NEWSLETTER
Society for the History of Children and Youth
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No. 11 |
Winter 2008 |
Ed. note: We are pleased to reprint Harvey Graff's article Interdisciplinary Explorations in the History of Children, Adolescents, and Youth -- for the Past, Present, and Future, first published in the Journal of American History 85 (Mar., 1999), 1538-1547. It has been reformatted and is reprinted here with permission from the Organization of American Historians, http://www.oah.org. Harvey has also included two more recent syllabi for his history of children courses:
Interdisciplinary Explorations in the History of Children, Adolescents, and Youth -- for the Past, Present, and Future Harvey J. Graff The course "Growing Up in America: Past, Present, Future" took shape over several years. Its inspiration and development reflect my scholarly and personal interests. The course also self-consciously and explicitly plays off current affairs. Especially compelling is the incessant cry that today the young have lost that special privilege, protection, and innocence that at least some young persons had, it is claimed, at some better time before the present. Thus, for example, the rush of books with such titles as Children without Childhood, The Erosion of Childhood, and The Disappearance of Childhood. The questions and comparisons implicit in such books and in current debates are historical, regardless of how seldom they are posed explicitly or tested within a chronological or comparative frame. Although key questions about the history of childhood and youth resist easy resolution, scholars have made major advances in clarifying conceptions and assumptions, indeed, in defining the questions and ways to approach them.[1] Along with many other historians trained after the 1960s, I was influenced by the new social history. It laid the foundations for my long-term interest not only in the history of children and youth, families, gender, and schools but also in classroom strategies.[2] The latest "new" histories were influenced by European cultural historians such as Philippe Ariès and the pioneering demographic and social structural Annales historians in France and Peter Laslett and his colleagues in the Cambridge Group and Lawrence Stone in England. In writings on American history, the impact of such approaches appeared first in colonial American community studies and manuscript census-based nineteenth-century city and community studies. Students of gender, families, culture, psychohistory, social institutions and social policies, and the life course followed their leads. As a result, scholars of the "history of growing up"-- those who study children, adolescents, youths -- have now answered David Rothman's 1971 question "Do age groups in fact have histories?" They may construe their own subfields differently, but they all agree that the answer is yes." [3] My own interests in the history of growing up came to a focus in the classroom first in the mid- to late 1980s when I was beginning the research that led to my 1995 book Conflicting Paths. Curricular needs and opportunities led me to offer a graduate seminar in an interdisciplinary humanities doctoral program, one of whose concentrations is history, at the University of Texas at Dallas. The bibliographic work I did on the historical and collateral social science and humanities readings for that syllabus led directly to the preparation and field testing of the anthology that I edited for 1987 publication, Growing Up in America, which remains the core text for my growing up courses. Subsequent offerings of the course in Interdisciplinary Studies as well as history programs encouraged methodological breadth and a long chronological span. From the first, my conceptualization of the course emphasized a consistent focus on the way major experiences (or paths, as I like to call them) of young persons growing up varied at different times and in different social settings; the intricate interplay of change and continuity in the transformation of growing up from the early modern era to the present; and the distinctions between prescriptive ideals and norms for the young and the actual patterns of their experiences, insofar as we can reconstruct them.[4] It is especially valuable for general clarification and pursuit of course goals to provide students with opportunities to grasp the salient differences and to explore systematically both the contrasts and the interrelationships between historical actors and their actions, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the preconceptions that different members of their society hold of those actors. Those preconceptions, for example, not only influence how authorities -- including parents (who themselves differ), teachers, school board members, influential citizens, and newly certified professional experts -- respond to the young but also help shape institutions, policies, laws, academic and applied disciplines, and more general expectations. In crude as well as subtle ways, this involves the distinctions -- for example, between young persons and the stages or phases of their development expected in their own and others' anticipations, social roles and rules, norms, therapeutics, and even legal prescriptions, penalties, and social psychological theories -- between children and childhood, adolescents and adolescence, young people and youth. These relationships place the history of growing up, broadly conceived, at the center of the processes and conflicts that form modern societies.[5] One telling example draws on the ways in which presumptions about gender as well as class, ethnicity, and race come to shape powerfully the experiences of growing up and the social responses to them, including efforts to control and reform the young. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became possible for young persons to offend against the very status presumed to define appropriate behavior and locations for young persons (by committing "status offenses," which could differ for boys and girls, blacks and whites, the middle class and the working class, the native-born and the immigrant). There were differential responses, for example, to idleness, vagrancy, vandalism, and sexual precocity.[6] More traditional and still enormously important questions about physical and other abuse of young people, inequality, victimization, discrimination, ignorance, as well as benevolence, education, reform, and related matters fit well within an interactive framework that highlights the interplay of behavior and prescription, structure and process, in shaping historical development. So too do newer emphases on the activism, resistance, and resilience of the young and their families. The course pursues those issues in particular historical contexts and moments as well as in more general or synthetic terms. The course also aims to be broadly inclusive of young persons of a wide range of origins and experiences, without pretense of total inclusion. I try to attend to the centrality of conflict between the conceptions and the experiences of growing up at the level of both individuals and groups. Without isolating or exaggerating it, I also try to direct attention to the psychological dimensions of growing up --developmentally, individually, socially -- and to encourage students to recognize how hard it can be to grow up. Finally, concepts of dependency, semidependency, semiautonomy, and autonomy, prominent in the historical and social-scientific literature, contribute to students' conceptual tools as do the formal notions of historical transitions in individuals' and groups' life courses and transitions from one stage or phase of growing up to another.[7] My efforts to do this effectively in class lead me to begin with images -- verbal and pictorial -- of the young and of growing up set within a discussion of selected mythologies of growing up and discrete case studies. We begin with seemingly timeless notions of humanity and its nature(s). The first class session raises and criticizes ahistorical and some historical notions of the young "rising" and "falling" -- as in the varying extent of the proclaimed or presumed innocence and sanctity of the young in different eras-and asks students to consider some of the uses and abuses to which images of the young have been and are still put. Popular myths about families as well as young persons in the past -- and present -- are discussed critically. We inquire into their impressive staying power rather than trying, and failing, to dismiss or refute them with empirical evidence. Theories and belief systems about human nature and the nature of the young are probed with the powerful lens of Peter Brook's film Lord of the Flies. The size and structure of families; attitudes toward and treatment of the young; socialization and training; work, home leaving, and marriage; infant, child, and adult mortality, and the like are explored first in late medieval and early modern Europe. These discussions help stake out the historical agenda and introduce terms, concepts, sources, and approaches. The French film, La retour de Martin Guerre (released in the United States as The Return of Martin Guerre), powerfully illustrates both our distance from the past and its complexity. L'enfant sauvage (released as The Wild Child) depicts revolutionary shifts in conceptions of the young in the eighteenth century. Other visual materials -- from formal portraits to documentary photographs of child laborers, from toys to other telling artifacts of social status and chronological age -- facilitate understanding of the cultures and material cultures of the young and differences among them synchronically as well as diachronically. They portray -- and beg for discussion of -- the similarity and alienness of the past, both distant and recent, and the difference and commonality among the young throughout the American experience. Demographic change, economic development, styles and standards of living, and the prevalent institutions interact inseparably with changing concepts of human development. Those concepts relate closely to age itself; gender; class, race, and ethnicity; time and place; modes of socialization; and the linkages that tie shifting expectations to norms, concepts and theories, and laws and policies, and of course the often unclear but regu- larly conflicting struggles of the young, their families, and peers to come of age securely. These factors frame the contours of growing up viewed historically. From the first, I found that extensive use of the visual (still and moving images, documentaries, docudramas, feature films) combined with intensive reading of first-person sources written by differently located persons and using different modes of expression (autobiography, memoir, diary, semifiction, and fiction) along with historical and social science readings advances the course's interpretive and critical goals while stimulating students.[8] The list of the differing "texts" for the course includes cultural icons of the recent and more distant past, from Catcher in the Rye to My Brilliant Career (in substance and value, this classic Australian film is less of a reach than it may seem at first), from Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Lucy Larcom's A New England Girlhood to Richard Wright's Black Boy, E. L. Doctorow's World's Fair, the film Rebel Without a Cause, and the powerful documentary films Streetwise and High School. Students "view" the past through a variety of lenses. While learning to "read" critically and evaluate comparatively a wide range of evidence that blurs an easy separation of past and present, fact and fiction, word and image, students pursue questions of theory, comparison, method, and interpretation. In class discussion and short writing assignments, we explicitly probe the advantages and the limits of various sources and their genres as well as the strengths and weaknesses of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Throughout, the course probes the complex configurations and relationships of, on the one hand, gender, class, race, ethnicity, and social context and, on the other, cultural expectations, opportunities and constraints, institutions, and policies. It considers, for example, shifting relations of the young to work and school, familial home and migration, or age grading of life courses and their principal points of transition and change, including home leaving, working, marrying, or other "status" redefinitions. By the final weeks of the course, no simple notions -- whether involving eras of "adultlike children," the young as "little adults," "innocent" children, or even "childlike adults" -- remain uncriticized and unqualified. Yet the power of such notions as historical factors is clarified. Past and present are made to serve each other, as the final reading, W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson's provocative Broken Promises, demands. The terms of one of history's epochal transformations -- the remaking of growing up -- with its many complications and contradictions are challenged and revised in the course of this semester-long collective exploration. "Growing Up in America" attempts to complement its range of content and approach in its formal requirements. In addition to doing required reading and participating in class discussions, students write brief critical and questioning "reaction" papers, participate in a group research project that relates past and present and results in an oral presentation, and prepare a final research essay that is based on primary sources on growing up. Practice in a range of critical and expressive skills -- reading and writing conceived broadly -- lies at heart of this course's view of "pedagogical correctness." SYLLABUS Fall 1998: Honors Program, Division of Behavioral and Cultural Sciences GROWING UP IN AMERICA: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE Did childhood exist in the past, or is it a modern invention? Are childhood (and children) and adolescence (and adolescents), as we have known them, and as some claim, disappearing? Are they biological or "natural" and universal stages of human development, or at least in part the products of society and culture and history? Do childhood and children have a future? How different from today was growing up in the past? How did the young mature in past times, and what relationships to current patterns does that past have? This course asks a number of important questions about the changing experiences and meanings of growing up-childhood, adolescence, youth, "coming of age." In contrast to most contemporary views, it looks seriously at the past, at the history of growing up, as a comparison to the present and as the specific context from which today's patterns and problems developed. History thus provides a rich laboratory in which current notions about growing up-for example, from psychology, anthropology, sociology, human developmental studies, and related areas-may be explored and tested. The relevance, usefulness, and accuracy of theories that relate to growing up will be examined in historical context and probed over a broad expanse of time. A wide variety of evidence, including films and novels and memoirs, and a number of different research traditions and approaches are considered. In addition, we will evaluate family child, and youth policy as it has developed over time and its functions today, and as it provides options for tomorrow. A new, broad, rich, and interdisciplinary understanding of growing up and its challenges is the course goal. Requirements: 2. 3 1-2-page "reaction/evaluation" papers at regular intervals during the semester, one each 3-4 weeks, responding to required reading, films, etc.: brief commentaries-more or less, informed conversations. Each paper should focus on one topic and one or more readings or films from one week. 3. Participation in a group research project and brief class oral presentation: giving his- torical, theoretical, and policy context and perspective to a contemporarp question or problem; presentations during final 3-4 weeks of course. These may range from day-care, latch-key children, child and family abuse, to teen suicide, adolescent pregnancy, one-parent families and single mothers, gifted youth, etc. Each group will ask: what difference(s) does a historical perspective make? 4. 10-page paper: using course ideas, approaches, concepts, interpretations, methods, and materials to interpret primary sources on growing up, selected from either materials on students' own families (with source materials including at least 2-3 generations), or from Eve Merriam, ed., Growing Up Female in America: Ten Lives; Chris Mayfield, ed., Growing Up Southern; Hamilton Holt, ed., The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves; Mary Frosch, ed., Coming of Age in America; or Harold Augenbraum and Ilan Stavans, eds., Growing Up Latino (detailed information provided in class). Due at final class meeting. Essays should focus on those aspects of the history of growing up that these first- person sources open to your reading, questions, and investigation. These may take the form of comparisons across time and space; change and/or continuity over time; comparisons across persons growing up at more or less the same historical moment, among a wide range of possible topics, issues, and questions. BOOKS ordered for University Bookstore (all paperbound): J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951). Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1968). OR Edward Eggjeston, The Hoosier School-master (1 871; reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). OR Anzia Yezierska, The Bread Givers (1925; reprint, New York: Persea, 1975). OR Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1937; reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1966). OR Optional, for essays (choose one): Optional, recommended but not required: Week 1. Introduction: Questions, Issues, Approaches Week 2. European Traditions, American Origins: Early Paths of Growing Up Week 3. Seventeenth-Century Beginnings of Growing Up in America: Change and Continuity, Variations on Themes Week 4. Eighteenth-Century Transitions: Rebellions Over the Land Week 5. Diversity and Early Transformations: Commercialization, Migration, Urbanization Family Change and Growing Up Change, c. 1780s-1840s Films from the American Social History Project, Who Built America?: Daughters of Free Men, The Five Points, Doing All They Can (1987, 25 mins. each) Week 6. Early Modernity: Remaking Growing Up in Nineteenth-Century America Week 7. Slouching toward the Modern Ways: Contradictions and Irregularity in the Transformations toward Modern Paths of Growing Up. Race, Sex/Gender, Social Class, Ethnicity, Geography Week 8. Change and Continuity: The Incomplete Revolution Among the Young. Policy, Institutions, the State, and the Family Week 9. Turning the Century: A Progressive Synthesis? Reforming the Young (Again?) Week 10. Twentieth-Century Transitions I, c. 1900s- 1940s Week 11. Twentieth-Century Transitions 11, c. 1940s- 1960s Week 12. Boom! Boom! Baby Boomers! Radical Youth, Conformist Youth Week 13. All Fall Down? The Rise and Fall of the Cult of Childhood and Adolescence Week 14. Today?/Tomorrow? Is There a Future for Growing Up in the Age of "the childlike adult and the adultlike child"? Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow FINAL ESSAYS DUE AT CLASS TIME ~~~ 1. Marie Winn, Children without Childhood: Growing Up Too Fast in the World of Drugs and Sex (New York, 1983); Valerie Polakow Suransky, The Erosion of Childhood (Chicago, 1982); Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York, 1982). This literature typically contrasts an incomplete (though at least partly warranted) view of the present with an oversimplified, often either romanticized or excessively negative, image of the past. The authors have been influenced to varying degrees by Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (1960; New York, 1962). For criticisms of Ariès, see Adrian Wilson, "The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Ariès," History and Theory, 19 (no. 2, 1980), 132- 53; Richard T. Vann, "The Youth of Centuries of Childhood," ibid., 21 (no. 2, 1982), 279-97; Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1700 (Cambridge, Eng., 1983); and Harvey J. Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge, Mass.,1995). For contrasting views on the existence of a concept of "childhood," among other interpretive differences, in works on American history: see, for example, John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970); and Ross W. Beales Jr., "In Search of the Historical Child: Miniature Adulthood and Youth in Colonial New England," American Quarterly, 27 (Oct. 1975), 379-98. 2. My formal interest began in graduate school. See Harvey J. Graff, "Patterns of Adolescence and Child Dependency in the Mid-Nineteenth Century City: A Sample from Boston, 1860," History of Education Quarterly, 13 (Summer 1973), 129-43. This interest also helped shape my dissertation, published as Harvey J. Graff, The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City (1979; New Brunswick, 1991). For the anthology that resulted, see Harvey J. Graff, Growing Up in America: Historical Experiences (Detroit, 1987). 3. David J. R. Rothman, "Documents in Search of a Historian: Toward a History of Children and Youth in America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2 (Autumn 1971), 69. For a bibliography to the mid-1990s, see Graff, Conflicting Paths. See also Elliott West and Paula Petrick, eds., Small World: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950 (Lawrence, 1992); Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, eds., American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook (Westport, 1985); and Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, eds., Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective: An International Handbook and Research Guide (Westport, 199 l); Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner also edit Twayne's History of American Childhood series. For examples of divergent approaches and interpretations to the history of growing up, see Demos, A Little Commonwealth; and Beales, "In Search of the Historical Child." See also Graff, Growing Up in America; and Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America includes examples of divergent approaches and interpretations. Among questions in the field are those about the frequency and persisting impact of nuclear versus extended families; the differential importance of family and community on youthful socialization; the impact of familial and individual migration; the motives, ages, and impacts of leaving home; the extent and significance of "broken families," whether disrupted by "social problems" or external intervention; the sources, impacts, and meanings of gender and gender relationships; the value of formal schooling versus other forms of learning; and the historical significance of generations and their interplay. 4. The starting point for the continuing debate is Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991), 773-97. 5. Graff, Conflicting Paths, Chapter 1; Graff, ed., Growing Up in America, xi-xix. 6. Steven L. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of 'Progressive" Juvenile Justice, 1825-1920 (Chicago, 1977); Barbara M. Brenzel, Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856-1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Ruth M. Alexander, The "Girl Problem": Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900-1930 (Ithaca, 1995); Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1995). 7. On dependency and autonomy, see Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York, 1977); Michael B. Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mill-Nineteenth- Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). On the life course, see Glen H. Elder Jr., "Family History and the Life Course," in Transitions: The Family and the Life Course in Historical Perspective, ed. Tamara K. Hareven (New York, 1978), 17-64; and Tamara K. Hareven, "What Difference Does It Make?," Social Science History, 20 (Fall 1996), 317-44. 8. Graff, Conflicting Paths; Graff, Growing Up in America; Harvey J. Graff, "Teaching and Historical Understanding: Disciplining Historical Imagination with Historical Context," in The Social Worlds of Higher Education: A Handbook for Teaching in a New Century, ed. Ron Aminzade and Bernice A. Pescosolida (Thousand Oaks, 1999); Harvey J. Graff, "Using First-Person Sources in Social and Cultural History: A Working Bibliography," Historical Methods, 27 (Spring 1994), 87-93; Harvey J. Graff and Alison Prentice, Children and Schools in Nineteenth-Century Canada/L'école canadienne et l'enfant au dix-neuviène siècle (1979; Ottawa, 1994). © Society for the History of Children and Youth, 2008 |