The admissions files / American guide, 1863 · later guide, 1898
The peas are holding up the furniture
An early kindergarten construction kit had a surprisingly demanding ingredient.
A nineteenth-century kindergarten could not build a chair until somebody had dealt with the peas. Elizabeth Peabody's 1863 American guide in Froebel's tradition explains the kit. Double-pointed wooden sticks. Soaked dried peas for joints. Children could build the skeletons of houses, chairs and tables.
Peabody stressed that the peas be carefully softened, which is a lot to ask of something usually found beside a potato.
The furniture is the best part. A miniature chair has a clear job, even with nobody small enough to sit in it. You turn it round, inspect the legs, start wondering about a table.
Peabody also saw a market. Froebel's range included a stick-and-pea box, and she thought American toy sellers would profit from stocking one. A heap of sticks is clutter; a box with a purpose is a product. Ideally it lives somewhere other than under a bare foot.
Lois Bates's Kindergarten Guide, published in London and New York in 1898, supplies the schedule. Soak the peas for twelve hours. Then dry them for one. Kindergarten, apparently, had an overnight stage. The peas needed more advance notice than many of the people bringing the children.
Bates did list rivals. Wires and corks would do if you preferred them, she wrote. But corks cost more than peas and soon broke from the punctures. Wires bent. Neither gave models quite as pretty. A vegetable that wins on price, durability and looks is a rare thing.
The Froebel Trust, a London charity, still lists sticks and peas among Froebel's original Occupations, its word for creative activities for young children. Its page names peas, garden or marrowfat, but also clay, Blu-Tak, plasticine and cork as connectors. Cork, which Bates faulted for cost and breakage, has been let back in. The pea has understudies.
The page adds that avoiding food for play is more ethical nowadays. That is fair, even to a pea that has been soaked for twelve hours. Still, the original arrangement has something going for it. Someone looked at a dried pea and thought it might have a future in architecture.