children and space, wednesday june 3
TRANSCRIPT
Government and charity organizations have sometimes
moved children from one place or environment to another to foster
their (perceived) wellbeing.
Newsies
• What role did space and place play in the show? What spaces belonged to the newsies?
• In what ways did the newsies exercise agency? • Did the newsies have families? • What role did women and girls play in the
show?
• News boys were typically in the eight to fifteen age range. Were the actors in the movie Newsies within this range?
Typed as Dangerous
• Children outside of adult supervision, monitoring, and control
• Children who refuse to conform to (middle class) adult values
• Children with agency?
Children’s Geographies
• Farm children• Middle class urban/suburban children• Working class urban children
• “Child saving” was often about imposing middle class urban/suburban childhood on working class urban children. Farm childhoods were generally romanticized as wholesome.
Child Saving
• The Orphan Asylum (separating children from evil influences and raising them strictly)
• Houses of Refuge (reforming or containing delinquent and homeless children)
• Aid to Families with Dependent Children (keeping poor families together)
Nature v. Nurture
• Are poverty and crime hereditary, passed down from parent to child?
• Or can poverty be cured by removing children from their poor homes and training them in upstanding morality and hard work?
• Problem: Hundreds of thousands of destitute children living on the streets of New York City.
• Solution?
The Orphan Train
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CytQh5GHE3o
Native American Boarding Schools
• Richard H. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle school, speaking in 1892:
• “Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit.”
Native American Boarding Schools
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfRHqWCz3Zw