Jeroen J.H. Dekker

Children at risk in history: A story of expansion

Looking at children at risk in history, one of the most striking changes over time is the relative and absolute growth of the number of at‐risk children. Although this is not a linear development, the need for intervention and prevention in the 1970s being much weaker than before and after that period, the long‐term direction of history indeed seems to indicate growth. This is a paradox when looking at the social, economic and scientific development of the Western world. Although the ambition of diminishing the group of at‐risk children continues until today, never before in history were more children being diagnosed as at risk.

Philanthropic networks for children at risk in nineteenth-century Europe

In the first half of nineteenth‐century Europe, the founding fathers of the philanthropic network developed a specific network for the care of children at risk. This network eventually resulted in institutionalized solutions for the care of these children. In this article, three topics are looked at: the meaning of the general concept of networks for this specific network; the building up of the network; and, finally, the working of the network at close quarters. It is concluded that the members of this network worked on the basis of reciprocal activities, were organized in an informal and horizontal way, knew each other very well and were regular philanthropic tourists across the frontiers of their respective countries. 1 The first sketch of this paper was presented at the workshop on “Europe of Networks”, European University Institute, Florence, November 2001, a second version at the ISCHE ISWG on Cross‐cultural Influences in Geneva, July 2004. I thank the organizers, respectively Peter Becker and Raffaele Romanelli (EUI), and Klaus‐Peter Horn and Christoph Lüth (ISCHE) as well as the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

The Republic of God or the Republic of Children? Childhood and Child‐rearing After the Reformation: an appraisal of Simon Schama's thesis about the uniqueness of the Dutch case

Abstract The Embarrassment of Riches (1987) Simon Schama claims that the Dutch of the 17th century were the first to approach children in a modern, love‐oriented way. Schama came to this conclusion from (emblem‐)books and above all from Dutch paintings. According to the authors of the present paper Schamas thesis is a re‐establishment of the old idea of the ‘discovery of childhood’, now settled in the United Provinces. His view can only be upheld by ignoring the criticism of evolutionistic writing on the subject. In this paper Schamas portrait of pedagogical relations in the Dutch Republic will be critically examined and compared with iconographic and literary evidence from other times and places which has been made available in recent years.

Philippe Ariès’s discovery of childhood after fifty years: the impact of a classic study on educational research

This article looks at the impact of Philippe Ariès’s classic L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien regime, published in 1960. His well-known idea of the emergence of ‘Le sentiment de l’enfance’ caused a lively debate among historians and social scientists resulting in fundamental contributions to our knowledge about the early phase of the life cycle and about family life in former times. Moreover, Ariès introduced a new and innovative use of sources and put new topics on the scientific agenda that would dominate the agenda of the history of education and childhood for many years. Ariès’s book perfectly satisfied both the scientific need for historicising the social sciences and the societal need considering the family, childhood, youth, and the relationship between the sexes, as historical instead of structural or even natural phenomena. With conceiving, as Ariès did, the history of the family and of childhood and youth as a story of continuity and change, it became possible to contemplate about making the family more egalitarian, the relationship between children and parents, and between pupils and schoolmasters more communicative, and intersexual relations more based on autonomy. So, Ariès, the ‘anarchist of the right’, became the hero of modernisation.

Discoveries of childhood in history: an introduction

Discovering childhood – that eureka moment experienced by many people, time and again, in the course of history – is the focus of this special issue of Paedagogica Historica. From religious moralists to educational practitioners, from philosophers to child scientists, from poets to painters and other artists, from lawmakers to children’s rights adherents, from adults looking back to their early years to each new generation of parents, and from historians to psychologists and sociologists: they all (re-)discovered childhood. Thus, in various actor roles, people have discovered childhood in the course of history, both inside and outside science. In his opening article, entitled “Historian’s Discovery of Childhood”, Willem Frijhoff’s starting point is that the child as a historical category has always been invented by others, that is, adults. The child is “not self-reflexive in history”, but “a pure object”, and “a virtual theme of discovery by others”. Those so-called “others” did have at least three major reasons for doing that. Firstly, discoveries of childhood can be related to the emergence of a series of major social practices, such as school. Secondly, discovering childhood became increasing a scholarly practice. Finally, for every scholar of the history of childhood, discovering childhood turns and turned out to become personal research into the discovery of the self. Firstly, discoveries of childhood in social practices are numerous. They vary from Romulus and Remus as the epoch-making founding twins of Rome to the future French King Louis XIII in the journal by Jean Héroard, made famous by Philippe Ariès in his L’enfant et la famille sous l’ancien régime (1960) and translated in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood, and from prodigious children like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to child-oriented public spaces, such as schools, on which contributions can be found by Rita Hofstetter, Marcelo Caruso, Josefina Granja Castro, and Anna Larsson in this special issue. Until the late nineteenth century, discoveries of childhood in history only rarely went together with discoveries of adolescence. One of the reasons seems to be that, according to Frijhoff, adolescence “could not be caught in a single institutional frame” as was happening much earlier in history for other age groups, as, for example, the group aged six to 12 with schools; as a result, a wide variety of people, caught in a variety of institutional frames, could belong to adolescence, such as “apprentices, workers, peasants, students, or idle youngsters, and occasionally even married people.” Indeed, it is true that

Doers: The Emergence of an Acting Elite

*The articles published in this volume are the result of a workshop on Doers, Philanthropists and Bureaucrats organised by Peter Becker and Jeroen Dekker at the European University Institute, Department of History and Civilisation, Florence, 17–18 March 2000.

Crossing borders in educational innovation: Framing foreign examples in discussing comprehensive education in the Netherlands, 1969–1979

In the Netherlands, crossing borders to study comprehensive schools was an important strategy in the 1970s, a decisive period for the start and the end of the innovation. According to policy-borrowing theory, actors that engage in debating educational issues are framing foreign examples of comprehensive schooling to convince their audiences. Framing therefore became the leading concept behind our study of the intellectual debate, examined through the leading Dutch scientific journal Pedagogische Studiën (Educational Studies), and the public debate, examined through recordings of television programmes. Assuming that those debates were influential in the political middle school process, our analyses show that foreign examples indeed functioned as a framing device in the form of legitimisation, glorification, sensationalisation and caution. However, the impact of framing differed. In the phase of cross-national attraction, the reform-minded perspective in the scholarly debate had a stimulating effect on the development of the plans, but little influence on the governmental decision-making process. This contrasts with the frames that were brought forward by television programmes. Although the negative frames, such as “a factory-made sausage”, were rejected by the programmes, such frames could linger in people’s minds as a means to interpret ideas about middle schools. At the end of the 1970s, the middle school was reduced to a minor feature of educational policy and, eventually, the middle school experiments were brought to a close. As a result, the foreign solution of introducing comprehensive education was never transferred to the Netherlands.

Child Maltreatment in the Last 50 Years: The Use of Statistics

Maltreatment of children as an educational problem received new and on-going attention with the publication in 1962 of the article on the Battered Child Syndrome by the American medical doctors C. H. Kempe, F. N. Silverman and their colleagues (Kempe, 1962). Following that publication, numerous studies were published on the abuse and neglect of children. Moreover, an increasing institutional and legal framework for diagnosing and preventing child maltreatment was set up in many countries in the Western world. With the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, in particular article 19, it was accepted that there should be international standards on the protection of children and on the behaviour of their educators. States should exercise more responsibility in this matter and professionals should have more power to tackle the problem. These views were accepted across most of the world with almost all UN member states ratifying the Convention.

Beauty and Simplicity: the Power of Fine Art in Moral Teaching On Education in Seventeenth-Century Holland

Seventeenth century Dutch genre painting played a major role in the promotion of the pursuit of family and educational virtues. Packing moralistic messages in fine paintings was considered as a very effective moralistic communication policy in a culture in which sending such moralising messages was very popular. The flourishing art market supplied great numbers of moralising paintings and drawings on education and domestic virtues, so contributing to the reconciliation of the existing tensions, or, in the words of Simon Schama, embarrassment between beauty and the promoted virtues of frugality and simplicity. A broad middle class created its own private surrounding in which morality and enjoying the beauty of moralising on the family and parenting went together, as is made clear by the analysis of a series of representative images. Dutch parents, moralists, and painters knew the power of beauty in moralising on the family.

Images as representations: visual sources on education and childhood in the past

The challenge of using images for the history of education and childhood will be addressed in this article by looking at them as representations. Central is the relationship between representations and reality. The focus is on the power of paintings as representations of aspects of realities. First the meaning of representation for images as sources for the history of education and childhood – mirrors of realities, complex symbol systems or representations – is explained. A distinction is made between images of real people and images of patterns of human behaviour and the value of the phenomenon of historical sensation as a methodological instrument for insight in that relationship is dealt with. Second, a specific genre of paintings from the seventeenth century, namely portraits of dead children, will be described and analysed to make clear that their value for the history of education and childhood can be studied adequately only by using those images as representations and by interpreting them within the cultural rules and regulations of time and place. This analysis results in the conclusion that images should be considered in their function as representations of aspects of educational and childhood reality.