A Visual History of Children's Emotions in Europe: Expression and Regulation, 1500 - 1900

(Hardback)

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This book gives you the historical sensation of coming face to face with the expression and regulation of childrens emotions over time. The study does this by encouraging you to look through the eyes of well-known artists, like Hans Holbein the Elder, Jan Steen, and Rembrandt in the Renaissance, Jean-Simon Chardin, Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki and Willem Bartel van der Kooi in the Enlightenment, and Bernard Blommers and Max Liebermann in the late 19th century. These sources as supplemented by works from less-famous artists, as well as popular emblem books, advice and conduct books, observations from the emerging child sciences, and personal documents. Jeroen J. H. Dekker observes childrens emotions within clear educational settings like the family, the school, and the workplace, and connects them with historys ongoing, underlying discourse on education and the emotions. This discourse was developed by theologians, philosophers, and moralists like Erasmus, Descartes, Jacob Cats, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by Romantic educationalists like Friedrich Frbel and adherents of Progressive Education like Ellen Key and Edouard Claparde, and finally by scientists like Charles Darwin and William James who emphasized the biological fundament of childrens emotions. The story of childrens emotions is told in the context of cultural movements like the Renaissance, Humanism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the start of the Age of Child Science. Theories on educational regulation in history by authors like Philippe Aris, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault and on disenchantment with science through Max Weber are critically examined. A Visual History of Children's Emotions in Europe crucially highlights the continuous co-existence of regulation-oriented and child-oriented educational styles on coping with childrens emotions.

Author Bio

Jeroen J. H. Dekker is Honorary Professor of History and Philosophy of Education at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He is the author of several books in English, French and Dutch, including Educational Ambitions in History (2010) and The Will to Change the Child: Re-Education Homes for Children at Risk in Nineteenth Century Western Europe (2001). He is also the editor of several volumes, such as A Cultural History of Education in the Renaissance (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Professor Dekker is a former President of ISCHE, Editor of Paedagogica Historica, and a former Visiting Professor at the EUI, Italy, Columbia University, USA and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany.