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Abstract: The theoretical and methodological basis of the Federal State Educational Standard for Preschool Education (2014) is the idea of free education. At the same time, in the Russian practice of organizing the educational activities of preschool children there are long-standing traditions associated with their implementation. In this context, the goal of the article is a historical-genetic analysis of the ideas of free education in preschool pedagogy of Russia of the 19th – first third of the 20th century and determining on this basis the prospects for the development of the theory and practice of modern preschool education. In preschool pedagogy of Russia at the beginning of the XX century. three directions took shape, using the ideas of free pedagogy. The first is represented by K. N. Wentzel’s theory of unlimited freedom, attempts to implement which have shown the obvious shift of emphasis towards moderate humanistic positions and their more realistic design. Therefore, in preschool practice, a second direction arose, called “Reasonable Free Education”, characterized by the presence of specially organized educational activities, flexible and varied planning. The third direction is represented by the mass practice of kindergartens, which actually did not use the entire set of system-forming ideas of the theory of free education, using separate methods and developments of this theory. In 1917, pre-school education became part of the state system of public education. In the first post-revolutionary decade in preschool pedagogy, a peculiar filling of the ideas of free education with new Marxist-Leninist content takes place. By the end of the 1920s such principles of free pedagogy as recognition of the intrinsic value of the individual and individualization of the educational process are beginning to be considered a flaw contrary to the ideology of Marxism. New principles of preschool pedagogy are consolidated: collectivism, activism and materialism, anti-religiosity, the interweaving of political, pedagogical and ideological tasks. From year to year, free education more and more takes on the features of “Reasonable”, gradually replacing the very concept of “Freedom”, which leads to the unification and uniformity of preschool education in Russia for many years. In modern preschool education, a kind of reinvention of the ideas of freedom is taking place, associated with a change in the educational paradigm.