This article looks at two modern institutions designed to discipline and control urban bodies--the school and the asylum--and the records they produced and the young people whose moral and cognitive capacities they tended. Both institutions are the sites of past childhood stories, yet the lives experienced in them are essentially anonymous. The focus of historians has been on engaging with the "voices" of the official policy makers, professionals and administrators rather than on the "voices" of the children. In pursuing the "voices" of children in these institutions the article makes a series of claims for the biographical approach and the use of multiple sources of evidence. It also addresses the relation between history and the telling of stories. (Contains 8 figures and 49 footnotes.)