Session Information
17 SES 13 A, Capitalist Modernity and Predicaments of Urban Childhood: Some Romantic Responses (1870-1970)
Symposium
Contribution
This symposium addresses the question of the nature of the educational responses to the dilemmas and challenges posed by children and their families living in cities. The papers cover a period of roughly one hundred years and contain studies from four very different societies. The arrival of capitalist modernity in European societies was marked by both industrialisation and urbanisation. The scale and pace of these processes varied according to the nation but in nearly all of them, there arose a Romantic worldview opposed to capitalist modernity that valorised the countryside over the city and valued nature over its subjugation by industry. Of all the symbols in the Romantic repertoire, that of the child was the most prominent. In the plant metaphor favoured by Friedrich Froebel and others, the conditions for children's physical and spiritual growth were believed to be absent from the city.
This critique took many forms, as did the prescriptions for action that accompanied it. One tendency, within which may be discerned elements of Romanticism, represented here in the case of Fascist Italy (in paper 3), was to metaphorically abandon the city and establish schools in rural areas, far from the cities' alleged modernist, corrupting, influences. Another response was to try to bring the country to the city. The free kindergarten is an obvious example in which poor, young, urban children could literally play in a garden (as paper 1 & 2 on England and Germany show). Compensation, however, was not only conceived of as helping to overcome the urban child's alienation from nature but also to assist the perceived disruption of family life caused by the transition to waged labour. Strategies to educate poor urban families, for which read ‘mothers’, abounded then as now. Many were strongly moral in character and based on the notion that the evils the city gave rise to were mainly cultural, not material and also believed that the moralisation of the urban poor might bring about their cultural transformation and fend off the darker anxieties of the wealthy.
Restricted from living in many cities, before the revolution, Jews in Russia in the early Soviet period brought to the city, when the restrictions were lifted, a vibrant culture that had rural roots in the shtetls and the school described in paper 4 regarded the transmission of folklore as an essential element.
In the world, after the great upheavals associated with the Second World War, the city was still regarded by Romantics with some suspicion, as were social relations and the social structure. As for many free kindergartners, early childhood education was seen as a key to a different future, which led to the move to the formation of kinderlädenin several West German cities analysed in the final paper, 5.
The papers mainly adopt a critical pluralist analysis that is chiefly concerned with social class and gender divisions but also address ethnicity and concepts of identity in their different approaches to the predicaments of children in the city and their education.
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