Children of a New World

by Fass, Paula S.

• ISBN13: 9780814727577
• ISBN10: 0814727573
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.In this remarkable volume, Paula S. Fass, a pioneer and pace-setter in the burgeoning field of children's history, demonstrates that a knowledge of history is essential to understanding contemporary controversies over child protection, the commercialization of childhood, multiculturalism in public schools, and the impact of globalization. --Steven Mintz, author of Huck's Raft: A History of American ChildhoodPaula S. Fass, a pathbreaker in children's history and the history of education, turns her attention in Children of a New World to the impact of globalization on children's lives, both in the United States and on the world stage. Globalization, privatization, the rise of the work-centered family, and the triumph of the unregulated marketplace, she argues, are revolutionizing the lives of children today.Fass begins by considering the role of the school as a fundamental component of social formation, particularly in a nation of immigrants like the United States. She goes on to examine children as both creators of culture and objects of cultural concern in America, evident in the strange contemporary fear of and fascination with child abduction, child murder, and parental kidnapping. Finally, Fass moves beyond the limits of American society and brings historical issues into the present and toward the future, exploring how American historical experience can serve as a guide to contemporary globalization as well as how globalization is altering the experience of American children and redefining childhood.Clear and scholarly, serious but witty, Children of a New World provides a foundation for future historical investigations while adding to our current understanding of the nature of modern childhood, the role of education for national identity, the crisis of family life, and the influence of American concepts of childhood on the world's definitions of children's rights. As a new generation comes of age in a global world, it is a vital contribution to the study of childhood and globalization.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Children in Society, Culture, and the World	1
Part I: Children in Society
Introduction to Part I	21
1 Immigration and Education in the United States	23
2 The IQ: A Cultural and Historical Framework	49
3 Creating New Identities: Youth and Ethnicity in New York City High Schools in the 1930's and 1940's	74
Part II: Children in Culture
Introduction to Part II	103
4 Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture	106
5 A Sign of Family Disorder? Changing Representations of Parental Kidnapping	141
6 Bringing It Home: Children, Technology, and Family in the Post—World War II World	168
Part III: Children of a New Global World
Introduction to Part III	199
7 Children and Globalization	202
8 Children in Global Migrations	219
9 Children of a New World	239
Index	261
About the Author	269