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.