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  • You Can Help Your Country: English Children’s Work during the Second World War
  • Lee A. Talley
You Can Help Your Country: English Children’s Work during the Second World War. By Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow. London: Institute of Education, 2011. xvii + 310 pp. $42.95 paper.

You Can Help Your Country examines an important and overlooked part of English children’s lives during World War II: their work and contribution to the war effort. Complementing other histories of British children during WWII, which tend to focus almost exclusively on evacuation, Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow concentrate instead on the ways all children were urged to help with the war effort. They contemplate children’s agency as well as how childhood was understood in markedly different ways than it is today. In addition to elucidating the ways the young were imagined as citizens who were expected to help with the war effort, their book charts the ways children were increasingly viewed as “learners not earners.” Indeed, Mayall and Morrow reveal how the war years helped consolidate the “scholarisation” of childhood: “the tendency to value childhoods only in so far as they are specifically childhoods spent under adult tutelage in schools” (pp. 13–14). Their book thus documents a fascinating and intertwined history: children’s significant contribution to the workforce and war effort during WWII alongside the growing shift in imagining children as exclusively schoolchildren.

After laying out the book’s themes within social policy, history, and sociology, Mayall and Morrow examine the early twentieth-century, interwar, and WWII history of children’s work and education in Britain. For example, they look back to the president of the Board of Education’s (Herbert Fisher’s) presentation of his education bill in 1917, which proposed that all children should have full-time schooling until fourteen. The half-time system, where children could attend school half time and perform paid labor half time, would thus be abolished. They then chart the gradual and remarkable change in societal perspective between the 1918 Education Act (a significantly compromised version of Fisher’s initial proposal) and the 1944 Education Act. Although it was [End Page 493] not implemented until 1947 because of the war, its nationally mandated school-leaving age of fifteen and provisions for a much wider range of nursery and secondary educational opportunities reflected beliefs that children’s best contribution to the societal welfare would be through gaining an education rather than working for pay. This clearly marked a shift in perspective from the beginning of the century when Fisher’s proposal was greeted with “furious opposition.”

The tension between conceptualizations of children as earners rather than learners was particularly fraught along class lines. The Fisher Bill, for example, was extraordinary in part because of the ways it imagined all children as potential beneficiaries of education. Indeed, Mayall and Morrow are careful to point out the ways class and gender shaped children’s experience of childhood and its attendant labor. They trace the history of ideas about childhood during the interwar years to untangle the ways developmental psychology, eugenics (and thus intelligence testing), social policy, beliefs about child-rearing practices, and understandings of children as an important part of the nation’s health and future worked together to improve opportunities for them at school and more tightly regulate children’s work. While many of these ideas stressed the commonalities of all children regardless of class, the prejudice against working class children was formidable.

Yet because so many adults volunteered to help with the war effort, children of all classes had to perform the work their parents and other adults had done before the war. And they were encouraged to do so through a range of media: from regular school radio broadcasts on gardening and food production to films and newsreels depicting young people at work. Children’s literature also portrayed children “doing their bit.”

Mayall and Morrow make skillful use of archival materials, relying especially upon school histories written during and about the war years, to document children’s work. They juxtapose these histories with government reports, BBC recordings, and an impressive range of interwar and WWII-era publications alongside interviews...

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