Looking back a hundred years and more, we read more about child and youth care philosophies and practice. An extract ...

... While no institutional director would have said that his institution was designed for incarceration and deprivation, there can be no doubt that at certain moments certain institutions were just that. Even the New York House of Refuge, as Pickett shows clearly, had become anything but a refuge by the late 1840’s.

Institutions seeking obedience and conformity were common. Obedience was a primary virtue in an era when children were to be seen and not heard. At home and at school, obedience was expected of the young. The institutions required it, too. That obedience was sought after in the Philadelphia House of Refuge, for example, is clear from the letters published in the annual reports each year during the 1850’s and 1860’s. Letter after letter, each doubtless chosen to give proof of the success of the institution, indicates in glowing terms that the young indentured servant, placed with a master, was "obedient" and "hardworking." Similar threads run throughout the reports of other institutions. The child who was to succeed in earning his own way in a wicked and wearisome world must be disciplined to obedience. Hence hours of work often exceeded hours of study, and emphasis was placed on the earnings of inmates. The latter item was, of course, watched by some board members interested in balancing budgets, but the more humane of the superintendents saw it as a symbol to the child that his work had value. In some cases a percentage of earnings would be actually or symbolically credited to the child’s account so that he could have a new suit of clothing and a small sum of money when he went out into the world.

In institutions that were seen primarily as schools, obedience was important, as it was in any school, but the focus was on acquiring an education and not on work. The emphasis on reeducation of those who had been charged with delinquency varied from place to place and from one staff member to another. To some the primary means of reeducation may have been religious training or conversion. This is apparent, for example, in what today seem to be sentimental stories of dramatic changes in specific children after crises in the institution. However, in the reports of both orphanages and reform schools, pages were given to educational programs. Sometimes the religious exhortation at the end appears to be an after thought, put in out of concern for the opinions of board members and contributors rather than out of conviction.

A school can be many things, and many nineteenth-century schools were designed to teach obedience and conformity and perhaps the three R’s. To an educational program some of the institutions added recreational or athletic programs. Some, including some early ones, added inmate self-government. Beaumont and de Toqueville were fascinated, for example, by the plan carried out by Superintendent Wells at the Boston House of Reformation. Many, in the hope of helping a child change his behavior, had special systems of "grading" the youngsters or, at Boston, of having the youngsters grade themselves. The children wore badges to show their ranks, and they might be demoted or upgraded after specified periods of time.

Allen, on the other hand, found such a system obnoxious. He would have no part of it. He would not allow the wearing of badges. He said: "The best badge for moral worth is the countenance. A boy may be very troublesome, violating the rules constantly, and yet we know him to be a good boy at heart; while another may obey every regulation, and cause no trouble, and still we may not have the least confidence in him. His approach to children was perhaps more akin to what would today be called "therapy."

One need adduce little proof that many nineteenth-century institutions trained youngsters for obedience and conformity. The case for reeducation is harder to make, unless one equates reeducation with "moral education," which is probably the nineteenth-century equivalent. Its purpose was to rescue the threatened child from his evil surroundings and to teach him new ways that would enable him to succeed in the world. These new ways were based not just on school learning, but on "changes of heart."

The precursors of modern therapy are to be seen in those persons interested in getting children out of the institution into adoptive homes or long-term foster homes and in using the institution to prepare the child for the new home. Though such a strategy also called for a type of education in manners and morals, it was based on the observation that the institution could not be a real home, no matter how much one tried to make it one. Turnover in institutional staff may have hurried this development, as sensitive staff members witnessed the distress of children at the frequent changes of housemothers. Actually, the dependent child usually needed a permanent home, not individual therapy, and the sensitive institution leader tried to get it for him.

The delinquent child presented a more serious and more difficult challenge. In the nineteenth-century institution one sees groping efforts to use the group to change the individual. The decision about how to introduce the new child into the group was seriously considered in the Boston House of Refuge in the late 1820’s. As the cottage plan was introduced in the 1850’s, group formation in a rudimentary form was also considered. Should children be placed with others of their own age, or in groups that more nearly resembled families? Some of these considerations had to do, of course, with ease in management, but some leaders were clearly concerned with what was good for the child.

The elements of today’s "diagnostic" thinking appear in Allen’s puzzlement and his wish for consultation. He wrote:

No one can fully understand all these boys: he may study particular specimens for days and months, as a skilful physician studies a patient in a hospital; but, like him, may never be able to do more than show his good intentions. Still, after months and years of labor, one may find an avenue to the heart, as was found to the mind of Laura Bridgman. The Board of State Charities could not do a better thing for the State than to have such cases as that of young Pomeroy investigated by eminent specialists.

An interesting view of what today might be called concern about ego development came from the chaplain of the Western House of Refuge in 1872. In days when the doctrine of "innate, total depravity" was still preached, this chaplain thought boys needed to come into contact with persons of high character, not to be preached to, but to acquire "a profound faith that there are really good people in the world." Without such faith, he considered a child’s conscience "paralyzed and manacled." Such faith he thought was usually "implanted by good mothers," and the child without such a mother was handicapped. He went on:

We have not this faith to work upon. Our wards have been born and bred under the misfortune of the absence or very imperfect presence of this condition; and so our work is not that of reforming those oace well formed, but lapsed and gone out of form. It is that of forming the deformed.

Allen also had that capacity to sense the feelings of the child and the group that would make him what some would call a "natural" therapist. He ran a school, but he knew that little boys who do not like to read are not necessarily naughty. He wrote:

It would be an interesting fact to know how many boys in Massachusetts get a hatred of school, play truant, form bad habits, and are sent to the Reform School, on account of the difficulty of learning to read our language, the spelling of which, according to Max Muller, "is unhistorical, unsystematic, unintelligible, unteachable;" and, according to Gladstone, "without rule, method, or system."

He believed that the farm work done by the children should be done with the teacher, who would be "full of fun, leading, not driving" the boys into the field, and he was sure that boys should realize a few dollars a year from their work. 

Allen understood what is meant by identification. He had no fear of being a role model, though he did not use the words. He spoke of the influence upon the boys of occasionally having his own suit of clothes made of the same material as theirs. 

Allen’s treatment of runaways brought him criticism from outsiders, but he stood his ground. He believed boys would be more likely to return from their brief escapades if they knew there would be no punishment upon their return. When they did come back he tried to relieve their suffering rather than to punish them. He wrote:

If boys never ran away, it would prove that no freedom was allowed; if a great many, that the officers were negligent or the building was insecure. A shrewd officer reads the intention of the boys in their countenances and actions and counteracts their plans. The inefficient officer, having eyes, sees not the things that most concern him .... No one who has not this faculty of "mindreading" to a considerable degree, should be employed in such a school, or perhaps in any other.

The "mindreading" officer of the 1860’s is probably the intuitive individual or group therapist of today. 

A final example of the incipient therapeutic milieu comes from a teacher in Allen’s school. She wrote this account of her handling of the group:

I went into school one morning with the first flower I had seen that spring, and they all seemed so happy to see a flower, and held up their hands, saying, "Can’t I have it, please?" I said, "I hardly know what to do, when so many good boys want it. You all say that L. B. is the naughtiest boy in the school, and I think I will give it to him – he looks as if it would make him a better boy." He took and hugged it to his bosom, crying and laughing, but never letting it out of his hands, till, in parade for supper, with hands behind him, a boy took it from him. He then gave such a scream that the officers all came running to see what was the matter, he all the time crying, "He’s got my flower."
I remember a nice little boy from P –, that I tried to teach to knit, but he was so sad and homesick that I pitied him very much. The boys called my attention to his pockets, so crammed. I asked him to let me see what he had. He said, "I am afraid you will not let me keep them." I said, "Let me see." So he pulled out two dirty stockings, saying, "I want to keep them; my mother knit them, and I may never see her again." I told him I would have them washed and mended for him which I did. Afterwards he was sent home, and his mother wrote me a nice, kind letter.

What can we say of the aims and outcomes of nineteenth-century institutions? Of ambitious aims there was no lack. Pious and serious souls, saddened or threatened by the misery and naughtiness of children, tried their best to remedy things. The modern reader may not fully agree with Thurston’s notion that each new invention was an improvement over the last, but he can recognize the thought that went into the effort to save, rescue, reform, or care for the child who needed help. The wide variation in quality of the institutions is pardonable. Child study was in its infancy, and modern methods of education were still a dream. The modern reader may find plenty to quarrel with in the motives and the methods of the past, yet he may well marvel at the patience of leaders who kept on trying, even when their methods seemed not to solve the problem. Those intrepid but human souls made no apologies for child-saving, and many of them really believed in a better tomorrow.