Saving the child for the sake of the nation: Moral framing and the civic, moral and religious redemption of children

Lynch, Gordon

doi:10.1057/ajcs.2014.5

Cited by 6 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…How matters of religion and education look from the perspective and experience of children and young people should be a priority area of research. In light of scholarship around the moral meanings given to children and childhood (Lynch, 2014), and the scandals around child abuse in religious contexts (Donnelly, 2017), there is an emerging ethical as well as scholarly imperative to consider how children experience, navigate and respond to the religious, not least in educational contexts (Shillitoe, forthcoming 2020).…”

Section: Children's Rights and Agency In Religion And Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religion and Education: Framing and Mapping a Field

2019

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This publication makes the case for ‘religion and education’ as a distinct, but cross-disciplinary, field of inquiry. To begin with, consideration is given to the changing dynamic between ‘religion and education’ historically, and the differing understandings of religious education within it. Next, ‘religion and education’ is examined from methodologically specific perspectives, namely the philosophical, historical and sociological. The authors outline the particular insights to be gleaned about ‘religion and education’ on the basis of their commitment to these methodological standpoints. Overall, this publication is concerned with demonstrating the scope of the field, and the importance of having a range of disciplinary, and interdisciplinary, perspectives informing it.

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Section: Children's Rights and Agency In Religion And Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religion and Education: Framing and Mapping a Field

2019

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“…As Lynch (2014) has demonstrated, child removal policies in Australia and other Western nations through the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries were justified as projects of nation-building. Children in these contexts were valued not for themselves or because of the inherent value of childhood, but as future citizens.…”

Section: Child Removal and The Reformatorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It was also a necessary preventive measure. Children who were removed were often seen as being in such danger of corruption that they posed a threat to the future of the community (Lynch, 2014: 179). The presence of child-saving and reformatory discourses in Australia arguably contributed to a fixation on Aboriginal children.…”

Section: Child Removal and The Reformatorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Reformatory schools and Whiteness in danger: An Australian case

Carden

2018

Childhood

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The Queensland Reformatory and Industrial Schools Act (1865) provided for the creation of a system of reformatory and industrial schools. This paper explores the early years of the reformatory for boys. The Act defined Aboriginal children as 'neglected' and eligible to be sent to this institution. However, of the first thousand children admitted, all but thirty-three were white. This paper explains this contradiction by positioning the reformatory as a space in which fears about the fragility of whiteness were enacted.

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“…Fuelled by biological determinism and eugenics, the assumption was that a child's moral character was irretrievably shaped by heredity, resulting in child migrants being condemned as degenerate 'slum kids' (Buss, 1976;Partridge, 1912;Stewart, 2009). Between these positions was a tentative construction of some children as 'capable' and 'resilient', namely those who showed strength of character and an ability to change (Lynch, 2014;Parr, 1982). Yet other coping mechanisms, such as resistance to emigration and running away, were blamed on their upbringing and hereditary tendencies, leading to them being classed as 'troublesome' and hard to manage and placing them in the 'undeserving' category (Moss, Wildman, and Lamont, 2020;Sims-Schouten, 2020;Sims-Schouten, Skinner, and Rivett, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While some writings highlight the altruistic motives of the voluntary agencies that sent children abroadin her book on the 'Middlemore Experience', for instance, Roberts-Pichette (2016) constructs the child migration scheme in terms of an initiative that helped vulnerable children thrivecases of abuse and neglect have also been widely reported in relation to the Canadian (as well as the Australian) child migration schemes (see Constantine, 1991;Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse, 2018;Lynch, 2014). The selection process associated with UK child migration schemes to Canada located the child within a framework of both morality (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A troublesome girl is pushed through’: Morality, biological determinism, resistance, resilience, and the Canadian child migration schemes, 1883–1939

Sims‐Schouten

2021

History of the Human Sciences

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This article critically analyses correspondence and decisions regarding children/young people who were included in the Canadian child migration schemes that ran between 1883 and 1939, and those who were deemed ‘undeserving’ and outside the scope of the schemes. Drawing on critical realist ontology, a metatheory that centralises the causal non-linear dynamics and generative mechanisms in the individual, the cultural sphere, and wider society, the research starts from the premise that the principle of ‘less or more eligibility’ lies at the heart of the British welfare system, both now and historically. Through analysing case files and correspondence relating to children sent to Canada via the Waifs and Strays Society and Fegan Homes, I shed light on the complex interplay between morality, biological determinism, resistance, and resilience in decisions around which children should be included or excluded. I argue that it was the complex interplay and nuance between the moral/immoral, desirable/undesirable, degenerate, and capable/incapable child that guided practice with vulnerable children in the late 1800s. In judgements around ‘deservedness’, related stigmas around poverty and ‘bad’ behaviour were rife. Within this, the child was punished for his/her ‘immoral tendencies’ and ‘inherited traits’, with little regard for the underlying reasons (e.g. abuse and neglect) for their (abnormal) behaviour and ‘mental deficiencies’.

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Saving the child for the sake of the nation: Moral framing and the civic, moral and religious redemption of children

Cited by 6 publications

References 26 publications

Religion and Education: Framing and Mapping a Field

Religion and Education: Framing and Mapping a Field

Reformatory schools and Whiteness in danger: An Australian case

‘A troublesome girl is pushed through’: Morality, biological determinism, resistance, resilience, and the Canadian child migration schemes, 1883–1939

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