Education Activist Bessie Locke; Keep Learning: Her effort to lift lives helped make kindergarten a social standard.(LEADERS & SUCCESS)

Byline: AMY REEVES

We take it for granted that when a child starts school, he or she starts in kindergarten. But it wasn't always so.

In the past, if a school was big enough to have separate grades, it started logically with first grade. Kindergarten was an exotic German innovation. The fact that kindergarten is now standard we owe to Bessie Locke.

Locke (1865-1952) had no children of her own. But she had a knack for organizing, lobbying and marketing. She also had a passion for social justice. The combination made her an ideal kindergarten advocate.

As a child in Brooklyn, N.Y., Locke attended one of just a few English-speaking kindergartens in America at that time. She completed the rest of her education in public schools, although she took a few business courses from Columbia University.

Locke's religious belief urged that those who were able should help the less fortunate. Acting on her faith, she visited a charity kindergarten for the first time in the early 1890s. Such kindergartens, funded by philanthropy, were aimed at the urban poor, rather like Head Start today.

But she was initially skeptical that such a program could really help children from the slums. They were mostly children of immigrants and some couldn't speak English. What good would a classroom do?