Children’s correspondence as a pedagogical tool in the Netherlands (1770–1850)

Philippe Ariès’s discovery of childhood after fifty years: the impact of a classic study on educational research

“…This resulted in several innovative studies on the history of childhood and the family, for example Robert Woods's (illustrated) study on the ways in which parents responded to the untimely death of their children, a book engaging with Ariès's 'parental indifference hypothesis', grounded on demography, but also exploring pictorial images, monuments and literary sources (Woods, 2006). Another interesting example is Rudolf Dekker's project to make accessible a large number of Dutch personal texts ('ego documents') from the 17th to the 19th century, including the detailed diary kept by Otto Van Eck (1780-1798), who was painstakingly raised according to Enlightenment ideals (Dekker, 1995;Kooijmans, 1997;Baggerman & Dekker 1998Roberts, 1998;Ruberg, 1999Ruberg, , 2005Dekker, 2006). Besides introducing new sources, Ariès also addressed three research topics that would dominate educational historiography for many years, namely history of the school, history of the family and of parenting, and, although until recently less popular, the history of childhood.…”

Epistolary and emotional education: the letters of an Irish father to his daughter, 1747–17521

“…By the nineteenth century, conversely, women would be encouraged to show their "feminine" emotions in their letters, and reprimanded when they did not. 71 Both norms on emotions and on gender seem to have changed at the end of the eighteenth century. Dror Wahrman uses the terms "ancien régime of identity" and "modern regime of selfhood" to denote a cultural revolution taking place during the last two decades of the eighteenth century.…”