“Equipping a Child for Life’s Battles”? Sources and Methods in the History of Boarding Schools

ABSTRACT

Boarding schools are well-known institutions that have been extensively studied by historians. Yet, there are still many hidden histories associated with this type of schooling. This section presents a range of methods that might fruitfully be applied to under-utilised sources to gain new insights into the history of boarding schools for children outside “mainstream” histories. The introductory article provides an overview of the different ways in which boarding schools have been theorised as institutions. This is followed by three articles that explore how music and photographs as well as ego-documents can be used to further develop social and cultural historical approaches to obtain a broader understanding of the complexities of boarding school life. Overall, this dossier provides insight into how different sources and methodological innovations can help us uncover alternative or hidden histories of historical actors in boarding schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Boarding schools
• methodology
• historiography
• children

In 1928, L. G. Gregory of Murtoa, Victoria, a farming community in the Southeast of Australia, wrote to the journal of the New South Wales Public School Teachers Federation, Education. In his letter, he espoused the benefits of boarding school education for young females. The author was dismayed that government provision of high schools in country towns led parents to stop sending their children to boarding schools further away, instead preferring to keep their children closer to them at home for longer. Gregory bemoaned this, stating: “There is nothing like boarding-school training for equipping a child for life’s battles, and the ones without are conscious of a handicap at every turn.”¹ The boarding school experience, according to Gregory, opened a child up to different experiences, views and opportunities that small town life could not offer, and in doing so better prepared them for the broader world.

The type of boarding schools that Gregory imagined in 1928 were the European, and particularly British, forms that had developed over centuries and had expanded significantly over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to spread across the globe, often along with imperial expansion.² In general, there were two types of boarding school that had spread around the globe: schools that replicated elite boarding schools or ones that were seen as social levellers for the perceived abject of society. Two of the articles in our dossier focus on forms of the second type, whilst a further article examines boarding schools for aspiring priests, in which children from lower social strata could receive a respectable education, thus complicating a strict division between boarding schools as only for either the elite or the abject. For pupils in Europe and in the colonial world, elite boarding schools were spaces in which pupils were to be “polished” and trained for subsequent respectable positions in society. Furthermore, the connections forged in boarding school environments were considered an essential part of life-long networks, as exemplified by “old boys’” and “old girls’” clubs. Such clubs were considered potentially beneficial for later career support.³ Thus, admission to these types of boarding schools was limited by means of social and group selection, by entrance exams, or costs, so that even those who desired for their children to attend were not always able to afford this form of education. For those considered to be on the fringes of society, boarding schools were specific spaces of education where pupils were – in many cases forcefully – extracted from their close family and at times the greater community to be educated in ways deemed appropriate for inclusion in the broader world. This often severed ties to land, community and family.⁴ Although the experiences of pupils differed greatly in boarding schools for both elite and marginalised children, there were commonalities in the organisational and structural patterns as well as the everyday practices of these schools, which stemmed from the shared origins of these institutions. The ideas that informed European forms of boarding schools stemmed from a general idea popularised through the European Enlightenment that all human beings could be educated, with the basis of this education predominantly formed through European ideals, curricula and morality.

Boarding schools have been extensively studied by historians. The question that we address here is not what is known about boarding schools, rather what methods might be fruitfully applied to under-utilised sources to provide new insights into the hidden histories of boarding school; that is, the history of boarding schools for children outside “mainstream” histories. This special section examines how music and photographs as well as ego-documents can be used to further develop social and cultural historical approaches to obtain broader understandings of the complexities of boarding school life. In our introduction, we provide an overview of the various ways in which boarding schools have been theoretically framed as institutions. In a second section, we track some of the historiographical developments in the study of boarding schoolings, particularly in relation to methods and sources. In a third section, we detail our reasons for focusing on boarding schools and introduce the sources and approaches presented in this dossier. Boarding schools were highly ambivalent institutions that could influence people’s lives through spreading western episteme and ideas across the globe. This process was not unilateral, rather it was dynamic and multilateral, with the content and aim of boarding schools evolving in response to local situations. In drawing on a range of methods and sources to examine such complexities, we seek to extend existing work to demonstrate the multiplicity of histories that are potentially opened through the consideration of alternative sources and methods.

The Boarding School as an Educational Institution

The boarding school was historically considered by many educators as one of the best means of changing and shaping children. Aside from the actual schooling, the boarding school environment offered the chance to influence social and moral behaviour through daily routines within a boarding environment. These kinds of notions and practices were shared by religious orders from the Middle Ages, reformers of the Enlightenment, bourgeoisie elites and colonial missionaries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as Socialist and Fascist educators. Children were sent to boarding schools for various reasons, including the assumption that these institutions would facilitate social achievements, the paucity of suitable educational facilities near family homes, or because this form of institution was deemed the most appropriate replacement for an absent family. Boarding schools can be seen as specific spaces of education that differ from other ways of educating children and youth, as their design was such that children were collectively educated and communally resided, ate, slept and engaged in leisure activities.⁵ Such community engagement could be undertaken amongst social peers with the support of children’s parents, or against parental wishes, resulting in the separation of children and youth from their original or primary social groups.

Boarding schools determined almost every aspect of the daily life of resident children and youth from the moment they woke until they went to sleep. In the early 1960s, the sociologist Ervin Goffman, in his seminal study on asylums, classified boarding schools as one form of a “total institution.” He conceived of these “total institutions” as formalised and hierarchical. For him, the rationale behind their establishment was to “improve” the inmate, often through labour or some “worklike task.”⁶ It was increasingly evident from the nineteenth century that boarding schools were part of a broader push in which educators and government in many Europeanised locations strove for universal education as one means of attempting to “shape” people into loyal and obedient citizens. Thus, boarding schools can be considered as an early form of “social engineering.” Although we agree that boarding schools were formative, we argue that they were not the “total institutions” that Goffman proposed. Goffman’s concept assumes that such institutions are “places/[s] of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, [are] cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time”⁷ and in which the boundary between the inside and outside worlds was largely impenetrable. Pointedly, he argues that the individual in these “total institutions” had no alternative options.

Goffman’s study is indicative of the ways in which many histories of boarding schools have been written; that is, as histories of institutions that do not necessarily focus on the experiences of the pupils themselves. Following other scholars, we argue that the boundaries between the worlds inside and outside boarding schools were porous.⁸ This is especially so in cases of elite institutions to which families deliberately choose to send their children, as Goffman himself acknowledges in regard to English public schools.⁹ “Total institutions” are also characterised by structural constrictions, for example through a clear separation between a supervising group and the “inmates.” This is, as Goffman notes, also the case in boarding schools between the teachers (supervising group) and the pupils (inmates).¹⁰ However, this separation is blurred when other groups such as parents, local community members, student teachers, prefects and auxiliary staff are considered in the structural dynamics of boarding school life.¹¹ Such examples illustrate that, despite criticism of the general idea of total or closed institutions, aspects of Goffman’s work can be fruitfully applied to the study of boarding schools. Nevertheless, instead of “total” we prefer the terms “greedy institutions” or “hyperinclusion,” which describe the appropriation of the individual into the structures of the institution that simultaneously restrict or deprave the other needs of the individual.¹²

Boarding schools housed pupils of diverse backgrounds, cultures, abilities and ages. They were sites of intense socialisation of children by non-family members in an enclosed social environment. In the 1920s, Gregory conceived of boarding schools as safe places in which the minor pains of rubbing off “corners” or “little peculiarities” that a child had acquired through living in a small community could be undertaken.¹³ More generally, boarding schools were considered safe places where a child could be altered and “improved” with less trouble than would be the case later in life. Yet boarding schools were not always safe spaces. The isolated spaces of boarding schools often compounded and hid the distress and violence to which many pupils were subjected. For many children, particularly those deemed to be on the fringes of societies, or children of Indigenous or First Nations peoples, or those considered by Europeans to be “uncivilised,” there are many harrowing accounts of gross abuse, violence and neglect.¹⁴ For children forced to attend boarding schools, such as many First Nations children in settler colonial spaces such as Canada and Australia, the aim was not to rub off “little peculiarities,” but to rub out strong connections to First Nations’ cultures, languages and communities and to “civilise” children to assimilate into settler colonial societies. Indeed, as Brenda Child has notably argued, the boarding school is for many American Indian families “also a useful and extraordinarily powerful metaphor for colonialism.”¹⁵ Overwhelmingly, the extraction of a child from his or her family environment was considered to be an act by individuals as well as broader systems to be of “benefit” to the child. Pertinently, the definition of “benefit” was dependent on contemporaneous cultural, social, religious, political and scientific norms.¹⁶ Child’s work is exemplary of studies that have emphasised the complexity of experiences of pupils at boarding schools. It is with this awareness of the broadness of the boarding school experience that we agree that there is no singular history of boarding schools as educational institutions.

Traditional Approaches to the History of Boarding Schools

Historical studies of boarding schools were initially written by supporters as well as former students and teachers of the institutions. Most of these early writers tended to praise the schools and their educational approaches and thus often neglected questions of physical abuse and bad experiences. An example of such a hagiographical approach that tended to become the official, or standard, narrative of a school is Edward D. Laborde’s 1948 book Harrow School: Yesterday and Today. In his study, Laborde, who had been an Assistant Master at the school in 1919, depicted in detail the developments of school buildings and institutions. He thereby established a success story that reveals little of the everyday experiences of the pupils. Moreover, he only acknowledged those pupils who subsequently had notable political or social careers after leaving school.¹⁷ Similar master narratives exist for many of the prominent English public schools, with this trend also evident within older US-American or French boarding school literature.¹⁸

Institutional histories often relied on sources created by officials, which could include printed school documents such as school magazines, chronicles and yearbooks. Such material can be described as the “memory of the administration,” which is biased towards the voices of adults and, by being so, underrepresents children’s voices.¹⁹ In institutional histories, school-based documents are often supplemented with documents stemming from umbrella organisations responsible for schools within a defined administrative unit, such as government ministries, church groups and regional school governing bodies. Site-specific serialised sources are useful to inform institutional histories, as they are commonly published and usually accessible in school or regional archives. Their serial nature contributes to the perception that a historical progression can be ascertained through examining them.²⁰ Nevertheless, they are problematic due to their official character, as Melissa Parkhurst shows in her article in this dossier on US boarding schools for Native Americans. These official school sources have a propaganda function, in so far as they are often used to present the school in a positive light. They are published to tell “the” official story and thereby present a positive image of the school that acts to garner support from parents and donors. Furthermore, they are predominantly written and published by teachers and other responsible school officials. When articles from pupils are included, they are often censored. Despite such limitations, official documents are useful for historians to obtain a first impression of a boarding school, yet they must be read in awareness of the common languages and epitomes of the time.

Increasingly from the 1960s and 1970s, there was a movement amongst social historians away from a focus on individual institutions and their histories to the examination of boarding schools as part of a larger system of education. Boarding schools were regarded as important objects of study to provide insights into particular national educational regimes.²¹ Many of these studies were influenced by the work of Goffman in conceiving of boarding schools as secluded educational spaces. In such a framing, children were considered to be subjected to specific disciplinary regimes that were enacted in space, time and also in the hierarchical relationships embedded in the institutions. Social historical studies often described the internal power relations of boarding schools, focusing especially on phenomena such as bullying, pennalism (a form of bullying directed by older to younger pupils) and initiation rites. These histories were actually not particularly interested in the individual actors themselves, but rather in the larger social functions the schools had within national education systems. Hence, social historians mainly used official records such as school magazines, school board minutes and especially statistics to write histories. Children and youth were hence mere figures and numbers and thus their personal stories rarely surfaced.

With the rise of cultural history in the 1980s, the study of boarding school histories turned its attention to the experiences of individuals within the complex environments of boarding schools. Cultural history studies often focused on the development of individual stories and attempted to echo the joys and concerns of different groups attached to schools, including the pupils themselves. John Chandos’s Boys Together (1984) and Christine Heward’s Making a Man of Him (1988) are both examples of this genre that focus on British public schools for boys.²² The emphasis of these and similar studies was on the disjuncture between the ideology of elite education and demeaning common practices, such as physical abuse through fagging and bullying. Such studies also examined abuses of positions of power within boarding schools, such as the sexual misconduct of teachers against pupils. Cultural history approaches have also uncovered intimate friendships and alternative masculine behaviours that were not present in official institutional histories of elite schools. Cultural histories used the sources available to institutional and social historians, but often read them in new ways to uncover alternative voices. For cultural histories of boarding schools, sources such as punishment books have been read for indications of rebellion or resistance. In their search for historical actors’ interpretations of the past, cultural historians look beyond official sources to ones not initially created for public consumption, such as diaries and letters. Oral histories are another rich source of material that cultural historians draw upon to give voice to alternative narratives of official histories.²³ Cultural historians have used various sources to ask critical questions about the lived experiences of pupils in boarding schools. In the last couple of decades more research has focused on the extent of (sexualised) violence in boarding schools, with the results leading to public and international debates as well as outrage.

Photographs are, like private letters and correspondence, often difficult to locate – a phenomenon that Marleen Reichgelt discusses in her article in this dossier on photography as a source of information on children’s lives. Photographs are often not systematically collected or created. This makes their collection and storage, as well as subsequent access to them, subject to individual whims. Photographs, as Reichgelt reminds us, are an important source to reconstruct self-images and perceptions of actors in the time of education. They can tell us something about different expectations and the different reactions of actors to these expectations. Occasionally, we can learn more about everyday life in schools through a candid moment caught in an image. Nevertheless, we have to be cautious because such sources are always subjective. There are many problems associated with subjective sources, as Ulrich Leitner demonstrates in his article for this dossier. He notes that ego-documents and autobiographical texts are often “retrospective reconstruction of biographies,” which have an inherent logic of self-representation. Using such sources therefore demands a multi-perspectival approach that includes not only different methodological approaches but also sources from a wide range of actors. In this regard, studies on boarding schools have a substantial advantage over other research that focuses on the upbringing and education of children as the boarding school environment can produce a large range of sources resulting from specific, intensive and restricted interactions between different groups of people involved, including teachers, parents, other family members, friends and the boarders themselves. Despite the general difficulties with regard to sources, these interactions are often significantly better documented in boarding schools than in cases in which children lived at home, visited day schools or spent their spare time with peers outside the school environment.²⁴

Although the genre of cultural history placed the focus onto the experiences of children, as the cases of Chandos and Heward demonstrate, initially white privileged children were the focus of these studies. To counter this limited perspective, throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s there was an increased awareness amongst scholars that large proportions of societies, particularly those in (former) colonial spaces, had been overlooked by conventional histories.²⁵ Drawing on the theoretical and methodological insights of scholars working in areas such as subaltern and postcolonial studies, historians of boarding schools increasingly placed attention on those pupils considered in need of “raising” in terms of the colonial hierarchy. In the (former) colonies, but also indeed amongst the poor in Europe, boarding schools have been conceived of as “laboratories” in which children were extracted from their usual situations and placed within new social settings that were distant from the influences of parents and other society members.²⁶ When examining boarding schools as social-levellers for the abject, focus was often placed on the power relationships embedded within boarding schools. These power relationships depended not only on the specifics of the school itself, but on who was being educated. Many studies have noted the importance of the categories of gender, race and class in affecting the internal structures of schools. To analyse the power dynamics within schools, and in an attempt to shed light on the experiences of overlooked pupils, the repertoire of sources used by institutional, social and cultural historians was further extended to include texts written by pupils themselves. In such studies, historians questioned the impact that asymmetrical power relations had on the types of sources that were generated and circulated. As Ann Laura Stoler has demonstrated with her alternative reading of official Dutch colonial sources, official sources can also be used for agency and alternative perspectives.²⁷ As such, these “official” sources can provide alternative perspectives beyond institutional histories. Yet there are often no extant written texts from students themselves. To insert alternative narratives into boarding school histories, scholars have turned to non-textual documents. These alternative sources include photographs, as used by Marleen Reichgelt in her article on the boarding school experience of colonised New Guineans under Dutch rule, and music and associated paraphernalia, as used by Melissa Parkhurst in her analysis in this dossier of boarding school students at a Native American residential school.

Our Articles and Their Approaches

In accordance with – and as an extension of – the previously presented cultural approaches, the articles in our dossier highlight a need to juxtapose multiple perspectives from various actors and subsequently to read these as a choir of voices that provides a more nuanced understanding of the broader social ideologies connected to the raising and educating of children. One of the aims of cultural historians is to place a focus on children’s agency and experiences in historical contexts. This aim complicates previous approaches that have focused on adult perspectives on children’s lives, often described as the history of childhood. In such a perspective the agency of children is often overlooked, leading to simplified narratives that may in turn lead to binary or simplistic explanations that marginalise children’s voices. Scholars such as John Wall advocate for reasserting children’s voices in historical narratives through the lens of “childism,” an approach that takes seriously children as actors.²⁸ Children and young people were subjected to physical and psychological suffering in boarding schools. It is important not to categorise those pupils subjected to such abuse simply as “victims” or “survivors,” but also to show what options for actions and reactions, such as adaptation or resistance, were open to them.²⁹ Moreover, it is important to examine the structures of asymmetrical power balances to uncover where and why some of these children were both victims and potential perpetrators. Such alternative readings are important to engage with the demand for more agency for children and young people, yet at the same time alternative readings should also address the problems associated with the agency trap.³⁰ Important here is the difference in perspective: the history of children privileges the opinion, responses and experiences of children and youth, while the history of childhood focuses on adults’ opinions and representations of children.³¹ Mona Gleason reminds us that when writing in the field of the history of children and youth there are three potential problems, or traps, that are associated with the concept of agency: contributory, binaried, and undifferentiated approaches to agency. In looking for children’s agency, she notes, these traps foster a view on child agency that is undifferentiated, binary, leaves intact various forms of “privilege” and confirms simplistic notions of children’s actions. Indeed, there are a number of scholars of childhood, such as Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander and Stephanie Olsen, who have argued that the concept of childhood agency is methodologically unsatisfactory, particularly because the way in which the subject is conceptualised stems from liberal Enlightenment thinking, which itself is a product of a particularly narrow way of seeing the world. Instead of “agency” they work with the concept of “emotional formation” and “emotional frontiers” in order to analyse the interactions, emotions and confrontation of the past.³² The articles in this section are also aware of the difficulties of the term “agency” and through their innovative combination of sources and methods illuminate the complexities of the boarding school experience for children on the margins of society, or those outside European spaces.

A multi-perspective approach to boarding schools requires new methodological perspectives and approaches to integrate different, and at times disparate, sources or methods to “read against the grain” of conventional sources. It is for this reason that we have brought together in this section an ethnomusicologist, a historian and an educational scientist to demonstrate the innovative methods that can be used to uncover histories of boarding schools, particularly in light of the hidden histories of these institutions and the people within them. While textual documents such as school reports or commemoratory histories diminish, distort or indeed ignore the alternative histories and backgrounds of children at boarding schools, non-textual sources can be used to reconcile contradictory stories. These sources can be used to focus on individual children and children as a diverse group of participants in processes of colonialism. Three articles detail how various sources such as music, photographs and autobiographical texts can be used to uncover histories of boarding school. Ulrich Leitner focuses on the use of ego-documents and the method of triangulation – that is, the combination of various research approaches to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the research object or subject – to analyse histories stemming from South Tyrolian diocesan pre-seminary boarding schools in the early nineteenth century. Melissa Parkhurst uses sources centred on music lessons in an early twentieth-century residential school for Native American Indians, the Chemawa Indian School, and applies thematic analysis, which is based on a process of coding, to explore the question of what meaning was ascribed to music in this institution. Marleen Reichgelt draws on a collection of photographs taken over a 30-year period of pupils of the boarding schools run by the missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Merauke, Netherlands New Guinea. Through doing so, she was able to uncover unique aspects of historical bodies not captured in written documents. In her detailed analysis of photographs, she was able to situate pupils over time and space and help identify individual children.

All authors are aware of the benefits, but also of the limitations of their use of methods and specific sources. Collectively, these papers inform us how different sources and methodological innovations can help us uncover alternative, or hidden, histories of historical actors. Following from the methodological and theoretical insights from social history, women’s history, subaltern studies and postcolonial studies, our texts demonstrate how the voices of the overheard, underrepresented or silenced can be (partly) reconstructed to provide insight into alternative histories of boarding schools and to place these histories in broader perspectives. Through reframing sources, we can provide methodological insights into the reading of biographies as retrospective reconstructions of childhood experiences. Moreover, our texts underscore how methodological differences affect the research question as well as findings when examining the experiences of boarding schools. Together these articles, plus our short introductory text, demonstrate how under-utilised sources and innovative methods can shed fresh light on the experiences of pupils and other actors at boarding schools across broad geographical and temporal frameworks. Furthermore, these articles highlight moments in which boarding schools strove to “Equip … a Child for Life’s Battles” and where, through different methodological insights, we can uncover moments in which boarding schools engendered more lifelong battles.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Felicity Jensz was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) Excellence Strategy, EXC 2060 “Religion and Politics: Dynamics of Tradition and Innovation” 390726036 (funding period January 2019-December 2025). Daniel Gerster was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), through the research project GE 2858/2-1 “Cloistered Boyhood: Becoming a Man at Boarding Schools in Germany and England 1870–1930” (funding period December 2019–November 2022).

Notes

^1. Gregory, “Boarding Schools for Girls.”

^2. See, for example, Allender, Learning Femininity; Jensz, Missionaries and Modernity; Pomfret, Youth and Empire; Swartz, Education and Empire and Tschurerenv, Empire. See also Gerster and Jensz, Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools.

^3. The most influential in this regard are the English public schools. See, for example: Bamford, Rise of the Public Schools; Mangan, Athleticism; Chandos, Boys Together; Heward, Making a Man of Him. See also, for the US-American boarding schools, McLachlan, American Boarding Schools; Levine, “The Rise of American Boarding”; Gaztambide-Fernández, “What Is an Elite Boarding School?”

^4. There is a large amount of research on boarding schools for Indigenous peoples in settler colonial societies. See, for example, Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction; Fear-Segal, “Nineteenth-Century Indian Education”; Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club; Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision. Similar kinds of institution can be found elsewhere, such as in the Soviet Union, and as part of the “western” social care system. See, for example, Galley, Building Communism.

^5. For a preliminary definition and a historical overview see Tenorth, “Internate in ihrer Geschichte.”

^6. Goffman, Asylums, 16.

^7. Ibid., 11.

^8. Until now it has mainly been empirical studies focusing on the current situation at boarding schools that have emphasised this point. See, for example, in the German case, Kalthoff, Wohlerzogenheit, and recently Rühle, Jugend zwischen Familie und Internat. For the general discussion see also Deppe, “Nur eine Episode,” esp. 217–18.

^9. Goffman 1970 [orig. 1961], 110.

^10. Ibid., 18–20. For a critical discussion on the teacher–pupil split in boarding schools see Deppe, “Nur eine Episode.”

^11. For some recent historical scholarship on boarding schools in a global context see the contributions in Gerster and Jensz, Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools.

^12. See Coser, Greedy Institutions; Erfurt, “Führung als Hyperinklusion.” For the references see Deppe, “Nur eine Episode,” 217–18.

^13. Gregory, “Boarding Schools for Girls,” 2.

^14. See, for example: Minton, Residential Schools and Indigenous Peoples.

^15. Child, “The Boarding School,” 38.

^16. See ibid.

^17. Laborde, Harrow School.

^18. See, for example, Rouse, A History of Rugby School; Cust, A History of Eton College. For the development of the historiography of US-American boarding schools see McLachlan, American Boarding Schools; Gaztambide-Fernández, The Best of the Best; Bas, “Boarding Schools”; for French boarding schools, particularly for girls, see De Bellaigue, Educating Women.

^19. Müller and Müller, “Akten/Aktenanalysen,” 23, as cited by Ulrich Leitner in this dossier.

^20. See, for example, the German “Schulprogramme,” which had been published annually by secondary schools since the early nineteenth century; Haubfleisch and Ritzi, “Schulprogramme”; Ächtler, Schulprogramme.

^21. For British boarding schools see Simon and Bradley, The Victorian Public School and Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe; for the US see McLachlan, American Boarding Schools; Levine, “The Rise of American Boarding Schools.”

^22. See Chandos, Boys Together; Heward, Making a Man of Him.

^23. See, for example: Simpson, Finding Our Way Home; Reyhner, “American Indian Boarding Schools”; Lomawaima, “Domesticity in the Federal Indian Schools.”

^24. For letters used in the research on boarding schools see, for example, Heward, Making a Man of Him, 14–19; Groppe, Im deutschen Kaiserreich, 41–4.

^25. See, for example, Cooper, Colonialism in Question.

^26. For the colonies see, for example: Allender, Learning Femininity; Barry, “Equal to Children of European Origin.” With regard to “homes” and “asylums” in Europe (here: Great Britain), see Hamlett, At Home in the Institution; Higginbotham, Children’s Homes.

^27. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.

^28. See Wall, “From Childhood Studies to Childism.” See also Pufall and Unsworth, Rethinking Childhood.

^29. See, for example, Child, “The Boarding School.”

^30. See Gleason, “Avoiding the Agency Trap.”

^31. See Dekker, Kruithof, Simon and Vanobbergen, “Discoveries of Childhood.”

^32. Bruce, Olsen, Scutaru and Stokes, “Diverse Perspectives”; Olsen and Vallgårda, “Emotional Frontiers”; Vallgårda, Alexander and Olsen, “Emotions.”