Preliminary Programme

Tue 13 April
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

Wed 14 April
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

Thu 15 April
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

Fri 16 April
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

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Tuesday 13 April 2010 10.45
J-2 EDU02 Negotiating Childhood, Citizenship and Political Conflict
Room D11, Pauli
Network: Education and Childhood Chair: Shurlee Swain
Organizers: - Discussant: Karin Zetterqvist Nelson
Maria Del Mar Del Pozo Andrés : Children at risk in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939): from refugees to citizens
At the very beginning of the Spanish Civil War the republican authorities have shown their concern for the children by organizing an experience of childhood protection and education: the refugee children camps, or the “children colonies” -as the Spanish government called them in the propaganda booklets written for the foreign ... (Show more)
At the very beginning of the Spanish Civil War the republican authorities have shown their concern for the children by organizing an experience of childhood protection and education: the refugee children camps, or the “children colonies” -as the Spanish government called them in the propaganda booklets written for the foreign observers-. The boys and girls that lived in Madrid were especially at risk because the continuous fascist bombing. Thousands of them -about 50.000 in the first year of the war- were translated to summer camps located either in the beaches of Valencia, Alicante, Castellón and Cataluña or in small cities -like Cuenca or Albacete- free of the attacks of the Franco troops. At the first moments the government thought that this situation would be finished as quickly as the war was presumed to arrive to an end, but finally they were lasting for almost three years. Classrooms, school material, textbooks and workbooks had to be provided because these summer camps became both the home and the school of all the children that have been evacuated from Madrid. The experience was studied by European and American educators and intellectuals as a model of protecting and raising children out of their families, but in a very special atmosphere of love and attention.

In the last twenty years many research have been done from an organizational point of view, about external aspects -number of institutions and children, location, finances, ...- and life experiences of these children. But very little is known about the internal everyday life in these communities, about the aims of the hundreds of teachers that had participated in them, about their pedagogical creed or the educational activities ruled in some of these summer camps.

The purpose of my paper is to study in deep the daily life of these “children colonies” and, especially, the educational practices of self-government experienced in many of them. The teachers that accompanied the children frequently shared the republican ideals of the active citizenship and wanted to make conscious citizens out of these children, children that, very often, were the typical “golfos” or street boys that had grown up in the Madrid suburbs and had never attended to the school.

In the first part, I will present the activities organized in the Madrid, at the very beginning of the war, for keeping safe and together all the children in the schools, in old palaces or in particular houses. In the second part I will study the evacuation of the children outside Madrid, to the coast or to the villages of the east of Spain. The third part will be devoted to the organization of the “children colonies”, the educational activities that were developed and some of the problems faced by schoolteachers and authorities. The main sources used in this paper are the newspapers and pedagogical reviews published in 1936-1939 and a collection of unpublished documents gathered in the Fundación “Ángel Llorca” from Madrid, with the reports from some of the organizers and supervisors of the “children colonies” organized in Valencia and Alicante. (Show less)

Heidi Morrison : The Prophet as the Ultimate Scout: Egyptians Negotiating Childhood under the British Protectorate
Egypt from 1900-1950 constitutes a period of considerable transformations in conceptions and experiences of childhood. The British under the protectorate propagated notions that Egyptian children were fundamentally different than western children and hence not deserving of the same protections in terms of labor laws and universal, free schooling. Egyptian reformers ... (Show more)
Egypt from 1900-1950 constitutes a period of considerable transformations in conceptions and experiences of childhood. The British under the protectorate propagated notions that Egyptian children were fundamentally different than western children and hence not deserving of the same protections in terms of labor laws and universal, free schooling. Egyptian reformers and nationalists resisted British imperialism, in part, through efforts to create a new, modern generation of Egyptian children. Modernization for these reformers and nationalists meant “westernization,” or the absorption of European material culture – its technology, economic institutions, and political structure – and much of the European customs, values, and mentality, particularly towards childhood. The Egyptian political and intellectual leadership did not, however, adopt a wholesale westernization of childhood, as they grounded their calls for change in Arab, Islamic, Mediterranean, Pharonic, and/or Egyptian heritage. For example, leading Egyptian reformer Hasan al-Banna presented the western childhood institution of the Boy Scouts as an institution imbued with the spirit of Islam. In a similar vein, leading Egyptian intellectual Muhammad Abdu justified his claims for western-style education by saying that Western ideas on childrearing are Eastern in origin as the East used to be the center of enlightenment and if it weren’t for Eastern sciences the West would not be what it is today. This paper has two parts. First, it argues that in the case of Egypt, the British did not have a critical interest in applying a western model of childhood to Egyptian children greatly due to the role Egyptian children played in Britain’s international cotton monopoly. While on one hand, Britain supported child labor protection laws at home, in Egypt they perpetuated the notion that Egyptian children should not be afforded the same style of childhood because Egyptian children were by their physical nature more apt for work, reaching puberty at an earlier age. Second, this paper argues that Egyptians resisted the British presence in their country by trying to make their children just as modern as the colonizers yet still a part of their own social fabric, i.e. authentically Egyptian. This paper concludes by asking what the lasting impact has been on Egyptian children of the early twentieth century British and Egyptian claims to childhood in their contesting battles for control over the country’s littlest minds and bodies. (Show less)

Daniella Sarnoff : "Insolent children, raised free of communist teachers:" Children and Childhood in French Fascism, 1919-1939
Children and childhood played a significant role in the rhetoric, discussions, organization, and “marketing” of French fascism in the interwar years. Whether exhorting French men and women to have more children or instructing their partisans on the appropriate education for French children, French fascist leagues frequently invoked children and childhood ... (Show more)
Children and childhood played a significant role in the rhetoric, discussions, organization, and “marketing” of French fascism in the interwar years. Whether exhorting French men and women to have more children or instructing their partisans on the appropriate education for French children, French fascist leagues frequently invoked children and childhood in their ideological and political formulations.
While the gender dynamics of French fascism were complicated and fraught with conflict, children were almost always portrayed in fascism as both a motivating cause for male and female involvement in fascist politics, as well as the symbols of sentimentality and tranquility which offered a respite from all the ills of France (the very ills that might lead one to support fascist groups).
My paper will address two of the fascist leagues that operated in France during the interwar years: Le Faisceau, founded in 1925 by Georges Valois, and La Solidarité Française, founded in 1933 by François Coty. Both leagues led recruitment efforts for child-members and published journals with “family pages” that frequently addressed children directly, spoke to parents about their children, or featured short stories and comic-strips that featured children as central characters.
For example, Le Faisceau published a cartoon, "Fanfan et Marinette," in their paper in which the main characters -- a 13 year old boy and an 11 year old girl -- were orphans, with at least one father lost, “glorieusement,” in the Great War. Their “adventures” in the strip conveyed an understanding and expectation of children’s role in French family life, national history, and the future of the nation itself. Another column, 'A Nos Amis Les Enfants...et à leur parents,' noted that the column would “endeavor to be the smile of this paper, the father's page, the mother's page, and the children's page, as the home does not exist but in view of the child and through the child.”
La Solidartité Française, in its family page, offered advice to parents, and some comfort to them that France would be able to withstand assaults from both within and without, “as long as there are… wool stockings and piggybanks and the maternal boxing of ears for insolent children, raised free of communist teachers.
This paper, in examining the significance of children in fascist conception of the nation state, contributes to the discussion of the relationship between children and childhood in politics and seeks to illuminate some of the complicated politics of the extreme-right. (Show less)



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