NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Conference Report:Cheiron

Adriana Benzaquén, Mount Saint Vincent University

For the 40th Annual Meeting of Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences, held on June 26-29, 2008 at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, Adriana Silvia Benzaquén of Mount Saint Vincent University and Anne Christina Rose of Texas Tech University organized the symposium “Historical Perspectives on the Sciences of Childhood and Children.” Four papers were presented at the symposium. 

The first, Benzaquén’s “‘Follow a Child from its Birth…: John Locke’s Children and the Origins of the Sciences of Childhood,” examined the published and unpublished correspondence of Locke and his friends to reconstruct Locke’s experiences with and observations of children (especially the children of his friend Edward Clarke of Chipley) and the ways in which these experiences and observations informed Locke’s account of childhood in his published works. 

In the second paper, “‘Living Machines’: Dance Education at Robert Owen’s New Lanark School, 1816-1828,” Cornelia Lambert of the University of Oklahoma explained why Owen made dance education such an important aspect of his school’s educational program and argued that the dance performances by children attended by visitors at New Lanark were conceived as working demonstrations of how a “science of man” could be made into a “science of society.” 

Rose’s “The Child as Scientific Object: Reconstructing Nineteenth-Century ‘scienza dell’infanzia’ and ‘science des enfants’” discussed some of the contexts in which actors themselves (physicians, psychiatrists, developmental psychologists) in late-nineteenth-century Italy and France used the terms “scienza dell’infanzia” and “science des enfants,” such as forensic sexual science (medico-legal study of child sexual abuse), the psychiatry of children’s dreams, moral orthopedics (to treat children with neurotic disorders and behavioral problems), and experimental pedagogy. 

Finally, Amanda Brian of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in her paper “The Child as Revelation: Scientific Networks and Baby Biographies in Imperial Germany,” analyzed the works of the German developmental psychologists William Preyer and William and Clara Stern, who scrutinized their own children to illuminate the process of human development.  Brian claimed that these baby biographies of individual children not only posited normal development for the child, from which deviation could then be minutely measured, but also revealed the intimate workings of bourgeois households that produced such class-based norms.