Preliminary Programme

The eighteenth century was a period when education became more important than before – not only for children of the elite, but also for common people’s children. In Norway compulsory school attendance was introduced in school laws in 1739 and 1741. Initiating poor people’s children into Christian faith was the explicit object, and the clergy was the most active introducing schools for all children. In the cities, however, the bourgeoisie also took part in organising schools. And their motives were clearly twofold: the wish to teach the children the catechism on one hand, and the wish to teach them industriousness on the other. In relation to orphans in need of public support this double object was quite explicit. Institutionalised education can be seen not only as an enlightenment project to teach children Christian faith, reading, and writing, but as a means to fit common people’s children into their proper place in the power structures and economic structures of society as well. My paper will deal with how these motives were discussed and practiced with reference to the orphanage in the Norwegian city Trondheim during the last decades of the eighteenth century. How these boys and girls should be brought up in the best way to become industrious members of the working classes was at issue. The orphanage was part of the poor relief system, and the children were of that kind of people who would have to “earn their bread with labour”, as one of the officials stated. What would be the best way: reading or spinning, institutionalised upbringing or care in foster families? (Show less)

In the 1950’s, Swedish institutional care for mentally retarded children went through a transitional phase. Institutions were traditionally organised around the idea of the differentiation and strict categorisation of inmates. During the first half of the twentieth century, issues of the placement and displacement of inmates therefore developed into a most troublesome matter, for both institutions and the authorities. Differentiation made institutions interrelated and dependent on one another and a strong emphasis was put on the rational functioning of institutions rather than on the finding the best possible care for every individual child.
My paper will address the question of how this system of institutional organisations coincided with a growing demand for individual rights as formulated by actors and groups of actors in the scope of the 1950’s. (Show less)

As part of the Josephinian strategy to regenerate state functioning, Ljubljana received a renewed foundling hospital with adjoined maternity ward already in 1788. Although preserved foundling hospital books testify on its group dynamics for the entire period of the institution’s existence, all up to 1871, I provisionally limited my interest for Carniolan foundlings and illegitimate children only to the years 1788-1815. Seemingly coincidental selection of the time span holds its methodological reasoning in the interval coverred by the first book of the foundling hospital protocols, whereas contents of the protocols indicates upon social reality of all registerred protagonists in question. A pulsating display of more than 700 entries on illegitimate children and foundlings, leads on their absent biological parents or on geographical domicile of foster parents, not to mention the signs of more or less latent omnipresence of the state regulation all over the minutes, thus represent an extensive source of statistical data on one side, and a comparative dimension towards contemporary demographic trends on another. The analysis of the foundling hospital materials will therefore try to ponder into this riches of data and produce an overall statistical survey of the microcosm in question. (Show less)