Children of a New World: Society, Culture and Globalization (review)

In her collection of essays written over the span of over twenty five years, Paula Fass explores and illustrates changes in thinking about the history of children in the US, especially as relates to schooling. At the same time she introduces some very interesting ideas about the relationship between childhood, migration, and ultimately globalization (drawn and modeled in part from her research into the history of immigration and American childhood). Although readers of Fass’s earlier works on minority education and kidnapping will be familiar with some of these essays, this collection represents a rare opportunity to read these scattered writings together as well as some of her more recent writing. They are presented in an order that reflects the evolution of Fass’s thinking and the historiography of childhood studies as it was shaped first by the quantitative scope of social history and more recently by the depth and detail of cultural history. In order to avoid the disjointed character of many retrospective collections, Fass introduces her more specialized essays on immigrant children and American education with a judicious and balanced survey. She rejects the simple argument that IQ tests in schools were used primarily to discriminate against immigrants and other minorities to claim that these tests became a major sorting tool in American education to carry out John Dewey’s admonition to offer diverse and individualized education. Similarly, she finds that whatever were the intentions of early 20th century high schools to “Americanize” immigrants, a close quantitative study of ethnic participation in the extra-curriculum finds that second and third generation immigrants created their own ethnic peer culture through high school activities. The next section focuses on how culture shaped perception of childhood. Her fascinating essay shows how the popularization of psychology and new notions of childhood innocence shaped public reading of the case of the “spoiled and “overly-precocious” young murderers, Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb in the 1920s. She follows with an analysis of how child abduction has changed from being seen as a minor offense (reflecting parental love) to being understood as a reflection of familial breakdown and an act of paternal vengeance or maternal “protection” (when abusive fathers have custody or visitation rights). She concludes this section with a wide-ranging analysis of how post-1945 technology and changing perceptions of childrearing have tended to isolate childhood issues from public debate and regulation and make childrearing an extension of personal expression and responsibility. For example, she shows how TV proliferation in the home along with the deregulation of broadcasting and advertising in the 1980s created the presumption of parental responsibility for monitoring the media exposures of their offspring. In a very different way the revolution in contraceptive technology not only made childbearing much more of a private choice, but, along with the entry of married women into the workforce, created a whole set of new concerns (especially public childcare) with little government protection.

The most innovative section of the book concerns children in an era of globalization. Fass makes the provocative claim that the American experience of children’s immigration can provide a guide to the possible effects of global migration of children today. As always, however, Fass make her arguments with thorough documentation and due regard for the complexity of her project. She focuses on the contrast between the idea of childhood as the time of socializing the next generation and thus protecting ethnic and regional identity with the notion of childhood as a universal stage of innocence demanding protection (especially in the west since the 19th century). In the past, this produced clashes between immigrant parents and American reformers over such issues as laws requiring school attendance or prohibiting child labor and the modern American emphasis on the child’s right to play, and, Fass contends, these conflicts are being repeated on a global scale today. In the 20th century, American children and, as adolescence became linked to childhood, teens entered...