Alternative education grew up in response to the establishment of standardized and compulsory education over the last two to three centuries. Educators including Jean-Jacques Rousseau,[3] Swiss humanitarian Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi; the American transcendentalists Amos Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau; founders of progressive education John Dewey and Francis Parker, and educational pioneers such as Friedrich Fröbel, Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner believed that education should cultivate the developing child on many levels: not only intellectually, but also morally and spiritually, emotionally and psychologically, and physically. After World War II an alternative Reggio Emilia approach to early-childhood education was developed in Italy, introduced by Loris Malaguzzi.