Children and Space, Wednesday June 3

Moving Children

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?

PRIMARY SOURCE: THE JUNGLE

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?

PRIMARY SOURCE: CHARLES LORING BRACE

The Orphan Train

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CytQh5GHE3o

What to do with the remaining Native American population?

PRIMARY SOURCE: KILL THE INDIAN

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

Moving Children

• Do we still move children today? • How is what is best for children’s wellbeing

determined, and by whom? • What role do race and class in decisions to

move children? • Are there benefits to moving children? Are

there drawbacks?