History of Childhood in America

Catalog description

This course places contemporary eductaitonal, legal, policy, and psychological thinking about childhood and current concerns about children’s well-being into sweeping historcial perspective. The course will examine childhood both as lived experience – shaped by such factors as class, ethnicity, gender, geographical region, and histroical era – and as a cultural category that adults impose on children. The class will place a special emphasis on public policy. The history of adoption, child abuse and neglect, children’s rights, disability, juvenile delinquency, schooling, and social welfare policies are among the topics this course will address.