CfP: Exclude to Include. Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools, their Participants and Processes during the 19th and 20th Centuries
Since the 19th century, many countries have striven for universal education as a means to ’shape‘ people into loyal and obedient citizens; a process which can be seen as part of ’social engineering‘. One particular form of education is the boarding school. Various forms of boarding schools existed: from ‚elite‘ institutes providing the offspring of high-class people an education and consolidating the social status of the pupil, to boarding schools for indigenous children in (former) settler colonies in which an European episteme was forced upon the pupils. A commonality within the broad spectrum of boarding schools was the assumption that through the isolation from some aspects of society, such as parents or peers, pupils would be molded into subjects that would easily be assimilated into a section of society that their education ‚prepared‘ them for.
This conference (and resulting publication) aims to understand the mechanisms and outcomes of boarding and residential schools in the socialization of children and youth during the 19th and 20th centuries from different backgrounds, social status, age, gender, nationality, religiosity, and ethnicity within a global perspective.