This year is that of its centenary, and we can see that it is still the Montessori pedagogy, in which \u00c9milie Brandt was trained from the beginning of the 1930s, which makes it attractive to parents.<\/p>\n It was in Nice, during the summer courses given by Maria Montessori in 1932, that Emilie Brandt converted, so to speak, to Montessorism.\u00a0Froebel’s interest in the observation and development of the child can be found in the theories of Maria Montessori which have spread throughout the world since she opened the first “casa dei bambini” in Rome in 1907. .\u00a0The scientific approach of the Italian doctor makes it possible to update the training of early childhood professionals based on the method she proposes, but also on the educational material she creates.<\/p>\n If the term kindergarten\u00a0remains<\/em>\u00a0pregnant in the landscape of early childhood, the name of Maria Montessori will gradually erase that of Froebel.\u00a0\u00c9milie Brandt will participate in\u00a0transmitting this Montessorism<\/a>\u00a0in the training schools where the new generations of gardeners will be trained.<\/p>\n Her action for the training of early childhood professionals intersects with institutional reforms and private companies, which she participated in bringing together after the Second World War during the creation in 1946 of the Association of training centers for gardeners-educators (ACFJE ), of which she is the president.\u00a0The association will develop a training program for gardeners which will give rise to a common exam for a certain number of schools.<\/p>\n It was not until 1973 that the training of gardeners was taken over by the State, when the profession evolved and became that of educator of young children.\u00a0Still active, at more than seventy years old, Emilie Brandt gave, in 1954, in Nice, “practical lessons” with the Saint-Vincent de Paul sisters to twenty-eight future gardeners and worked as a technical adviser at the center of training of kindergarten teachers, a position she would keep until the end of her life.<\/p>\n By training the gardeners in active methods, \u00c9milie Brandt has contributed to creating a network of educators who in turn get involved in the field and participate in\u00a0making the school a place of fulfillment and learning<\/a>\u00a0.<\/p>\nTeach the child to observe and experiment<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n\u201cTo what exactly does the term ‘kindergarten’ apply?\u00a0It’s not necessarily a real garden where children would come to play from morning to night.\u00a0A lawn populated by young babies may well be a garden with children, but not a \u201ckindergarten\u201d.\u00a0If Froebel gave this last title to his infant schools, it was because he made prevail there a method of education which cultivated the young child in a particularly happy and effective manner.\u00a0The spirit of the method is to freely develop the individual nature of the child in an atmosphere of good order and harmony.\u00a0\u00bb<\/em>
\nTo achieve such a goal, kindergarteners carefully choose objects which will allow “the study and prolonged observation of the child” and which bring to life the “central ideas”, i.e. teaching subjects, through which children “learn to see, feel and live for themselves”.\u00a0And it is indeed because there is “nothing fixed in the teaching which results from it” that the theoretical teaching must be reduced to the profit of the practice, which is exposed in the following pages through a dozen of chapters.<\/p>\nTrain early childhood educators<\/strong><\/h4>\n