Following Foucault's analysis of expanding psychiatric power, this article addresses the shift from psychiatry into pedagogy in interventions concerning children with mental problems in the nineteenth century. The aims of this article are twofold. First, to answer the question of how the notion of "idiocy" developed in the context of an…

In this article Copeland's model of visualising the classification of children with learning disabilities is applied in examining the development of special education schools in the Netherlands during the interwar period. Central are three intertwined social practices: the teacher's professionalism (in pedagogic and practical concerns), the…

In this article, the authors examine policies and interventions concerning special children in the United States and Europe from 1900 to 1960. They focus on concerns about, and interventions on, children defined as having "special needs". They explore interventions, both in the form of words and practices, and examine their effects on…

In this paper the concept of gender script is applied to examine the cases of two women educationists trying to construct a professional "self" in confrontation with gender scripts that constantly recited meanings of gender, in particular of femininity. The research focus is on the period 1890-1940, when in the Netherlands, like abroad,…

In the wake of developments in France and the United States where early psychiatrists such as Pinel, Esquirol, Belhomme and Seguin advocated "moral treatment" of the insane and classified"idiots" and "imbeciles" as incurable though educable, the Revd C. E. Van Koetsveld initiated his "School for Idiots" in…