Undesirable citizens: Education, care and control of the “Feeble-minded” in the Swedish Province of Malmöhus, 1900–1950
This paper contains the main results of a recently completed historical research project about the situation of persons cate- gorized as“feeble-minded” in Sweden. In this study, the case of Malmohus province constitutes the microhistorical core. Here, educational and care institutions such as schools, asylums and working homes were particularly established in the first half of the 20th century. The motives behind these foundations will be discussed and the working routines in those institutions will be analysed in terms of teaching and after-care of the inmates and their exclusion justified by social constructs such as “uneducable” or “moral imbecile”. This paper aims at demonstrating how feeble-mindedness was perceived as a social problem, and how close the efforts of education and care were connected to eugenic ideology and control. Thereby, the history of the feeble-minded will be interpreted as a striking example of the contradictions of modernity. The coincidence of social inclusion and exclusion was a characteristic of the situation of an undesirable group of citizens in the Swedish society under the era of modernization. This outcome is of high relevance for understanding the early historical development of the Nordic welfare state.
Det sinnesslöa skolbarnet : Undervisning tvång och medborgarskap 1925-1954
In 1944 special compulsory schooling for feeble-minded children was introduced in Sweden. This meant that these children could no longer be taught in ordinary elementary school classes. Instead they now had to be transferred to schools for the feeble-minded.The main purpose of the study is to investigate the meaning assigned to feeble-mindedness, the arguments in favour of compulsory schooling for the feeble-minded, and the significance that it subsequently had for the citizenship of these individuals in society. For this purpose, articles published in 1925-54 in four professional journals, reports of inquiries, legislation, and material from two schools for the feeble-minded have been studied.In the study the complexity that characterized compulsory tuition for the feeble-minded is revealed and related to contemporary welfare policy as a whole. Because of the special compulsory schooling, its institutional form, and the link to legislation on sterilization, the special education for the feeble-minded was to be both a form of tuition adjusted to the special needs of the children and an efficient instrument of control, at once a benefit and an imposition. The compulsory schooling made it possible to enrol feeble-minded children and keep them in the institutions, if necessary against their will and that of the parents. The sterilization laws also meant that sterilization could be made a condition for discharge. At the same time, the feeble-minded children were said to be given not only tuition adjusted to their abilities but also a suitable and sheltered environment in which to grow up with classmates of equal status and in many cases a better home than their parents could offer.Arguments in favour of special tuition for the feeble-minded were that it prevented them from growing up into asocial adults, while furthering their development into socially well-adjusted citizens. Work and social adjustment were also the characteristics of the feeble-minded individuals- citizenship, as this was described both in the professional debate and in the parents- correspondence with the Storangen institution for the feeble-minded. However, this citizenship did not include the right to form a family and have children.
Fit for what? Special education in London, 1890–1914
Introduction This paper presents a case study of the implementation by the London School Board of special education for children designated ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘mentally defective’ in the period from 1890 to the passing of the Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act in 1914. Through an analysis of the choice of pedagogy for special schools, the qualities sought in teachers and the interplay between prescription and practice the aims and intentions of various players in the establishment of a system of separate provision are interrogated. The paper seeks to address the point made by Armstrong that Whiggish, or, in Foucault’s terminology, ‘traditional’ interpretations of history, undermine the very essence of the discipline, by wielding a broad brush that obscures the fine detail. Adopting a case-study approach facilitates the writing of ‘effective’ history by supplementing the existing overarching studies of the history of special education with some of that detail. In doing so it is possible to illuminate in some small way the ‘messiness, variety and unpredictability’ of policies, the conflicting and shifting motivations of committees and individuals and the clash of discourses surrounding the ‘feeble-minded’ child and the question of such children’s educability. Ball notes that ‘Knowledge and practices drawn from the educational sciences provided (in Foucault’s terms) modes of classification, control and containment, often paradoxically linked to humanitarian rhetoric of reform and progress’. In the paper I acknowledge that in the period under discussion a shift in emphasis took place from an optimistic view of the potential of education to enable ‘feeble-minded’ children to live lives in the community (albeit under some form of control) to a focus on containment within the developing residential institutions, both schools and colonies. However, through use of the case study, I suggest that the overwhelmingly female workforce continued to exhibit greater commitment to less draconian forms of control within the community in the face of this clamour.