In 1851, Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten, weighed up fleeing his homeland for America. That August, the Prussian government had banned as seditious the network of kindergartens he had started eleven years earlier. To a government fearful of liberal-democratic ideas, the new institutions were breeding grounds of “atheism and demagoguery,” dangerous cells of “Froebel’s socialist system” that promoted “destructive tendencies in the realms of religion and politics.” One aristocratic alumna of Froebel’s recently founded college for training kindergarten teachers – it was the first secular professional school for women in Germany – actually felt compelled to emigrate to escape accusations of subversion.

His protests that he was neither a socialist nor an atheist went unheeded; the government apparently regarded kindergartens as a genuine political threat.