Education | 27.01.2010 US judge grants German homeschooling family asylum

 

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: The Romeike family has lived in Tennessee since 2008

Homeschooling has been illegal in Germany for most of the 20th century. But a decision in the United States granting asylum to a German homeschooling couple has revived an ongoing debate on the freedom of education.

 

An American judge on Tuesday granted asylum to a German couple who wanted to homeschool their children, bringing international attention to the debate in Germany over the rights of parents to freely educate their children.

The decision came from immigration judge Lawrence O. Burman in Memphis, Tennessee. Judge Burman said the German government violated Uwe and Hannelore Romeike's "basic human rights," according to the Web site of the Home School Legal Defense Association, a Virginia-based pro-homeschooling organization that represented the couple.

"Homeschoolers are a particular social group that the German government is trying to suppress," Burman was quoted as saying. "This family has a well-founded fear of persecution… therefore, they are eligible for asylum."

A religious family

The Romeikes moved with their five children to Tennessee in August 2008 and applied for asylum shortly thereafter.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Uwe and his wife Hannelore say German public schools cannot be neutral

The parents identify themselves as evangelical Christians and say religion was the primary reason why they chose to homeschool their children. Hannelore Romeike said public education can never be neutral.

"During the last 10-20 years the curriculum in public schools has been more and more against Christian values," she told the Associated Press. "We communicate our values, the teachers communicate theirs, and if the kids are at school, we cannot have an influence on what they learn."

Atlanta-based German consul Lutz Goergens declined to comment directly on the Romeike case, but he pointed out that German parents can send their children to private or religious schools as an alternative to public schools.

Academic freedom

While religious homeschoolers are often covered in the media, they don't represent all German homeschooling families, said Dagmar Neubronner, a publisher and therapist in Bremen who moved her children from Germany to France to homeschool them.

Neubronner told Deutsche Welle when her children were in public schools they often complained of not having enough academic freedom and of noise and disruptions from classmates.

"Our children didn't thrive in school," she said.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Bruegelmann says all children should be exposed to diversity of opinion

After attempting to get permission from German courts to homeschool her children, she says she was threatened with fines and jail time. It was then that she and her husband decided to move their children to France where they could legally homeschool them.

When asked whether homeschooled children have difficulty integrating into society, Neubronner said those claims were "not proven by reality."

"Just look around to all those countries where homeschooling is permitted," she said. "You don't find a group of ex-homeschoolers who fail in life."

'Embryonic democracy'

The German laws mandating public-school attendance date back to Germany's first experiment with democracy in 1919, according to Hans Bruegelmann, an education professor at the University of Siegen.

Bruegelmann said previously private education was only available to the elite, and that the public-school mandate was a clear political choice.

"The school is an embryonic democracy and will help to integrate children and young people coming from different backgrounds into the democratic culture," he said.

Integration into democracy and learning to get along with those who hold opposing opinions are important skills that children cannot learn when homeschooled, Bruegelmann said, and that is especially true with highly religious parents.

"They should not have the right to indoctrinate their children," he said. "It's important for children, besides the experience they make at home, which is respected, to have access to other sources of understanding the world."

When asked about Germans' opinions on the public school mandate, Bruegelmann said he thought most Germans supported it.

He admitted, however, that he could not say whether that was because they truly believed in it or if it was simply what they were accustomed to.

Author: Andrew Bowen
Editor: Nancy Isenson

 

 

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DW-WORLD.DE

• DW-WORLD: German family fled to US for educational freedom

  Germany is normally a country people seeking asylum go to. But one young, religious German family has left their homeland for the United States so that they could teach their children as they see fit. (01.02.2009)

• DW-WORLD: Education ministers announce rework for German tertiary reform

  As thousands of students rallied in cities across Germany against reforms to the tertiary education system here, the country’s state education ministers surfaced from a meeting with a pledge to rework the new format. (10.12.2009)

• DW-WORLD: Drastic shortage of teachers feared in Germany

  This fall, German schools could find themselves short some 40,000 teachers, according to a teachers' organization, which recommends importing German-speaking teachers from eastern Europe as a stopgap measure. (21.07.2009)

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Compiled by Emily Robin Jackson

Here's a brief list of educational resources for your family to explore.

AUTHORS AND LEADERS

Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
Hard Times (1854)
Dickens’s novel involves, among other things, an attack on the prevailing educational philosophy of his day, the cramming of factual information into children, the deadening routine of the classroom, including abuse and humiliation, and the lack of interest in the imaginative life of the child. Dickens’s novel opens as follows:

‘NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’ The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room.

Dennison, George
The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School (1969)
An experiment involving schooling children in a New York ghetto demonstrated that the teacher, in responding to a student, never just mediates facts but demonstrates concern with the life of the child. Dennison’s book is just one example of many studies done in the 1960s and early 1970s that emphasized a holistic approach to learning.

Dewey, John (1859–1952)
In School and Society (1889), Dewey wrote: “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” Active in philosophy, psychology, education, politics, and social thought, Dewey found many schools to be oppressive, and he sought to implement progressive reforms. He believed learning in school was a function of living within a social community and should help develop citizens in a democracy. He saw early academic learning as potentially cramping and deadening; observing American interest in the Prussian model of efficiency in schooling, Dewey was not convinced it would take hold in America. Dewey’s works include Schools of Tomorrow (1915), Democracy and Education (1916), and On Education (1940; essays published separately, 1897–1933). Online, see “My Pedagogic Creed” and the Center for Dewey Studies. Dewey and his wife also established an experimental school at the University of Chicago. For information, see Ida DePencier’s The History of the Laboratory School: The University of Chicago, 1896–1965 (1967).

Farenga, Patrick
Farenga worked closely with the author and teacher John Holt until Holt’s death in 1985. He is now president of Holt Associates Inc. The website provides information about Farenga’s speaking schedule, conferences, and numerous writings, including a revised and updated edition of Holt’s Teach Your Own (Delacorte 1981; rev. Perseus 2003). Farenga also provides business and personal consultations.

Ferrer y Guardia, Francisco (1859–1909)
Ferrer y Guardia was a freethinker, anarchist, and founder of the alternative Modern School in Spain. He also wrote The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School (1913). His execution stimulated the development of Modern Schools in Europe and the United States.

Freire, Paolo (1921–1997)
Freire was an influential Brazilian thinker in the field of education who emphasized dialogue and a concern for the oppressed. Mark K. Smith’s critical essay is a good starting point for learning more about Freire’s work. It is followed by a bibliography and links. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) is summarized at http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/Freire_summary.html

Froebel, Friedrich Wilhelm August (1782–1852)
On the Education of Man (1826)
Froebel, a German thinker in the field of early education, in 1837 originated the idea of the kindergarten as a transition between home and school—a place for children to learn through independent creative play and social interaction.

Gordon, Thomas
Parent Effectiveness Training (1970)
Teacher Effectiveness Training (1974)
These books discuss issues of discipline and communication within families and in schools. The approach manifests a true respect for children and demonstrates in practical terms how to achieve effective communication. Additional information is available from Gordon Training International, 800.628.1197, info@gordontraining.com

Johnson, Marietta (1864-1938)
Marietta Johnson’s School for Organic Education was established in Fairhope, Alabama, in 1907 (Fairhope itself was founded as a utopian community in 1894). The school received praise from John Dewey in his Schools of Tomorrow and is still in operation, having recently restored its high school program. It bases its work on the view that “education is not preparation for life; education is life.” Johnson’s works Youth in a World of Men (1929) and Thirty Years with an Idea (1974) are now available in one volume, Teaching without Failure (1996). See www.mariettajohnson.org and www.school oforganiceducation.org for further information.

Kamii, Constance
Constance Kamii applies Piaget’s thinking to mathematics pedagogy. Her work is useful for homeschooling parents, as well as teachers, in developing mathematics problems for young children. Kamii shows that an awareness of the stages of learning, and the ways in which children come to intellectual awareness as a result of their own experiences, can be used in school to stimulate learning. She stresses that autonomy is the goal of teaching. Her work includes Number in Preschool and Kindergarten: Educational Implications of Piaget’s Theory (1982), Teaching Place Value and Double-Column Addition (with Linda Joseph) (1988), and Young Children Reinvent Arithmetic (with Leslie Baker Housman) (1999).

Kohl, Herbert R.
Known for the open classroom idea of the 1960s and 1970s, Kohl has sought to put Dewey’s ideas into action over many years of teaching. His books on teaching and learning include 36 Children (1967); Math, Writing, and Games in the Open Classroom (1974); On Teaching (1976); Growing Minds: On Becoming a Teacher (1984); I Won’t Learn From You: The Role of Assent in Learning (1991); Should We Burn Babar? Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories (1995); The Question Is College: Guiding Your Child to the Right Choices After High School (1989); and Stupidity and Tears: Teaching and Learning in Troubled Times (2004).

Kohn, Alfie
Kohn’s Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes (1993) critiques the problematic but long-accepted view that rewards help children develop. Kohn’s other works include The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” (1999); The Case against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools (2000); and What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated? (2004). The Alfie Kohn Organization offers a variety of lectures online on subjects such as bribing, competition, and testing.

Liedloff, Jean
The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost (reprinted 1986)
Liedloff’s widely acclaimed book describes what she learned about children’s development and sociability during her two years with Indians in the South American jungle. The Liedloff Continuum Network website contains a number of related articles such as “Who’s in Control? The Unhappy Consequences of Being Child-Centered” (Mothering, Winter 1994). The Liedloff Continuum Network is a worldwide network of people striving to live by continuum principles. Its Internet discussion list deals with a wide range of issues involving child-raising in contemporary Western culture, without coercion on the one hand, and without falling into excessive child-centeredness on the other.

Lifton, Betty Jean
The King of Children: The Life and Death of Janusz Korczak (reprinted 1997)
Lifton explains: “It was Janusz Korczak who introduced progressive orphanages designed as just communities into Poland, founded the first national children’s newspaper, trained teachers in what we now call moral education, and worked in juvenile courts defending children's rights. His books How to Love a Child and The Child’s Right to Respect gave parents and teachers new insights into child psychology. Generations of young people have grown up on his books, especially the classic King Matt the First, which tells of the adventures and tribulations of a boy king who aspires to bring reforms to his subjects.”

McGhee, Alison
McGhee’s Homeschooling Our Children, Unschooling Ourselves (2002) contains an appendix of contemporary websites, newsletters, and special resources for teens. From Homeschool to College and Work: Turning Your Homeschool Experience into a College Job Portfolio (1998) helps parents who want to write a college transcript based on the unschooling experience.

Miller, Alice
Miller’s books include Prisoners of Childhood: The Drama of the Gifted Child (1981) and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware (1984). She stresses that abuse and humiliation in parenting have profound and inevitable effects on the development of the child. For Your Own Good (1983) deals with the childhood of Adolf Hitler, among others, showing the relationship between an abusive childhood and violence in adulthood. Miller’s books are listed and summarized at www.alice-miller.com and www.naturalchild.com/alice_miller/booklist.html

Montessori, Maria (1870–1952)
Montessori initially attempted to teach apparently “uneducable” children to read and write. She emphasized the role of the senses in learning and developed a set of learning materials. For specifics on training, Montessori schools, publications, and conferences, visit the Association Montessori Internationale website at www.montessori-ami.org/ami.htm. See also Montessori online at www.montessori.org/ for journals and magazines, a directory of schools, a lengthy bibliography, classified ads, Montessori in the news, a calendar of events, Montessori education, and Montessori suppliers. For more information, visit http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-mont.htm

Owen, Robert (1801-1877)
A social reformer, Owen founded a communistic colony at New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825. The town included the nation's first kindergarten, first free public school, first free library, and first school with equal education for boys and girls. Owen’s work and ideas are documented in A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society 1814–1824 (1975) and J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenite Movement in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (1969).

Pestalozzi, Heinrich (1746–1827)
A follower of Rousseau, Pestalozzi is known as the father of modern pedagogy because of his emphasis on democratic education, knowledge as based on sense experience, and nurturing. Robert B. Downs’s Heinrich Pestalozzi: Father of Modern Pedagogy (1975) is a readable introduction to his life and work. Pestalozzi’s influence extended throughout Europe and North America, where he inspired the creation of alternative schools, such as the New Harmony School in Indiana.

Scheffer, Susannah
Scheffer is a former editor of Growing Without Schooling magazine. Her works include The Beginner’s Guide to Homeschooling (2000), A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt (1990), Writing Because We Love To: Homeschoolers At Work (1992), and A Sense of Self: Listening to Homeschooled Adolescent Girls (1995).

Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950)
“A Treatise on Parents and Children” (1910)
Shaw’s piece, written as a preface to his play Misalliance, is a witty and courageous critique of schooling and its social function. Shaw insists that the most productive and useful function of schooling is to keep children from being a nuisance to their parents. The text is readily available in collections of Shaw’s plays as well as online: www.zona-pellucida.com/texts/shaw1.html

Vygotsky, Lev (1896–1934)
Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist whose most famous work, Thought and Language (1934) anticipated Piaget. Many of his works are available in English translation at the Vygotsky Archive, together with further reading suggestions. He contributed a wealth of ideas to early childhood education and wrote: “A child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action.”

ORGANIZATIONS, MAGAZINES, AND WEBSITES

American Homeschool Association
AHA, created in 1995 and sponsored in part by the publishers of Home Education magazine, strives to create a network of homeschoolers on a national level. Its website includes an online discussion list; a list of online, print, and newsletter publications; and a list of homeschooling support groups and organizations.

Alternative Education Resource Organization
This site includes a free e-newsletter, information about the quarterly Education Revolution magazine, a listserv and information for people who want to start alternative schools, job listings for teachers looking for alternative schools and alternative schools looking for teachers, a library, consulting information, an extensive list of individuals who have been inspirational in the field of alternative education, conference information, and a list of colleges that support alternative approaches to education, among other links and resources.

Charter Schools
http://www.uscharterschools.org
This site offers a guide to successful charter schools, as well as information about how to start one. It also contains information about federal grant programs, the No Child Left Behind Act and related legislation, and how charter schools can meet accountability requirements.

ENCOUNTER: Education for Meaning and Social Justice
www.great-ideas.org/enc.htm
Edited by Ron Miller, this magazine covers an array of education–oriented topics, with a progressive and conscious slant.

Growing Without Schooling
GWS (1977–2001) documented John Holt’s work with early homeschoolers. Readers were sometimes widely dispersed geographically, but they formed a support group and a community of values through this magazine, now unfortunately no longer in publication. Back issues are available through F.U.N. Books and sometimes on eBay.

Home Education and Family Services
www.homeeducator.com
Designed to help families with homeschooling, HEFS operates full-time and is staffed with consultants and administrators. It offers information on testing, workshops, conferences, curriculum resources, speech therapy, and gifted education. It also runs an alternative school. The group’s founder, Shirley Minster, provides testing and portfolio reviews, helps with curriculum design, and offers expert court testimony in homeschool cases.

Informal Education Encyclopaedia
www.infed.org/index.htm
This website, based in Great Britain, is an excellent scholarly source for information about the history of informal education. It also contains detailed and well-written articles about contemporary education issues in Great Britain;

Institute of HeartMath
www.heartmath.org
This nonprofit research and education organization aims “to facilitate people in finding the balance between mind and heart in life’s decisions.” The organization focuses on the relationship between emotions and performance. It has received government funds for a project involving reducing test anxiety.

Life Learning Magazine
www.lifelearningmagazine.com
This magazine is specially designed for those interested in unschooling and offers support and resources for unschoolers. The magazine includes articles on self-directed learning and natural parenting. It is edited by Wendy Priesnitz, a public speaker, writer, editor, and founder of the Canadian Alliance of Homeschoolers. She is available to present workshops, seminars, and speeches on homeschooling and alternative education topics wendy@life.ca

National Home Education Network
www.nhen.org
An organization interested in changing the public perception of homeschooling, NHEN offers information cutting across political agendas and religious affiliations. The group also provides networking opportunities, newsletters, and support for public relations work in the homeschooling community.

Natural Child Project
www.naturalchild.com
This website has a fairly extensive list of books; articles by a number of different authors, including Peggy O’Mara, Tina Thevenin (The Family Bed), Naomi Aldort, and Jan Hunt; and excerpts on attachment parenting, nurturing, and stay-at-home mothering. It also contains an Attachment Parenting Family Directory with national and international references.

Paths of Learning
www.pathsoflearning.net/magazine.cfm
During its publication, this magazine aimed to promote “caring communities; a sense of place; values of peace, human rights, and sustainability; and a deep respect for each learner’s own passions, hopes, and quest for connection and meaning.” Although the magazine ceased publication in 2004, the website offers access to the magazine archives, a directory of support organizations, and guides for community action.

Rudolf Steiner Archive
www.rsarchive.org/
According to the website, the archive “is our gift to Anthroposophy, the world-wide Anthroposophical Movement in general, and to the Spiritual Community of Man. Here, we offer summaries of Rudolf Steiner’s books translated from the original German to English, a catalogue of Steiner’s holdings, a chronological listing of Steiner’s lectures (over 6000), and a few of his books and lectures for interested readers to contemplate. If nothing else, the topics covered should make you think—and that is good. This is an ongoing project—there will always be new information presented here.”

Stelton Modern School
www.talkinghistory.org/stelton/stelton.html
This site provides information about the Stelton Modern School, founded in 1911 in Greenwich Village. The organizers were the Francisco Ferrer Association, formed in 1910 by anarchist leaders Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Leonard Abbott, and Harry Kelly. In addition to teaching children, the school ran a publishing house, an adult education center, and a community center. Later it moved to Stelton, New Jersey. See www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/libs/scua/modern_school/modern.shtml for more information.

Sudbury Valley School
www.sudval.org
The Sudbury Valley School was a free school founded in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1968. It served as an inspiration for many others of its kind, often now called Sudbury Valley model schools. The official school website sells books and audiotapes published by the Sudbury Valley Press. Many free texts are also available there, as well as a listing of similar schools worldwide. Not officially connected to the school, discuss-sudbury-model@sudval.org offers an e-mail discussion of democratic schools in general. A another directory of democratic schools is available at
http://dmoz.org/Reference/Education/K_through_12/Private_Schools/Sudbury_Valley_Model/

Summerhill
www.summerhillschool.co.uk
Summerhill School was founded in 1921 in Dresden, Germany, but soon moved to its present location in Suffolk, England. Summerhill recently won a court battle to continue in operation as a school with noncompulsory lessons. Books by and about the school’s founder A. S. Neill and his work include Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (1960), Inside Summerhill (1970), Neill! Neill! Orange Peel! (1972), and Record of a Friendship: The Correspondence of Wilhelm Reich and A. S. Neill, 1936–1957 (1981). Among the fascinating aspects of this school are its legal struggle to survive, the differences between Summerhill and the Sudbury Valley model, and Neill’s work with children, including his use of psychoanalysis and the teachings of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich.

Unschooling
As used by John Holt, the term originally meant homeschooling. It now refers to the practice of permitting the student to learn independently, as opposed to following an established curriculum or any kind of strict parental guidance. In practice, unschooling parents take a wide range of approaches, and many “do school” at home using a variety of curricular programs. Several resources offer support to parents who believe that the child learns best on his or her own initiative. The website www.fun-books.com has books for sale and copies of Growing Without Schooling magazine; www.unschooling.com is a great place to find book lists, essays, networking, supports groups, stories from experienced unschoolers, newsletter and message boards, and information on math, special needs students, and state laws. The website quotes Helen Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan:

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of coloured paper, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experience.

Waldorf Education
This holistic method, formulated initially by Rudolf Steiner and associated with anthroposophy, emphasizes the arts as a primary means of learning and the importance of play and imaginative activity in young children. The site www.waldorfworld.net/ lists jobs in Waldorf education, among other things. For national and international school listings, extensive FAQs, and related links, go to www.awsna.org/index.html.

Issue 131, July/August 2005 First Published in Mothering Magazine)

http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/informal-education-r-3645.html

To create your own Blog at Atom5, go to http://www.atom5.com]]> http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/informal-education-r-3645.html http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/informal-education-r-3645.html#c http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/dutch-court-takes-ba-3370.html Sun, 30 Aug 2009 09:33:51 -0500 A Dutch court put a 4-month old baby in foster care to ensure absolute clarity about its background. According to the article in ThaiIndian News the Dutch court took the baby away from its young adoptive parents because the sale "violates international adoption laws."  If you follow the link to International Adoption Laws you come to Smarter, a comparison shopping website. However, there is reference there to the Hague Convention which seems to have been designed to make sure that no two people or organizations can enter into any agreement of any kind whatsoever without getting a validating stamp from a central authority.

The story came out on November 28, 2008 in Amsterdam - see the headline below.

Then you can find an article in German News on March 4, 2009 which says that the Dutch couple will face trial in Belgium, but not in their own country, in Holland because some two-year limit has expired. Indeed, at the end of the article, it looks like even Belgium's case may not be prosecuted, and the Dutch couple have been "awarded" their now supposedly 4-year old child: "The Dutch couple has also been awarded custody of four-year old Donna while parental access rights have been granted to Philtjens." This arrangement was the same as originally agreed-upon by the two sets of parents in question, with the one exception that, once having taken the four-year old away from its parents for four years, the State has now put its mark of validation on the agreement. Not only that, but the article with the headline saying that the Dutch couple may face trial, concludes by saying that "the trial in Belgium remains to be seen as there may be insufficient evidence to bring the case to trial."
(Radio Netherlands/Expatica.)





Dutch couple who bought Internet baby face trial

Amsterdam, Nov 28 (DPA) A Belgian baby bought by a Dutch couple via the internet will be placed in state custody because the sale violates international adoption laws, a Netherlands court decided Thursday.The court in Zwolle in eastern Netherlands ruled in favour of the Dutch child protection service Thursday.

http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/dutch-court-takes-ba-3370.html

To create your own Blog at Atom5, go to http://www.atom5.com]]> http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/dutch-court-takes-ba-3370.html http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/dutch-court-takes-ba-3370.html#c http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/year-old-seafaring-d-3369.html Sun, 30 Aug 2009 09:02:44 -0500 According to Time Magazine, a 13-year old Dutch girl with seafaring experience wants to travel around the world solo, but the Dutch Court has taken her into so-called "protective custody" because her parents signed off on the venture. The article discusses in detail the issue of whether a 13-year old is equipped for such an undertaking and whether she might miss out on important "social experiences" during this time period. The article doesn't mention the issue of whether a Dutch court or any court has a right to take her away from her parents into so-called "protective custody." This is one of those instances in which supposedly internationally binding "rights of the child" are being invoked to determine that the state has a right to take children from their parents.

http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/year-old-seafaring-d-3369.html

To create your own Blog at Atom5, go to http://www.atom5.com]]> http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/year-old-seafaring-d-3369.html http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/year-old-seafaring-d-3369.html#c http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/virginia-homeschooli-3314.html Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:00:01 -0500 A May 14, 2009 article shows homeschooling on the rise in Virginia. Interesting statistics are as follows:

According to the article, there are now 23,000 home-schoolers in Virginia, a number that has increased 37% in the last six years. Alexandria has 86 home-schoolers, five times more than in 2003, and the following numbers are given for several counties:

"More and more Virginia parents are opting for home-schooling. According to the Virginia Department of Education, the number of home-schoolers last year jumped 9 percent statewide.

For example, home-schoolers increased by 44 percent, to 1,049 students, in Loudoun County; by 35 percent, to 470 students, in Henrico County; and by 29 percent, to 2,080 students, in Fairfax County.

If home-schoolers constituted a school district, they would be the 13th-largest in Virginia - with almost as many students as the Richmond Public Schools."

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To create your own Blog at Atom5, go to http://www.atom5.com]]> http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/virginia-homeschooli-3314.html http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/virginia-homeschooli-3314.html#c http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/sweden-proposes-ban-3301.html Thu, 16 Jul 2009 20:43:59 -0500 Rohus (or Sweden's homeschool organization) has announced the June, 2009 proposal to ban homeschooling in Sweden!

At the same time, on June 30, 2009, the UK announced drastic changes to its homeschooling laws -- laws which have been reasonably favorable in the past, at least compared to Germany and the Netherlands.

This might seem to be coincidental, but probably it is not so. The US is under pressure to ratify the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Obama is putting the pressure on to do so.

Sweden has indicated that bringing its policies under international protocol is what these changes are all about.

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To create your own Blog at Atom5, go to http://www.atom5.com]]> http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/sweden-proposes-ban-3301.html http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/sweden-proposes-ban-3301.html#c http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/neubronner-trial-med-2861.html Wed, 4 Feb 2009 09:01:26 -0600 The following notes describe the recent -- and second -- trial of Dagmar and Tilman Neubronner -- homeschoolers -- in Germany. Although they lost their case this time, they are pleased to see the media attention to the issue. Most of the media attention is also quite positive as regards the issue of homeschooling. Germany is still the only country in Europe that does not admit homeschooling as a legal option. The plan is to appeal to the Constitutional Court and to the European Court. They can be reached at info@genius-verlag.de. They were not reimbursed for their legal costs, so their legal activity is deepening their debt load. They welcome support, media attention to the issue and financial assistance. Below you will see a long list of links that bring up German articles on this issue.

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To create your own Blog at Atom5, go to http://www.atom5.com]]> http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/neubronner-trial-med-2861.html http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/neubronner-trial-med-2861.html#c http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/child-labor-1783.html Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:48:50 -0500 The Child that Toileth Not. The Story of a Government Investigation that was Suppressed With one hundred and twenty-one illustrations by Thomas Robinson Dawley, Jr. Former Special Agent, Bureau of Labor, Department of Commerce and Labor, Washington D.C. New York: Gracia Publishers, 1913 (Second Edition).

A review that is somewhat belated, being 95 years after publication:

This book was uncovered recently in a old building in Birmingham, Alabama, one of many subject to severe moisture damage and possibly the object of a mouse's interest since a quarter-sized chunk has been eaten out of the spine. The book is hardly in condition to be sold, although the lowest price I could find for it was $150.00.

Why is the book so interesting - because it supposedly involves a suppressed government investigation? This is hardly the only reason. President Roosevelt signed a joint resolution by Congress to research the condition of working women and children employed in the United States, and the Commission of Labor sought researchers who would carry out this task. Our author, Thomas Robinson Dawley, fascinated by the issue, took the challenge to travel throughout the South, including parts of Tennessee, South and North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi to see how people lived and to see what in particular was the effect of cotton mill employment on the lives of the white rural poor.

I really enjoy the wonderful detail provided in this book and the way in which it captures, not only in its 121 photographs but in words, the realities of daily life for rural people. Traveling by horse, under not always so comfortable conditions, facing difficult stream crossings, cold winter days, not always abundant food, Dawley managed to collect enough detail to give a living picture of life in the rural South. Staying in people's houses he had to a chance to see what people ate or didn't eat, what the children did or didn't do, how the houses were built, what clothes were worn, what health conditions were like, what work was done, how people paid for goods, what means of exchange were used.

Here is an example:

"I stopped for dinner with the postmaster at the mouth of Mine Fork. He lived in a roughly-built, but comfortable board house papered with old newspapers. He was a kindly man who kept a little store at the cross-roads. He owned forty acres of land, with a good barn, and necessary outhouses. His wife served us a dinner of salt pork in abundance, potatoes and "sour cabbage," with the usual corn-bread and biscuits." (p. 203)

On to the point of the book. Dawley argues shockingly for the view that children and women were by no means universally exploited, that, in fact, the local cotton mills in rural communities throughout the South provided white rural families with opportunities for self-development that were not associated with the hard-scrabble farming conditions where people grew corn on rocky hillsides, made moonshine and participated in murderous family feuds. Young children wanted to work and to contribute to the welfare of their families, Dawley demonstrates. A thirteen-year old worker could contribute substantially to the well-being of his family. Mill owners did not by any means typically force children to work beyond their capacity. Large families of women and children could improve their lives substantially this way. The welfare -- schools and health care -- sometimes associated with the local mills had a lot to do with the need to improve the conditions of people so they in turn could perform the tasks required of them. Among other things, the cotton mills successfully employed the group known then as "the feeble-minded," a group that a decade or two later were being institutionalized for their lack of productivity.


The following statement is made in the conclusion of the book, a statement implying misrepresentation of labor conditions in the South:

"While thousands of dollars were squandered by the Federal bureau of Labor, in its investigation of woman and child labor, to prove that the manufacturers are rascals; that they lie with respect to the ages of the children employed; that they hide them away when investigators are sent to report upon them and that they can get the same labor from adults; and finally that they compel them to work when they should be in school, and underfeed and underpay their employees generally--not a word of the revelations showing the misrepresentations of the agitators, reformers and other interests of the kind was allowed to go before the public in the reports." (481)

According to Dawley, the Child Labor Committees "condemn the business interests of the country, the men who make the wheels of industry go round and set the pace for real progress,..." (483), an example of which he finds in a Lanette, Alabama cotton mill manufacturer who had built a school costing $20,000.

Dawley explains that his research was repudiated and discredited, that he was removed from his position in the Bureau of Labor. In his last line of the book he explains his reason for writing up his research, namely, "because I had become convinced of the great wrong being done a class of very poor people, our own people, by the persistent agitation and misrepresentations of conditions effecting their welfare, and the ultimate aim to inhibit their further progress through the open doors of the industries that lead them to better things, even though in some instances their children are obliged to work." (490)


Reading this book led me to various thoughts about the child labor law, in particular, the thought that it throws the baby out with the bath water. The problem is with abuse in working conditions, not with employment as such. From the time children are quite young -- my experience suggests -- they can and want to work. Such work could materially contribute to their learning and to the well-being of their families, to their integration into the community, to their level of general skill. Today, child labor legislation and custom and culture have brought us to such a pass that children are not permitted to work when they want to, are then imprisoned in schools in order to "learn," which they clearly are not doing, while being frequently blamed for their lack of productivity.  How many times have I heard people complain about the horrors of the teen years...years whose horrors sometimes don't seem to let up until the children are actually employed. While parents are vastly over-worked, why shouldn't children be permitted to contribute to the well being of their families, thereby helping everyone to acquire a measure of autonomy, each according to his or her needs and ability? It's a question worth asking.

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To create your own Blog at Atom5, go to http://www.atom5.com]]> http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/child-labor-1783.html http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/child-labor-1783.html#c http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/miles-college-shreds-1555.html Fri, 5 Sep 2008 23:39:13 -0500 The library of Miles College, a Historically Black College dating back to 1905,  put its law book collection in the dumpster today. I don't know what other lawbooks are available to the students at Miles College law school, but the 4th floor collection had to be cleared. Pleasant-tempered immigrant laborers with no knowledge of the language in which the books were written were hired to shuttle moving dumpster carts out to the larger dumpster in back of the library. Meanwhile, art books, music books, history books, language books and textbooks reflecting the history of Miles College were prepared for shredding by having the back covers ripped off. I found books of folk songs with illustrations, gilt lettering, and intact hardback covers prepared for mincing in this way. The employee available to discuss the issue said it had nothing to do with her. They were told to clear the 4th floor immediately.

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To create your own Blog at Atom5, go to http://www.atom5.com]]> http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/miles-college-shreds-1555.html http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/miles-college-shreds-1555.html#c http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/the-orphan-perspecti-1270.html Sat, 8 Mar 2008 10:45:22 -0600 The Orphan Perspective: A Critique of Society and Education

How many classic children’s stories tell the story of an abandoned, orphaned or outcast child! There is Peter Pan, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Jane Eyre, Mary in The Secret Garden, Sara in The Little Princess, Anne of Greene Gables, Heidi, Louisa May Alcott’s Rose or Fanny, or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, to name only a few. Orphans are prevalent in folktales and fairy tales, in popular literature (Harry Potter), cartoons (Little Orphan Annie) and movies (Star Wars).  Why do orphans dominate children’s literature to such an extent? Recent comments on the subject suggest that the orphan’s deprivation, insecurity, and disempowerment show us how children struggle to grow and assert themselves. Philip Nel in his guide to Harry Potter wrote: “The literary orphan dramatizes the difficulty of being a child.” Melanie Kimball’s study of orphans in folktales and fiction (1999) supported this view: “Orphan characters in folktales and literature symbolize our isolation from one another and from society.”  In a recent commentary on Harry Potter, Lammermann (2000) tried to link the condition of being an orphan with the loss of connectedness characteristic of modern society. The understanding is that these are stories about coming to terms with life and power on one’s own.

Stories of orphans are not only focused on loneliness and self-assertion. The orphan also functions to present the reader with a stark outsider-perspective, and these narratives tell us a great deal about the world around the child, giving the reader insight into life in the schoolroom, life with parents, life for the powerless. The following notes suggest that our interest in the orphan is not only due to his isolation, poverty, and apparent personal autonomy, but also to the unique perspective of an autonomous mind on the world around the child. The orphan’s perspective in the context of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature threw light on a period of rapid industrialization and the shocking changes it brought about, including the rise of compulsory schooling, non-traditional approaches to medical practice, smaller, more isolated families and an indoor urban lifestyle.

The condition of being an orphan in stories of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (roughly 1865–1920) is marked by the fact that the father is often a marginal character, in part because his role as a provider has collapsed. In most of these narratives, the father is chronically absent, incapacitated or insolvent, as in Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and David Copperfield. In spite of counter-examples such as Rose’s Uncle Alec and Heidi’s grandfather, many of the fathers depicted are conflicted, suffering emotionally, and feel compelled to give their children over to the care of a school or housekeeper. Colin’s father in The Secret Garden tries to keep his son a secret. E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children opens dramatically at the moment the father has been thrown into prison. Disempowered men in fiction are not new. They are also familiar from fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Snow White, in which they indulge or ignore the cruel whims of the step-mother. The father’s inability to protect his helpless child or children from a female caregiver results in near catastrophe from which the children save themselves by the skin of their teeth, thanks to their own initiative, ingenuity, capacity for expressiveness and courage.

The mother or mother-substitute in these tales, as in so many fairy tales, is more central and takes the form of a wicked stepmother, housekeeper, head teacher, guardian, or governess. This maternal figure belittles and deprives the child, physically as well as emotionally. The pinched Miss Minchin, principal of Sara’s school in The Little Princess, is hostile, and Mrs. Reed, in the episodes of cruelty and neglect that open Jane Eyre, is resentful of Jane and behaves abusively towards her. The appropriately named Mrs. Medlock in The Secret Garden and the fearful Miss Rottenmeier in Klara’s home in Vienna seem to put their charges in the center of their attention, but clearly seem to hate them as well. Miss Rottenmeier and Miss Medlock, with the support of the doctor, assume that the children in their care won’t ever thrive, contributing perhaps to the children’s apparent inability to do so. Aunt Marilla (Anne of Greene Gables) and Aunt Miranda (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm) may care a good deal about their charges, but their behavior is often critical and impatient. The mother figure regulates indoor urban life with pettiness and cruelty, and the fear that something might be damaged or stolen lurks over everyone in these orderly households, including those of Anne’s Aunt Marilla (the amber necklace!) and Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally. Perhaps the predominance of the letter “M” in these names suggests we can interpret these women as horrific variations on the theme of motherhood.  No wonder the first chapters of Tom Sawyer and of Huck Finn emphasize the need for escape from the physical constraint of a world dominated by housekeeping, as Huck tells us, explaining why he “lit out:”

“Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways;”

As in Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, where many Aunts offer different life directions for poor Rose in a somewhat didactic and allegorical view of the female influence in the household, these stories show us the female influence as complex, sometimes caring and attentive on the one hand, but often oppressive on the other.

Indoor life involves the suppression of energy, and this in turn leads to illness. The illness of children, a frequent theme in 19th century fiction, appears in orphan stories as the culminating result of various forms of oppression and suppression.  This may take the form of a deep willingness to sacrifice, as in the case of Beth in Little Women.  She has a great musical gift, but Louisa May Alcott’s story implies that she is too willing to subordinate herself to the care of others, as in nursing the Hummel baby, who has scarlet fever, at Christmas. The struggle to survive in body and soul, the struggle for self-expression – the musical voice of Beth, of Phoebe, and of Rapunzel – together with the whole idea of sacrifice is at the core of these stories.  The four girls’ sacrifice of their Christmas money for the good of the poor and that of Jo’s hair, her pride and joy, to the war effort, prefigure the ultimate sacrifice of Beth herself. Of all the sisters, Beth most completely submerges herself in the care of others, and her death seems to be the consequence of this submission to duty.

Illness is also the narrative opportunity for a critique of the school system, as in Jane Eyre’s Lowell School, which suppressed and squandered the children’s vitality in part by neglecting their need for wholesome food and fresh air. At Lowell school, Jane’s friend, Helen died of consumption, due in part to the lack of sanitation, but also to a lack of autonomy for the spirit. Bronte’s Lowell school might be the Lowell textile mills in Massachusetts for all the deprivation its inmates endure. The schools in Dickens are also unhealthy, breeding divisiveness and petty cruelty. Dickens describes David Copperfield’s Salem House school in this way:

"I gazed upon the schoolroom into which he took me as the most forlorn and desolate place I had ever seen—a long room, with three long rows of desks and six of forms, and bristling all round with pegs for hats and slates. Scraps of old copy-books and exercises litter the dirty floor.”(Ch.5) 

Teachers and administrators discourage autonomy of intellect in a school setting dominated by “old copy books and exercises.”  Copperfield’s schoolmates humiliate him from the start of his school career, forcing him to wear a placard on his back that reads “Take care of him. He bites.” The bully Steerforth takes Copperfield’s money and slanders the only kind teacher, resulting in his dismissal. In this environment, bullying and cruel behavior goes unpunished. The dismal effects of schooling also appear in Hard Times in which the teacher Thomas Gradgrind favors the rule of fact over the imagination, signifying the suppression of autonomous thought. In adulthood Gradgrind’s own children turn out to have poor judgment, apparently a result of the suppressed drive for autonomy, whereas his adopted child, Sissie Jupe, survives emotionally. It’s important to realize that Sissie had proven hopelessly immune to instruction, which put her in a stronger position, emotionally. Offering an impoverished physical and emotional diet and crude methods of control, these schools were meant to show the horrors of a child’s forced march to adulthood. The authors of these narratives were not only writing about a child’s loneliness, poverty and isolation. They were also pointing to a situation of economic collapse, resulting in a father’s absence, a mother’s constraint, the deprivation of personal autonomy required by the school, and the cruel sacrifice involved with spiritual submission.

Poverty isn’t exactly the problem either, however. Poverty and the condition of being an orphan appear to provide the conditions in which a child can learn persistence and hard work, whereas in contrast the affluent children face a more serious kind of deprivation. The narrators portray affluent children as indulged, pampered and spoiled by excessive attention. The affluent children’s central position in the household deprives them of opportunities to serve and weakens their ability to take initiative and become autonomous themselves. As a result, affluent children look sick and the orphan looks healthy.

There are a couple of striking examples of this in David Copperfiel. Steerforth had always been the focus of his mother’s life. She absolved him of guilt for his own role in abusing others, and consequently the habit of abuse persists. His mother later on admits the tragic nature of her relationship with him, describing her son as “the object of my life, to whom its every thought has been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child in every wish, from whom I have had no separate existence since his birth…” (218-Chapter 32). In this faustian pact of parenting, the mother indulges the whims of the child at the expense of his soul. The lurid Uriah Heep, the other of David Copperfield’s two villains, is even more dangerously entangled with his mother than Steerforth.  In both cases, the villain’s mother has stifled him by depriving him of the opportunities that autonomy would provide them, whereas the motherless David raises himself by his own bootstraps, his life grounded in ethical principles.

Indulged children in the books of this era are not always evil, but they are sometimes ill or aimless, passive and desperate. Examples include the lonely and wealthy Laurie in Little Women who never develops a strong sense of personal motivation, as well as Aunt Clara’s son in Eight Cousins, the handsome Charlie, who, like Steerforth is “wild”, and Colin in The Secret Garden, under the care of Miss Medlock and Dr. Craven. The landed upper-class household at Misselthwaite revolves around the needs of Colin, initially a physically incompetent child without independence, resourcefulness, or a sense of purpose. The struggles of Colin and Klara, in spite of the medical attention brought to bear on their cases, brings to mind the heroine’s unambiguous remarks about her husband, the doctor, in The Yellow Wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “John is a physician, and perhaps – (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) –perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.”  Gilman privately lets us know that she believes “congenial work, with excitement and change,” would do her good, but the windows in “this atrocious nursery” in the “ancestral halls” her husband has rented are “barred for little children” as for her. Medical diagnosis has often entailed the warning to avoid work, change, excitement, even writing, but these authors tell us that the lack of useful work, freedom and autonomy impedes the health and development of constrained children, as well as constrained women.

    Who are the true guides, helpers and teachers that foster the orphan child’s personal growth and development? The orphan child finds his true helper and model for ethical behavior in close association with the natural world, as in the case of Heidi’s grandfather, or Mary’s Dicken and Ben Weatherstaff’s robin redbreast, a bird that seemed to speak to Mary, telling her about the secret garden. As in fairy tales, these narratives link the natural with the supernatural, bearing out the magical relationship of effort and energy between love given and love returned, or the seeds of giving and the response of the universe. The Golden Age narratives of orphans also link work and effort with the magic of change and growth.

    Perhaps this relationship between effort and the natural, work and the supernatural, accounts for the fact that in orphan stories of achievement, the helper or teacher also belongs to a lower social class than the hero. For one example, Cousin Rose, in Louisa May Alcott’s somewhat moralistic Eight Cousins, has a maidservant, Phoebe, who proves to be her role model. Phoebe has learned to sacrifice her own interests with humility and without resentment, and she works hard and selflessly. Phoebe is an orphan, like Rose, but she has no aunts or uncles to occupy themselves with her development. She does have a beautiful singing voice, and this helps her carve out a sphere of her own. Rose later matures and marries her intellectual cousin, Max, but does not, either literally or metaphorically speaking, acquire a voice like her friend, Phoebe.

    In other orphan stories as well the abandoned child’s real teacher is often a servant. The Indian servant creates a bridge for Sara in The Little Princess between the poverty of her school existence and the wealth that changes her life and vindicates her as a human being. For Mary in The Secret Garden, the country boy Dicken, and his sister, the hard-working housemaid Martha, from a poor family of 12 children, show her a new way of looking at the world. The authors show us that Heidi’s friend Peter, the goatherd, his grandmother, and Heidi’s grandfather, who has returned from the excesses of urban life to a life of woodworking and farming, embody true values. Mrs. Reed’s young servant, Bessie Lee, who tends to Jane Eyre, is the only person in the child’s young life to treat her with affection, telling her stories, singing songs, providing good food. In David Copperfield, Peggoty, the young servant that tends David as a child, together with her family, provides David with support and a model for family strength, illustrating simplicity, honesty, deep humility, gratefulness and capacity for joy in the face of penury and tragedy. In other words, the lonely orphan usually finds his role models in the laboring class. The strongest influence on Tom Sawyer’s life is also the outcast, Huck Finn, and, in the most dynamic of all these examples of relationships spanning social classes, Huck Finn’s real teacher is Jim, a slave in ante-bellum Missouri. Huck learns more from this relationship than from his violent father or from school, or the Widow Douglas or Judge Thatcher. For example, Jim takes a “hair ball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox and he used to do magic with it,” and eloquently tells Huck’s “whole fortune” (Chapter 4). Jim’s friendship is unique in Huck’s life, providing Huck with the opportunity for the growth in moral character that is at the center of the book.

    In addition to friendship, the health of the child appears to be the result of independence and resourcefulness. Heidi learns compassion and persistence from the care and feeding of a number of intractable goats, and Mary’s work clearing the ground for the green shoots introduces her to the cycle of life, teaching her the effort it takes to grow. The strong child contributes to the common good. Heidi, Dicken, eventually Mary, and Rebecca, unlike her mother and Aunt Miranda, are exuberantly healthy and willing to work. Health is closely linked with agricultural work, and ill-health is associated with an indoor and urban lifestyle. Health is the result of inner strength, entailing stubbornness and resistance to the unnatural order of things with which our heroes and heroines are in conflict. Within these books, the unnatural order of things is manifested in school and medical practice as well as in the absurdity of a ferocious house-keeping, appearing in such details as the thread Tom’s Aunt Polly uses to sew the boys’ shirts so they won’t go swimming. These petty details manifest the absurdity of arbitrary coercion and demonstrate the way constraint and suppression of energy works. No wonder Huck ends his story telling the readers: “But I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

    Orphan children are marginalized and impoverished, but their lack of parents, lack of schooling and lack of medical care enables the author to contrast their condition with that of wealthy children who are at the center of the lives of their caregivers, subject to the petty tyranny of the household, lacking meaningful employment, apparently dependent and stifled by privilege and the subtlest forms of coercion. Sickness and paralysis of the limbs become the symbolic expression of their incapacity for initiative. The focus of these Golden Age books on the paralysis of children such as Klara (Heidi) and Colin (The Secret Garden) suggests that these are not only rags-to-riches stories about personal empowerment, or cases of exemplary children faced with hardships, but also adult books taking issue with the culture of a rapidly industrializing society as it disabled children and by implication, adults as well. Charlotte Perkins Gilman later sent a copy of The Yellow Wallpaper to the physician who had prescribed that she never pick up a pen in her life; she reported in a 1913 comment that while he never responded he did change his prescription for neurasthenia as a result of reading it.

    Dickens and Twain have been accused of didacticism and propaganda, and moralism can be seen in Alcott, Wiggins, and Spyri, but these narrators all created an autonomous orphan child whose life served as a direct attack on public education, new forms of medical practice, urban life, and the compulsory suppression of imagination and autonomy apparently designed to ready children for life and work in an industrial society. The orphan linked urbanization didactically linked with moral depravity, dis-ability being the result of social conditions that suppressed the vitality and energy of the child and denied her a voice. In these books the recovery of a child’s health became the dramatic means of embodying the values of pre-industrial life in which children, spiritually connected with the earth, could find an autonomous voice, and prove able to heal themselves. The orphan perspective of the late 19th century, as far as it is from our world, can still remind us of our own aspirations.

Works Cited

Donahue, Deirdre. (2003, July 2). Orphans in literature empower children. USA Today. Retrieved February 24, 2007 from http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/2003-07-02-bchat_x.htm

          Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. (1899). The Yellow Wallpaper. An Autobiography of Emotions.

          Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. (1913). Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper.

Kimball, M. (1999, January 1). From folktales to fiction: Orphan characters in children’s literature. Library Trends. Retrieved February 24, 2007 from http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1387/is_3_47/ai_54836352

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