Adelaida Semyonovna Simonovitch

Adelaida Semyonovna Simonovitch ( 1844-1933) was a Russian educator and the founder of the first kindergarten in Russia. She also was the first Russian theorist of public preschool education and published books and journals advocating early childhood development. Early life Adelaida Semyonovna Bergman was born in 1844 in Moscow, Russia to Augustina (née Gutsohn) and Semyon Bergman. Her parents were merchants of German-Jewish heritage, who owned and operated their own mercantile business. There were three sisters, Adelaide, Sofya and Valentina and one brother, Alexander, in the family. As was typical for the era, Bergman attended five years of schooling and then studied on her own to be able to pass the examination to be qualified as a home teacher. Feeling her education was inadequate, Bergman asked to attend lectures at Moscow University, but permission was refused. In 1864, newly married to the physician Yakov Mironovich Simonovich, she decided to go abroad to study in Geneva, where women were allowed to attend university. Studying under the niece of Friedrich Fröbel, she learned his pedagogical methods and originally planned to remain in Switzerland and run a school for immigrants. They traveled to Germany to learn how schools were organized there. Having met and discussed her ideas with Alexander Herzen, whom she greatly admired, she changed her plans and became determined to take what she had learned back to Russia. Career In 1866, Simonovitcha and her husband returned to Russia and opened the first Russian kindergarten in Saint Petersburg. Simultaneously, the couple began to publish the first Russian magazine dedicated to preschool education, which they called Detskiy sad (, meaning kindergarten). Though the magazine was short-lived, publishing only until 1868, it espoused the benefits of public education and was a forum to reshape Fröbel's ideas with a Russian context. Drawing on the pedagogical work of Konstantin Ushinsky, Simonovitcha published a mixture of articles on children's literature, pedagogical critique, public education, sample lesson plans, and included games and stories for children. In 1870, the couple relocated to Tbilisi and opened a new school for international students. Their students spoke Armenian, Georgian and Russian, giving birth to the concept of a bilingual school servicing a variety of ethnic groups.