SHCY Bulletin

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Entering into the Fray: Historians of Childhood and Public Policy,  SHCY 2009

Julia Grant, Michigan State University

During the first session of the SHCY conference, at 8:30 sharp, with good strong coffee in hand, my colleagues and I hosted a roundtable entitled “Entering into the Fray: Historians of Childhood and Public Policy.”  All of the participants came prepared to discuss how historians might contribute to public policy debates about children and what lessons can be learned from the past experiences of those who have written editorials, made presentations at gatherings of professionals in child welfare, or have had their research made use of in policy discussions about education and child welfare.

The panelists included Barbara Beatty, author of Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Childhood from the Colonial Era to the Present (Yale, 2007), and a number of essays and opinion pieces on early childhood education.  Beatty, along with Julia Grant and Emily Cahan, also edited the volume When Science Encounters the Child: Perspectives on Education, Child Welfare, and Parenting (Teachers College, 2006).  Julia Grant has written Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (Yale University Press, 1998) and is completing a manuscript for Johns Hopkins University Press, tentatively titled, The Boy Problem in American Education and Society.  Tim Hacsi has been involved in the world of historical scholarship and advocacy, serving as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Chapin Hall for Children and a Spencer Fellow at the (late lamented) Harvard Children’s Initiative, and authoring, among other things Second Home Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Harvard, 1998) and Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform (Harvard, 2002).  Our chair and discussant, Roberta Wollons, has edited the anthologies Children at Risk: History, Concepts, and Public Policy (SUNY, 1993) and Kindergartens and Culture: The Global Diffusion of an Idea (Yale, 2000).

 During the session, panelists discussed whether we should focus on writing good history that also appeals to policy makers, or whether we should write in more than one mode: the mode that employs traditional historical methods, and one which directly speaks to policy makers and boils down the lessons of our research.  One of the problems with the second approach, of course, is that there may be no easy lessons and historians may need to over-simplify their findings. Others noted that policy makers are notably resistant to referring to good evidence in crafting policies, preferring instead to forge blindly ahead based on anecdotes and popular opinion.  Nevertheless, both the panelists and the audience felt the need to find ways to disseminate their ideas more publicly, in the interest of enabling educators and advocates of children to make more historically-informed choices.  Ultimately, we would like historians of children and childhood, ourselves included, to hone their abilities to write in ways that capture the attention of policy makers. 

A unique feature of the session was that I, as a novice web master, created a website prior to the conference to provide information to conference goers about the session.

http://sites.google.com/site/childhoodandpublicpolicy/ 

The site includes the abstract for the session and information about the participants.  We have also posted Barbara Beatty’s remarks, “Mixing History with Policy” and Julia Grant’s “Reflections on the ‘Boy Problem’ and its Public Implications.”  With a link for “visitor comments,” we hoped to stimulate discussion before and after the panel.  Although we have a long ways to go in terms of learning to craft and make use of such web sites, this might be a feature of future conferences that could be promising: online conference programs could provide links to web sites or further information to use in helping conference goers to make decisions about which sessions to attend and host initial discussions about the topic at hand to spur conversation.  We feel that more interactive sessions, involving online conversations, and a more visible role for participants, would make our already dynamic conferences even more enjoyable.

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