Harry Willekens

Introduction: Path-dependencies and Change in Child-care and Preschool Institutions in Europe — Historical and Institutional Perspectives

Public child care and collective forms of education in early childhood have already been well researched, not only from a national but also from a comparative perspective.1 It might not be very productive to add to this literature, were it not that the available research is strongly dominated by a relatively short-range social policy perspective. Where comparison is practised, it focuses on developments of the last decades, which are virtually all connected with the rise in mothers’ labour market participation and the ensuing increase in the need for public child-care arrangements.2 Broadening the temporal horizon of our view to include long-range developments since the nineteenth century allows us to see questions bound to be rendered invisible by the shorter-range perspective.

The Development of Early Childhood Education in Europe and North America

1. Introduction: The Longue Duree: Early Childhood Institutions and Ideas in Flux Harry Willekens, Kirsten Scheiwe and Kristen Nawrotzki 2. The Spread of Infant School Models in Europe during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Jean-Noel Luc 3. Religious Cleavages, the School Struggle and the Development of Early Childhood Education in Belgium, France and the Netherlands Harry Willekens 4. Development and Diffusion of Early Childhood Education in Italy: Reflections on the Role of the Church from a Historical Perspective (1830-2010) Eva Maria Hohnerlein 5. The Roles of the State and the Church in the Development of Early Childhood Education in Spain (1874-1975) (5) Carmen Sanchidrian 6. From Poverty Relief to Universl Provision: The Changing Grounds for Child Care Policy Reforms in Norway Arnlaug Leira 7. Split Paths: Early Childhood Education and Care in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (1949-1990) Franz-Michael Konrad 8. Saving Money of Saving Children? Nursery Schools in England the USA Kristen Nawrotzki 9. Towards Early Childhood Education as a Social Right: A Historical and Comparative Perspective Kirsten Scheiwe 10. Professional Profiles in Early Childhood Education and Care: Continuity and Change in Europe Pamela Oberhuemer 11. Modernising Early Childhood Education: The Role of Germans Womens Movements After 1848 and 1968 Meike S. Baader 12. Womens Activism on Child Care in Italy and Denmark: The 1960s and 1970s Chiara Bertone 13. Early Education and the Unloved Market of Commercial Child Care in Luxembourg Michael-Sebastian Honig, Anett Schmitz and Martine Wiltzius 14. Preschool, Child Care and Welfare Reform in the United States Sonya Michel 15. The History of Kindergarten as New Education: Examples from the United States and Canada, 1890 to 1920 Larry Prochner

Is Contemporary Western Family Law Historically Unique

Over the past decades, a wave of family law reforms has shaken the very foundations of family law as known in the West over the past centuries. Strict gender equality has been introduced, the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children has been abolished, divorce has been facilitated, and the borderlines between marriage and cohabitation and between heterosexual and homosexual relations are fading. Is this new family law historically unique? A broad historical and intercultural comparison undertaken to answer this question shows that a remarkable and unexpected substantive similarity can be observed between the family laws of the contemporary West and the folkways of some hunter-gatherer societies. This is explained by the fact that in both types of society, as opposed to nearly all other societies on the record, the social function of family law is reduced (or on its way to being reduced) to organizing fathers for newborn children.

Introduction: The Deep Roots, Stirring Present, and Uncertain Future of Family Law

Family law has been in constant turmoil over the past three to four decades. Legal institutions that, to the contemporary eye, give the impression of having been fairly stable over several centuries have quite suddenly crumbled under the combined pressures of capitalism, individualism, and moral anomy. Marriage and parenthood were constructed around the authority of the husband and father, but in a short time, the prerogatives of the husband and father have been abolished and replaced by a set of genderneutral rights and duties of spouses and parents. Marriage held the monopoly of awarding legitimacy to children, but the legal distinction or, as it must nowadays be called, discrimination between legitimate and illegitimate children has been swept away. Marriage used to be for life, with divorce either impossible or to be obtained only under burdensome conditions. But the control of the exit out of marriage has been much relaxed, and the dissolution of a marriage by divorce has become just as normal as the dissolution by death. Cohabitation outside marriage was either sanctioned or regally ignored by the law; it has developed into a true alternative for marriage, a somewhat less stringently regulated way of organizing partner relations. Even one of the last remnants of traditional family law, the requirement that spouses and parents be of different gender, has come under siege: a series of legal reforms extending marriage-like rights to same-gender couples has recently culminated in the introduction of full equality between differentand same-gender couples in marriage and adoption law in the Netherlands. In short, the principles that uncontestedly dominated family law for hundreds of years have been turned topsy-turvy.

Die Bedeutung des Rechts für sozialpädagogisches Handeln

Arbeitsbereiche und Berufsfelder der Sozialpadagogik sind in starkem Mase verrechtlicht. Rechtswissen ist erforderlich, um die institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen und die rechtlichen Anforderungen an fachlich kompetentes Handeln zu kennen. Uber die Kenntnis der relevanten Rechtsgebiete hinaus bedarf es der Fahigkeit, rechtliche Gestaltungs‐ und Ermessensspielraume im Kontext Sozialer Arbeit zu identifizieren und aktiv zu nutzen. Dieser Beitrag vermittelt das Verstandnis einiger Grundprinzipien und Strukturen des Rechts. Das Kinder‐ und Jugendrecht als Querschnittsmaterie, die Anteile aus dem Familienrecht, dem Kinder‐ und Jugendhilferecht und dem Jugendstrafrecht umfasst, ist fur sozialpadagogische Arbeit von zentraler Bedeutung. In den Handlungsfeldern Sozialer Arbeit bieten sich rechtliche Gestaltungsraume fur die professionelle Handlungspraxis, die von Sozialpadagog_innen im Idealfall aktiv und selbstbewusst „auf Augenhohe“ mit den juristischen Professionen genutzt werden sollten. Mehr empirische Forschung zum Verhaltnis von Recht und Sozialpadagogik in der Praxis der Sozialverwaltung und der Sozialen Arbeit ist zu wunschen, denn dieses Feld ist bisher zu wenig erforscht.

Introduction: The Longue Durée — Early Childhood Institutions and Ideas in Flux

Across Europe and North America (and in other parts of the world to which we can claim no expertise), we have witnessed in recent decades a spectacular development of institutions and arrangements designed for the education and care of young children (those under compulsory school age) outside the family. In no society have young children ever been raised by their parents alone, but, with a few exceptions, collective education and care in the past took place within networks of individuals who knew each other and who were tied to each other by complex social obligations (e.g. networks of kin or neighbourhood solidarity). The early childhood education and care (henceforth ECEC) which has come to define the life of young children in contemporary societies is of a wholly different nature: it is always regulated and often directly supplied by the State; its establishment has most often been the result of intentional policies pursuing specified social goals; and the individuals providing the services do so for money and not on the basis of personal ties with the parents or children.