Schooling and State Formation in Early Modern Sweden

"A meticulously researched, richly detailed, and finely contextualized piece of work, and a magnificent contribution to the history of childhood and youth that will stimulate new thinking across historical, educational, and childhood studies."– John Wall, Rutgers University, USA
"From the preface onwards the author places the book firmly in the history of childhood, an emphasis which, alongside that on education and social policy, will help it appeal to many audiences beyond academic historians: educators, educationalists, social workers, policy makers, and sociologists."– Rab Houston, University of St Andrews, UK

In this book the emergence of schools in urban Sweden between the seventeenth and the nineteenth century provides the framework for a history of children and of childhood. It is a study through the lens of the changes in early modern education, spatial aspect of the life of children and systems of governance in the early modern Swedish state. Educational systems defined the spatial aspects of childhood—where children were supposed to grow up, in the home, the school, the streets and alleys, or the place of work—over a period of about two hundred years. Schools and education represent both a mental and a physical space; an abstract place for children as well as a local and concrete place for them, which stood out against the alternative spatial aspects of the life of children. It is also a study of how different cultural systems influence the definitions of childhood and schools, in the context of church and home instruction, poor relief, policing, surveillance, and the question of why children went to schools. It examines the role of the school as childcare and as a provider of food, shelter and welfare, and as governance.

Bengt Sandin is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Thematic Studies, Unit of Child Studies, at the University of Linköping, Sweden.