Nursery school

Nursery school, preschool care and early education for children from about 3 to 5 years old. Nursery schools developed from 19th-century infant care programs for factory women's children, launched by Robert Owen (1771–1858) in Great Britain and copied in Europe as the Industrial Revolution spread. Johann Pestalozzi (1746–1827), Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), and Maria Montessori (1870–1952) pioneered preschool methods of nursery education. The first U.S. nursery schools opened in the 1850s in New York, Philadelphia, and other cities to release mothers for factory work, followed by efforts to combine early care and educational projects at the University of Chicago in 1915. Nursery schools today have developed programs in which the young learn by experience and through play to understand others, the world around them, and themselves.