Educating children: future directions for the history of childhood and education

ABSTRACT

This article explores the crossover between the history of education and the history of childhood. The emergence of state-sponsored national schooling, institutions for juvenile delinquents, home-schooling and expanding higher education were legal and social manifestations of cultural assumptions concerning the needs of children and projections of futurity that accompanied childhood. Several avenues ripe for collaboration between historians of childhood and education are proposed, including a move towards transnational and globalised history, a renewed attention to socialisation and a return to the school as a source for children’s writing and activities. In doing so it can be seen how educational practices and pedagogical beliefs regarding the nature of children reveal the underlying logic that governs modern categories of belonging and difference particularly in reference to the British and Ottoman empires.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood
• education
• Ottoman empire
• transnational studies
• youth culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Phillipe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (Suffolk: Penguin Books, 1973), 150.

² Some historians stake great importance on differentiating between historians of children and historians of childhood, the former indicating an interest in children’s lives and experiences, and the latter focused on the cultural and social construction of childhood by adults. To us the dichotomy of this argument seems false as many histories do both types of methodological work. In this article, we use the term historian of childhood to indicate those working on any topic related to children or childhood. See Julia Grant, ‘Children versus Childhood: Writing Children into the Historical Record, or Reflections on Paula Fass’s Encyclopaedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society’, History of Education Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2005): 468–90.

³ An attempt at summing up the tradition can be seen in Peter Cunningham, ‘Educational History and Educational Change: The Past Decade of English Historiography’, History of Education Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1989): 77–94; Majorie Theobald, ‘Boundaries, Bridges, and the History of Education: An Australian Response to Maxine Schwartz Seller’, History of Education Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1993): 497–510; Maxine Schwartz Seller, ‘Boundaries, Bridges, and the History of Education’, History of Education Quarterly 31, no. 2 (1991): 195–206; John Rury, ‘The Curious Status of the History of Education: A Parallel Perspective’, History of Education Quarterly 46, no. 4 (2006): 571–98.

⁴ The Society for the History of Childhood and Youth was formed in 2001, and it issued its first edition of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth in 2007.

⁵ Ariès, Centuries of Childhood.

⁶ Colin Heywood, ‘Centuries of Childhood: An Anniversary – and an Epitaph?’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3, no. 3 (2010): 341–65.

⁷ James Axtell, The School Upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New Haven, CT: Norton, 1976). Barbara Finkelstein, Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979); B. Finkelstein, Governing the Young: Teacher Behaviour in Popular Primary Schools in Nineteenth-Century United States (Brighton: Falmer Press, 1989). W. Reese and J. Rury, eds., Rethinking the History of American Education (New York: Springer, 2007).

⁸ DeMause is often used as the exemplar of this kind of ‘modernisation’ thesis, perhaps unfairly as his work was more nuanced than how he is often quoted; see Lloyd deMause, ed., The History of Childhood (London: Souvenir Press, 1976); For the theory of children as priceless emotional beings, see Virginia A. Rotman Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). A proponent of the ‘continuity’ thesis in childcare and sentimental attachment is Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent–Child Relations from 1500–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

⁹ For example, Marilyn J. Boxer, ‘“First Wave” Feminism in Nineteenth-Century France: Class, Family and Religion’, Women’s Studies International Forum 5, no. 6 (1982): 551–9; Linda Clark, ‘The Primary Education of French Girls: Pedagogical Prescriptions and Social Realities, 1880–1940’, History of Education Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1981): 411–28; Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Clive Whitehead, ‘The Education of Women and Girls: An Aspect of British Colonial Policy’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 16, no. 2 (July 1984): 24–34; Felicity Hunt, ed., Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women 1850–1950 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Thomas E. Jordan, Victorian Childhood: Themes and Variations (New York: SUNY Press, 1987).

¹⁰ For example, Anna Mae Duane, Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Eden McLean, Mussolini’s Children: Race and Elementary Education in Fascist Italy (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 2018); Stephen Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Emanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Shelley Sallee, The Whiteness of Child Labour Reform in the New South (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2004).

¹¹ Colin Heywood, Growing up in France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 43.

¹² Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

¹³ For example, see Alistair Black, The Public Library in Britain, 1914–2000 (London: British Library, 2000); Alistair Black, Simon Pepper and Kaye Bagshaw, Books, Buildings and Social Engineering: Early Public Libraries in Britain from Past to Present (Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2009), Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

¹⁴ Maza criticises the lack of integration between the history of childhood and the ‘wider’ historical field; S. Maza, ‘The Kids Aren’t All Right: Historians and the Problem of Childhood’, American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (2020): 1261–85. For responses see, Robin P. Chapdelaine, ‘Little Voices: The Importance and Limitations of Children’s Histories’, American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (2020): 1296–9; Stephen Mintz, ‘Children’s History Matters’, American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (2020), 1286–92; Ishita Pande, ‘Is the History of Childhood Ready for the World? A Response to “The Kids Aren’t All Right”’, American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (2020): 1300–5.

¹⁵ Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander and Stephanie Olsen, ‘Emotions and the Global Politics of Childhood’, in Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives, ed. Stephanie Olsen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 12–34. For more on childhood agency see K. Vallgårda, K. Alexander and S. Olsen, ‘Against Agency’, Society for the History of Children and Youth, October 28, 2018, http://www.shcy.org/features/commentaries/against-agency/.

¹⁶ William A. Corsaro, The Sociology of Childhood (Los Angeles: Sage/Pine Forge Press, 2011).

¹⁷ Kristine Moruzi, Nell Musgrove and Carla Pascoe Leahy, Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

¹⁸ Kathryn Gleadle, ‘Playing at Soldiers: British Loyalism and Juvenile Identities during the Napoleonic Wars’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 3 (2015): 335–48; Catherine Sloan, ‘“Periodicals of an Objectionable Character”: Peers and Periodicals at Croydon Friends’ School, 1826–1875’, Victorian Periodicals Review 50, no. 4 (2017): 769–86; Sian Pooley, ‘Children’s Writing and the Popular Press in England 1876–1914’, History Workshop Journal 80, no. 1 (2015): 75–98.

¹⁹ For a more in-depth account, see Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldán Vera, ‘Introduction: The Transnational in the History of Education’, in The Transnational in the History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives, ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldán Vera, eBook (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 1–48.

²⁰ Hugh Cunningham, ‘Histories of Childhood’, American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (1998): 1206.

²¹ This is a generalisation; in the history of female religious education there has been excellent work on the idea of transnational connections and exchange.

²² For example, Mary O’Dowd and June Purvis, eds., A History of the Girl: Formation, Education and Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Sharon Stephens, Children and the Politics of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Paula Fass, Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalisation (New York: New York University Press, 2007); J. Helgren et al., Girlhood: A Global History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Christopher H. Johnson et al., Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences since the Middle Ages (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Heidi Morrison, The Global History of Childhood Reader (London: Routledge, 2012).

²³ There are of course exceptions to this: Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Hilary Marland, Cultures of Child Health in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003); Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History (London: Routledge, 2006); Growing Up: The History of Childhood in a Global Context (Baylor: Baylor University Press, 2005); Hugh D. Hindman, The World of Child Labour: An Historical and Regional Survey (London: Taylor & Francis, 2009); Patricia A. Simpson, The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2020).

²⁴ For example see, J. Helgren and C. Vasconcellos, Girlhood: A Global History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010).

²⁵ Black queer studies offers rich methodological and theoretical approaches to historians of childhood and education to explore varying ideological impacts and outcomes of universal education policies and how they target differently suppressed and discriminated ethnoreligious or racial subjects in any given sociocultural setting. See Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Colour Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

²⁶ Thomas Popkewitz, ed., Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Daniel Tröhler, Thomas S. Popkewitz and David F. Labaree, eds., Schooling and the Making of Citizens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Comparative Visions (London: Routledge, 2011).

²⁷ The field of missionary education is a rapidly expanding area; see Michael C. Coleman, ‘The Responses of American Indian Children to Presbyterian Schooling in the Nineteenth Century: An Analysis through Missionary Sources’, History of Education Quarterly 27, no. 4 (1987): 473–97; Shih-Wen Sue Chen, Children’s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China: Education, Religion, and Childhood (Singapore: Springer, 2019); Karen M. Teoh, Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s–1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Joy Schulz, Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).

²⁸ Clare Anderson, ‘After Emancipation: Empires and Imperial Formations’, in Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall, Nick Draper and Keith McClelland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 113–27.

²⁹ Helen May, Baljit Kaur and Larry Prochner, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies (Farnham: Routledge, 2014); Rebecca Swartz, Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880 (New York: Springer, 2019); Barbara Mann Wall, Into Africa: A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

³⁰ J. L. Ritterhouse, Growing up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), P. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); G. Schaffer, Racial Science and British Society, 1930–62 (New York: Springer, 2008).

³¹ Deirdre Raftery and Susan M. Parkes, Female Education in Ireland 1700–1900: Minerva or Madonna (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), 5.

³² On changing political and ideological climate in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire, see Engin D. Akarlı, ‘The Tangled Ends of an Empire: Ottoman Encounters with the West and Problems of Westernization – An Overview’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 26, no. 3 (2006): 353–66; Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 6–8. A detailed analysis of the switch from a conventional and orthodox Islamic education to a centralised state education can be seen in Aytaç Yıldız and Mustafa Gündüz, ‘Maarif: Transformation of a Concept in the Ottoman Empire at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century’, History of Education 48, no. 3 (2019): 275–96.

³³ Yıldız and Gündüz, ‘Maarif: Transformation of a Concept’, 280.

³⁴ Benjamin Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Akşin Somel, The Modernisation of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire (1839–1908): Islamisation, Autocracy, and Discipline (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2001); Emine Evered, Empire and Education under the Ottomans: Politics, Reform, and Resistance from the Tanzimat to the Young Turks (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2021).

³⁵ Yıldız and Gündüz, ‘Maarif: Transformation of a Concept’, 280.

³⁶ Betül Açıkgöz, ‘Approval and Disapproval of Textbooks in the Late Ottoman Empire’, History of Education 46, no. 1 (2017): 2.

³⁷ Filiz Meşeci Giorgetti offers an extensive analysis of the functional role of education across different levels in nation-building in the late Ottoman and early Republic of Turkey era. Scholars working on different parts of the Middle East also denote a similar role for education taking over in the transition from empires to nation-states. Afsaneh Najmabadi’s ground-breaking work, for instance, explores the role of education through an intersectional lens, arguing how education informed national as well as gendered and sexual subjectivities of Iranian youth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Judith Tucker also underlines how education became a site of ideological intervention in Egypt in the course of the nineteenth century. See Filiz Meşeci Giorgetti, ‘Nation-Building in Turkey through Ritual Pedagogy: The Late Ottoman and Early Turkish Republican Era’, History of Education 49, no. 1 (2020): 78; Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Moustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 181–207; Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1986), 102–32.

³⁸ C. Mayer and A. Arredondo, Women, Power Relations, and Education in a Transnational World (Berlin: Springer Nature, 2020); D. Matasci, M. Bandeira Jerónimo and H. Gonçalves Dores, Education and Development in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa: Policies, Paradigms, and Entanglements, 1890s–1980s (Berlin: Springer Nature, 2020); A. Arce Hai et al., Reimagining Teaching in Early Twentieth Century Experimental Schools (Berlin: Springer Nature, 2020); Fuchs and Roldán Vera, The Transnational in the History of Education; C. Ydesen, The OECD’s Historical Rise in Education: The Formation of a Global Governing Complex (Berlin: Springer Nature, 2019).

³⁹ For example, Catholic religious sisters could rely on their order’s resources and staff to fill vacancies in schools and embark on building projects, giving them a great deal of independence from local authorities. For example, see, Deirdre Raftery, ‘“Je Suis d’Aucune Nation”: The Recruitment and Identity of Irish Women Religious in the International Mission Field, c.1840–1940’, Paedagogica Historica 49, no. 4 (2013): 513–30; Anne O’Brien, ‘Catholic Nuns in Transnational Mission, 1528–2015’, Journal of Global History 11, no. 3 (November 2016): 387–408; Barbara Mann Wall, Into Africa: A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

⁴⁰ Jackie C. Horne, History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children’s Literature (London: Routledge, 2016); Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature in the Late Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2004); Andrew O’Malley, Children’s Literature, Popular Culture and Robinson Crusoe, Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

⁴¹ Matthew Orville Grenby, The Child Reader, 1700–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

⁴² Fortna, Learning to Read, 66.

⁴³ Yoko H. Thakur, ‘The History Textbook in Allied Occupied Japan, 1945–52’, History of Education Quarterly 35, no 3 (1995): 261–78.

⁴⁴ S. Alayan, A. Rohde and S. Dhouib, eds., The Politics of Education Reform in the Middle East: Self and Other in Textbooks and Curricula (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012), 2–3.

⁴⁵ Açıkgöz, ‘Approval and Disapproval of Textbooks’, 6.

⁴⁶ Fortna, Learning to Read, 60–8.

⁴⁷ Deringil, The Well Protected Domains, 100–1.

⁴⁸ For some examples of the vast scholarship on nationalisms in the late Ottoman Empire, see Ussama Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); İpek Yosmaoğlu, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1908 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Bedross Der Matossian, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, ‘A Climate for Abduction, A Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 3 (2013): 522–53.

⁴⁹ These studies offer a more nuanced reading of what modernisation of public education meant in the Ottoman context and teaching orthodox (Sunni) Islam continued to define the politics of education due to the state’s articulation of the ideal Ottoman subject as Turkish and Muslim. See Somel, The Modernisation of Public; Füsun Üstel, ‘Makbul Vatandaş’ ın Peşinde: II. Meşrutiyet’ten Bugüne Türkiye’de Vatandaş Eğitimi (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları); Benjamin Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains.

⁵⁰ Selim Deringil, İktidarın Sembolleri ve İdeoloji: II. Abdülhamid Dönemi (İstanbul: Doğan Kitap, 2014), 129–30.

⁵¹ Ussama Makdisi’s studies of Ottoman orientalism and sectarianism on Mount Lebanon explain the phenomenon of ‘reverse-orientalism’ that the Ottoman state undertook to ‘civilize’ its so-called backward subjects. See U. Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768–9; Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism.

⁵² Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 105.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Ann Stoler’s important work on colonialism, missionaries and the politics of sexuality also underlines the necessity of an intersectional lens that would place sexuality not on the periphery but at the centre of colonial politics: Ann L. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

⁵⁵ Lynn Hunt’s, Suad Joseph’s and Afsaneh Najmabadi’s work shows examples of nationalist ideologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shaped by notions of the French Revolution, and impacts on societies, through extensive discussion on the institution of family. See Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 1–17; Suad Joseph, Intimate Selving in Arab Families: Gender, Self, and Identity (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999); and Najmabadi, Women with Moustaches.

⁵⁶ For a brief discussion on the construction of this notion in the wartime Ottoman Empire, see Tuğçe Kayaal, ‘Twisted Desires, Boy Lovers, and Male–Male Cross-Generational Sex in the Late Ottoman Empire (1912–1918)’, Historical Reflections 46, no. 1 (2020): 31–46.

⁵⁷ Tuğçe Kayaal, ‘Breastfeeding: Ottoman Empire’, in Encyclopaedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, ed. Suad Joseph (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

⁵⁸ Nazan Maksudyan, ‘Foster-Daughter or Servant, Charity or Abuse: Beslemes in the Late Ottoman Empire’, Journal of The Historical Society 21, no. 4 (2008): 488–512.

⁵⁹ For some examples see Kayaal, ‘Breastfeeding: Ottoman Empire’; Maksudyan, ‘Foster-Daughter or Servant,’ 488–512.

⁶⁰ The fictional literary character mentioned here, Little Mehmed, alongside the paramilitary youth organisations, served this purpose in the Ottoman case. See Yiğit Akın, When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and the Devastation of an Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).

⁶¹ Zafer Toprak, ‘İttihat ve Terakki’nin Paramiliter Gençlik Örgütleri’, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Dergisi 7 (1979): 96.

⁶² Ayşe Gül Altınay’s work on militarised patriotic youth culture that became popular in the late Ottoman Empire and later in the Republic of Turkey underlines the importance of reading militarisation by focusing on people’s everyday lives and the politics of public education: Ayşe Gül Altınay, The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

⁶³ Benjamin Fortna, ‘Bonbons and Bayonets: Mixed Messages of Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic’, in Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 178.

⁶⁴ Lucy Andrew, ‘Be Prepared! (But Not Too Prepared): Scouting, Soldiering, and Boys’ Roles in World War I’, Boyhood Studies 11, no. 1 (2019): 48.

⁶⁵ Stephanie Olsen, Juvenile Nation: Youth, Emotions, and the Making of the Modern British Citizen (1880–1914) (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 74.

⁶⁶ Sami Karayel, İzci Rehberi [The Scout Guide] (Istanbul, 1915); Paul Vuibert, İzcilik: Altın Ordu [Scouting: Golden Army] (Istanbul, 1914–15); Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship (London: Horace Cox, 1908).

⁶⁷ For some examples of this scholarship, see Andrew, ‘Be Prepared!’; Benjamin Rene Jordan, Modern Manhood and Boy Scouts of America: Citizenship, Race, and the Environment (1910–1930) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Mehmet Beşikçi, The Ottoman Mobilisation of Manpower in the First World War: Between Voluntarism and Resistance (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012); and Sevil Özçalık and Gerhard Grüsshaber, ‘“Frank, Fresh, Frish, Free” at the Bosphorous? Selim Sırrı and the German Model of Youth Mobilization in the Late Ottoman State, 1909–1918’, Middle East Critique 24, no. 4 (2015): 375–88.

⁶⁸ Following the lead of critical scholarship analysing colonial practices of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century by exploring the Ottoman state’s deployment of colonial state- and citizen-making politics – education being one of them – this article defines the Ottoman state as a colonial entity. See Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’; Ella Fratantuono, ‘Producing Ottomans: Internal Colonization and Social Engineering in Ottoman Immigrant Settlement’, Journal of Genocide Research 21, no. 1 (2019): 1–24; Selim Deringil, ‘“They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (2003): 311–42; and Thomas Kühn, ‘Shaping and Reshaping Colonial Ottomanism: Contesting Boundaries of Difference and Integration in Ottoman Yemen, 1872–1919’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 27, no. 2 (2007): 315–31.

⁶⁹ Scholarship on education in the Ottoman Empire underlines the limited accessibility of public education for underprivileged children. Scholarship on the First World War also points to the exacerbation of the distribution of resources, including those related to education, and how it impacted class-based hierarchies in the Ottoman Empire. Evered, Empire and Education; Fortna, Imperial Classroom; and Beşikçi, The Ottoman Mobilisation. For scholarship on the First World War see Melanie Tanielian, The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid, and World War I in the Middle East (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018); Yiğit Akın, When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and the Devastation of An Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018); and Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

⁷⁰ Ríona Nic Congáil, ‘Young Ireland and The Nation: Nationalist Children’s Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Eire-Ireland, 46, (2011): 37–9; Ríona Nic Congáil, ‘“Fiction, Amusement, Instruction”: The Irish Fireside Club and the Educational Ideology of the Gaelic League’, Eire-Ireland 44, (2009): 91–117. Also see Margot Backus, ’“The Children of the Nation?”: Representations of Poor Children in Mainstream Nationalist Journalism, 1882 and 1913’, Eire-Ireland 46, (2009): 118–46.

⁷¹ Nic Congáil, ‘”Fiction, Amusement, Instruction”’.

⁷² Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement (London: Pantheon Books, 1986); T. M. Proctor, On My Honour: Guides and Scouts in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002); Marnie Hay, Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Revolution, 1909–23: Scouting for Rebels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019); Sian Edwards, Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside: Creating Good Citizens, 1930–1960 (New York: Springer, 2017).

⁷³ For further information on the organisation, educative role and ideological function of boy scouts and paramilitary youth organisations in the late Ottoman Empire, see Zafer Toprak, ‘İttihat ve Terakki’nin Paramiliter Gençlik Örgütleri’, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Dergisi no. 7 (1979): 95–113; Beşikçi, The Ottoman Mobilisation.

⁷⁴ Toprak, ‘İttihat ve Terakki’nin Paramiliter’, 95–113.

⁷⁵ There are too many examples to include here, but certainly class, gender and to a lesser extent race are fundamental to the history of education. In History of Education, a search for ‘class’ pulled up 1619 articles, ‘gender’ 729 articles, and ‘race’ 644 articles.

⁷⁶ Dirk Schumann, Raising Citizens in the ‘Century of the Child’: The United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).

⁷⁷ Peter Stearns discussed some of these research questions in the inaugural issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. See ‘Challenges in the History of Childhood’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 35–42.

⁷⁸ Some examples of this vast scholarship are K. L. Acosta, ‘Queering Family Scholarship: Theorizing from Borderlands’, Journal of Family Theory & Review 10 (2018): 406–18; Najmabadi, Women with Moustaches and Men without Beards; and Kathleen Wilson, ‘Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, and Governmentality in Eighteenth-Century British Frontiers’, American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011): 1294–322.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary Hatfield

Mary Hatfield received her PhD in history from Trinity College Dublin and has held posts at the University of Oxford and University College Dublin. Her research centres on childhood, gender and class in Ireland with an emphasis on middle-class education. Her recent publications include Growing up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Cultural History of Middle-Class Childhood and Gender (Oxford University Press, 2019), and the edited book Happiness in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Liverpool University Press, 2021), as well as articles in Gender & History, History of Education and the Irish Economic and Social History Journal.

Tuğçe Kayaal

Tuğçe Kayaal is an assistant professor of history at Furman University. She received her PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and completed the Women’s Studies Graduate Certificate Program. Her research interests incorporate the history of childhood and youth sexuality; discourses of sexual deviancy in the Ottoman Empire; queer youth cultures in the Middle East; and histories of intimacy and friendship in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Republic of Turkey. Kayaal’s research has appeared in Historical Reflections, Encylopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures and various other academic venues.