The easiest method of acquiring the scientific habit is through acquiring the ability to express oneself clearly in discussing and disputing scientific problems. This is what clarifies their import and makes them understandable. Some students spend most of their lives attending scholarly sessions. Still, one finds them silent. They do not talk and do not discuss matters. More than is necessary, they are concerned with memorizing. Thus, they do not obtain much of a habit in the practice of science and scientific instruction. Some of them think that they have obtained (the habit). But when they enter into a discussion or disputation, or do some teaching, their scientific habit is found to be defective. Their memorized knowledge may be more extensive than that of other scholars, because they are so much concerned with memorizing. They think that scientific habit is identical with memorized knowledge. But that is not so.

1. Doumato, Eleanor Abdella and Gregory Starrett, ed. Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East. Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007.
   The contributions to this edited volume explore the political and social priorities behind religious education in nine Middle Eastern countries. The authors find vast differences in how Islam is presented in textbooks and a general lack of incitement to violence in the name of religion, or for any other reason.
2. Hefner, Robert W. and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, ed. Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
   This edited volume looks at Islamic education in countries as different as Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The contributors demonstrate that Islamic education is neither timelessly traditional nor medieval, but rather complex and evolving.
3. Nadwi, Mohammad Akram. Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam. Oxford: Interface Publication, 2007.
   This book is an adaption of a larger 40-volume biographical dictionary of female Muslim scholars in the pre-modern period. This book can be used to understand the traditional system of transmission of knowledge and to counterbalance charges of misogyny against Islam.

by Heidi Morrison
(Suggested writing time: 50 minutes)

Using the images, texts, and audio recording in the documents provided, write a well-organized essay of at least five paragraphs in response to the following prompt:

• Imagine you are at a dinner party and the topic of conversation turns to international politics. One person at the table makes the statement, "Since ancient times, children in the Middle East have been taught violence against infidels." Using at least six primary sources related to the history of schooling in the Middle East, write an essay that responds to this theoretical statement.

Your essay should:

• have a clear thesis,
• use at least six of the documents to support your thesis,
• show analysis by grouping the documents into at least two groups,
• analyze the point of view of the documents, and
• recognize the limitation of the documents before you by suggesting an additional type of document or source to make your discussion more complete or valid.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following institutions for primary sources:

• ABC National Radio,
• Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris,
• Fethullah Gulen Website,
• Houghton Mifflin Company,
• Library of Congress,
• The New York Times,
• Princeton University Press,
• University of California Press, and
• Yale University Library: Near Eastern Collection.

About the Author

Heidi Morrison is an assistant professor of modern Middle East History at the University of Wisconsin- La Crosse. She is currently writing a book entitled State of Children: Egyptian Childhoods in an era of Nationalism, Modernity, and Emotion. Heidi is also the editor of the forthcoming The History of Global Childhood Reader (Routledge Press, 2011). She is working on a project on the history of boys and mental health in Palestine.

In recent years, westerners have been fascinated by the education of children in the Middle East, raising concern over whether or not schools teach extreme radicalism or anti-Americanism. The Arabic word madrasa, which literally means "school," has come to imply in the minds of some pundits and politicians a pro-terrorism center with political or religious affiliation. The situation was very different in the pre-modern era, when schools in the Middle East were world renowned: students from as far away as Spain traveled to regions such as Iraq to study with noted teachers.

In the early days of the Islamic community in the Middle East (i.e., from the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632CE through the four Islamic caliphates and the Umayyad Dynasty in 750CE), the leading Muslims of the Arabian peninsula employed tutors or owned slaves to teach their sons the basics of religion, to read and write, to use the bow and arrow, to swim, and to be courageous, just, hospitable, and generous. The elite expected their daughters to attain skills relating to the household as well as the basics of religion, and sometimes to learn music, dance, and poetry.

The majority of children in rural areas learned how to work the land from their families. The only formal education they received would be from the kuttab, or mosque school, listening to Qur'an readers in mosques, or from informal exchange of information in the family.

In urban areas, boys typically began apprenticeships at around eight years of age to master a craft or skill. In terms of higher education, if a child had memorized the Qur'an (by about 12 years of age) he would often then travel around the Islamic world in quest of a teacher who had an understanding of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). Students would gather around these teachers in mosques and master the teacher's approach to law without much questioning.

With the consolidation and cultural development of the Islamic empire during the Abbasid Dynasty (750-1258CE), a systematic method of schooling was established in the Middle East for both elementary and higher education. This remained the main form of education until the 20th century.

A maktab, or "elementary school," was attached to a mosque and the curriculum centered on the Qur'an, which was used to teach reading, writing, and grammar through recitation and memorization. Physical education was emphasized in childhood education because Islam gives importance to the training of the body as well as the mind. (Children of wealthy and prominent families continued to receive individual instruction in their houses.)

After attending a maktab, a student could attend a madrasa, or "higher education institution," attached to a mosque. Individual donors, rulers, or high officials funded these through pious endowments. The endowment funds maintained the building, paid teacher salaries, and sometimes provided stipends for students.

The madrasa founder generally set the curriculum. With a focus on fiqh, schools sometimes also taught secular subjects, such as history, logic, ethics, medicine, and astronomy. Memorization was a critical aspect of a student's training in law. The material memorized formed the base used by jurors to practice ijtihad, or the process of making a legal decision by independent interpretation of legal sources.

The most famous madrasas in the Middle East were Cairo's Al-Azhar, founded in the 10th century, and Baghdad's Al-Nizamiyya, founded in the 11th century. (Medical schools were usually attached to hospitals.)

The period of the Abbasid Dynasty is often referred to as the Golden Age of Islam, due in large part to the thriving centers of learning. Scholars during this time translated, preserved, and elaborated Greek philosophy (later used in European universities). They also made advances in algebra, medicine, trigonometry, mechanics, optics, visual arts, geography, and literature.

During the early-modern era (1500-1800), education continued to flourish under the Ottoman and Safavid Empires. One study suggests that up to half of the male population was literate in Cairo at the end of the 18th century, implying that maktabs were numerous.

The madrasa continued to be constructed as part of the mosque complex, reflecting the importance of education to religion and the sense that education took place within the religious framework. Scholarship under the Ottomans and Safavids centered on the notion that the most advanced science came from Islam and that scholars before them knew best. This was in contrast to Europe during the 19th century, where higher education in new types of institutions of learning began to free itself from church control to embody the Enlightenment value of questioning religion (i.e. putting the laws of science over the laws of God), although reform of the older universities in Europe proceeded slowly.

In the face of Europe's growing power from advanced technology and commercial wealth, Ottoman rulers entered the modern era (1800-present) with a series of educational reforms. The reforms aimed to modernize the empire by adapting aspects of western life. (In contrast, Iran, under the Qajars, did not undergo the same level of educational reforms.)

The Ottomans sent envoys to Europe to translate their scholarship and learn new scientific discoveries. They secularized society such that educational opportunity became equal for all subjects in state schools. In cities such as Istanbul, Cairo, and Tunis, reforming governments established specialized schools to train officials, officers, doctors, and engineers. Some contesting voices in the Ottoman Empire argued, however, that the problems of the Empire were not from a lack of western ways, but from a need to return to the ways of the early age of Islam and the Golden Age.

Nonetheless, by the end of WWI, almost all of the Middle East had fallen under European colonial rule. The maktab and madrasa system of education began to wane in the place of French and British schools. These schools had limited enrollment due in large part to their scarcity in number; access was restricted to a select local elite trained to enhance colonial administration. Study in the maktab and madrasa no longer led to high office in government service or the judicial system.

Although the colonizing authorities introduced compulsory schooling measures of one kind or another, they often failed to include sufficient funding in colonial budgets, so the percentage of the total child population in schools remained dismally low. Children in rural areas who attended school often studied for a half day and worked the other half. In Algeria, for example, by 1939 the number of secondary school graduates was in the hundreds for the entire country.

Various types of private Islamic schools existed as alternatives to government secular schools, but the colonial governments sought to exercise close control through subsidies, curriculum expansion, and inspection systems. Religious schools often served—as they did in European efforts to extend education to the middle and lower classes—as a base from which to build capacity. A small number of European and missionary schools, as well as some indigenously operated Christian schools existed alongside the government and Islamic schools. In cities, these Christian schools of various denominations sometimes gained importance as institutions where children of elites accessed European education. In this way, a two-tiered education system developed under colonialism. In all of these systems, girls were able to acquire a nominal education; if it continued, it was usually in the form of training for teaching, nursing, or midwifery.

Post-colonial governments in the Middle East prioritized mass popular education to build strong nations. Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser, for example, promoted free education and promised each graduate a position in the public sector. In countries such as Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and Algeria, schools underwent a process of "arabization." This meant a focus on teaching Arabic language and culture. Traditional schools either closed or became incorporated into the state system. Iran, in contrast, had never been colonized. It became increasingly westernized in the mid-20th century, until the Revolution and subsequent Islamization of the state and schools.

While access to education has improved dramatically in the Middle East in the second half of the 20th century, the public education system tends to suffer from overcrowded classes led by poorly-trained, overworked teachers with inadequate materials. The curriculum is for the most part secular, and when the history of Islam is taught, the goal is not to incite children to violence. Many families must hire private tutors to help children with their end of the year exams, which emphasize the memorization of massive amounts of material. If children fail these exams, they can conceivably remain in the same grade level for as many years as it takes to pass, or they fail to qualify for secondary or post-secondary training of their choice. A very small percentage of families can afford to send their children to private European or American schools in the Middle East, which provide a western-style education.

This teaching module provides a wide variety of sources to explore the history of schooling in the Middle East, a topic that is largely misunderstood in the west. Schools in the Middle East today take various forms, from secular to Islamic. Current research of textbooks in the Middle East finds little in them that could be construed as incitement to violence in the name of religion, or for any other reason. Many western pundits, politicians, and academics portray schools in the Middle East as breeding grounds for terrorists and Islamic extremists. These schools are also portrayed as unchanging institutions, which implies that they have not evolved since medieval times and that even in medieval times the schools were static.

The truth is that medieval Islamic schools produced a wealth of knowledge that European scholars translated from Arabic after the 12th century, and incorporated into institutions of higher learning between the 14th and 16th centuries. Furthermore, in today's world, schools in the Middle East take various forms, from secular to Islamic. Current research of textbooks in the Middle East finds little in them that could be construed as incitement to violence in the name of religion, or for any other reason. Wherever military struggle is mentioned, it is always in the context of defense against an aggressor.

With the first four sources, encourage students to explore the various characteristics of schooling in the Middle East in medieval times. In regards to the emphasis on memorization, students should understand that there were scholars who challenged this accepted method, such as Ibn Khaldun. Likewise, students should themselves grapple with finding the strengths in a method of instruction that emphasizes memorization. Do students agree with the Ottoman reformers who thought that a modern nation must have an educational system similar to Europe's? Do students think that the various early 20th-century Middle Eastern reformers' justification for schooling girls marked a step towards modernization?

They key problem governments in the Middle East face today in regards to the educational system is not extremism, but rather identity crisis, underfunding, and conflict. The article on schools in Algeria since independence shows that colonization created an abused collective psyche that initially sought to heal itself through insulation. Might the educational system in Iraq be on a similar path? What evidence do we have that people in the Middle East value education, despite the challenges they have faced in its pursuit in the 20th century?

Discussion Questions

• Look at the two ijazahs (diplomas) from medieval times. Even without reading the Arabic, what stands out to you most about them? For a system of education that emphasized rote memorization, do you discern a sense of creativity?
  
  Possible answer:
  Creativity can perhaps be discerned in the designs on the diplomas and the difference in appearance between the two. The annotation also mentioned that the diplomas used individualized flattery.
• Imagine you are in a debate with Ibn Khadlun. Present an opposing argument, including in your stance some of the merits to memorization that el-Baghdadi lists in his autobiography as well as some of the achievements medieval Islamic society made for humankind as a whole.
• Envisage yourself a student in a medieval maktab: Who would be in your class with you? What would you learn? How would your progress be evaluated? To what might you aspire in terms of higher education?
• Arguably, schools can be viewed as a means of controlling a population. Provide examples of how this has been attempted through physical and intellectual means, particularly under colonialism and the independent nation-state.
  
  Possible answer:
  Some examples to include in the answer would be: schools were funded by endowments in the medieval period and the benefactors set the curriculum; as the devshirme illustration indicates, when first conscripted, the boys were dressed in red to avoid their escape; and, the reform of education during the tanzimat was for the sake of the nation and military; education under the colonists was intended to benefit the British; education in post-independence countries had economic and social development as a main goal. Students might also point out instances of where the student is a free agent, such as in medieval times when he would travel from scholar to scholar seeking knowledge. Generally speaking, students can discuss the role that the individual student can play in thinking on his/her own and not being fully controlled.
• After you summarize the New York Times article about education in Algeria, analyze its tone. What approach does the author take to the issue? Do you notice any bias? Does the author leave out any important issues? How do you think context influences content? What information might this article reveal about modern-day US concerns regarding education in the Middle East?
• The podcast on young people's accounts about war in Iraq focuses almost entirely on their experiences with school. What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages to studying political issues through educational institutions? In your answer, reflect as well on some of the other sources provided.

Lesson Plan: Education in the Middle East

by Heidi Morrison

Time Estimated: two to three 45-minute classes

Objectives

1. Be able to accurately and succinctly summarize a document, in the context of the history of schooling in the Middle East.
2. Articulate how context influences content, in regard to various documents published over time about schools in the Middle East and also in regards to one's own knowledge.
3. Gather information about the history of schooling in the Middle East in order to state characteristics that can be used when grappling with regional stereotypes.
4. Use the information about the history of education in the Middle East to formulate opinions on current-day debates about education's role in society.

Materials

Students must come to class already having read the primary documents (in the case of the podcast, listened to it and recorded notes). For this lesson, students will need a hard copy of the documents and/or their notes. A notebook, paper, and pen are also required.

Hook

Share with the students this quote from a widely-cited article in the New York Times Magazine reporting that in Pakistan, "There are one million students studying in the country's 10,000 or so madrasas, and militant Islam is at the core of most of these schools." 1 Tell students that other commentators have suspected that an equally militant spirit pervades schools in predominately Muslim countries.

Ask students what comes to mind when they think about schools in the Middle East, a predominately Muslim area of the world. Have them write down their thoughts anonymously and collect them to read out loud. They may mention variations of such terms as "jihad factories" or "backwards" or "outposts of medievalism." If these subjects come up, ask students to speculate about how and why schools in the Middle East have developed such negative associations with extremism.

Instruct

Explain to students that they will learn about the history of schools in the Middle East. They will study primary sources that will help them understand the characteristics of schools in the pre-modern Middle East as well as the contemporaneous debates around schools. They will also study primary sources that will help them understand the changes that these schools have undergone in entering the modern era. This lesson will help students formulate an informed image of schools in the Middle East, which is the ultimate goal of the Document Based Question.

First Activity
The first activity will focus on piecing together information from the various sources about how schools functioned in the pre-modern Middle East.

Divide the class into four groups. Tell them that each group will be assigned part of the larger project that is to create an imaginary 11-year old male pupil living in the Middle East in the 10th century. After each group completes their part of the project, they will present to the entire class. Every student in the class is responsible for learning all components of the material. Assign each group one of the following topics to describe in detail about the virtual student and tell them to base their answers on the first four sources provided in this module:

• Why he goes to school;
• What he learns in school;
• How he is taught in school;
• His aspirations for the future.

Second Activity
Students will be challenged to advance their understanding of the history of schools in the Middle East, as well as to improve their critical reading skills.

Divide the class into six groups and assign each group one source from sources 6–12 to summarize. Tell students to pay attention to what the sources say about changes schools in the Middle East have undergone in the modern era. When the students are ready, have them present their group summaries to the class.

Now tell the students that there is as much information in what sources from what they don't say as in what they say. Tell the students to return to their groups and decipher new information based on what is not included in their source. When the students are ready, have them present their ideas to the class.

A final step to this activity is to have the students return to their groups and talk together about how context influences content. Students should discuss how the information they garnered from the documents was influenced by what they know about the author of the source and/or what was happening in society at the time of its production. This discussion should force students to reevaluate the information they presented to the class thus far. Each group should do one final presentation to the class about what they know from their assigned document about education in the Middle East in the modern era.

Third Activity
Students will synthesize what they covered in the last two activities.

In a general class discussion, have the students recap what they find to be the main characteristics of education in the Middle East over the pre-modern and modern eras.

After this is completed, tell students there are many ways in which the history of education (as a field) contributes to current-day debates. Now that students possess a wide breadth of knowledge about the history of schools in the Middle East, ask them to articulate their opinions on the following topics:

• Do you think that schools are a means of controlling a given population?
• What do you think are the best pedagogical tools for learning?
• How does access to education, or lack thereof, impact society?

Many students may have a tendency to base their opinions about these questions on their experience/knowledge of schooling in the west. Ask the students to formulate opinions in the framework of their knowledge of the history of schooling in the Middle East. This exercise will force students to integrate what may have previously been foreign to them (schooling in the Middle East) into how they construct their worldview.

If there is time, conclude by telling students to "shift gears" and write down all the associations that come to mind when they hear the words "women in the Middle East" or "religion in the Middle East." Listen to their responses and ask why you might conclude a lesson on schooling in the Middle East with such a question. Encourage students to take away from this module not only information about schooling in the Middle East and an exposure to larger interdisciplinary debates on education, but also an awareness that just as the texts are shaped by their context, so too is our knowledge.

American Centuries displays items from the collection of the Memorial Hall Museum and Library in Deerfield, Massachusetts. This museum specializes in 17th-20th century artifacts of the East Coast, and its online exhibits contain many materials about children's and adolescents' lives from the Colonial period onward.

The website makes its primary appeal to teachers and young students. In addition to the usual elements of internet archives (images, texts, maps), the site offers interactive activities where kids can learn more about historical clothing, how to read old manuscripts, and other topics that draw from the museum's holdings. A section of the site called "In the Classroom" offers numerous lesson plans for elementary and middle-school teachers, some written by museum employees and some by schoolteachers themselves, using materials in the online exhibits.

The exhibits cover multiple aspects of historical New England. Finding materials specific to the histories of youth and childhood is much easier here than in some online archives. Using the "site search" box, which appears on every page, is not the most efficient approach; better, more focused results come from choosing the "Search the Collection" item off the main-page menu. There, typing "children" will yield 488 results that specifically pertain to children's histories, mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Even more directly helpful for the young (or old, but impatient) site visitor is the "Highlights" page, which offers artifacts in neatly arranged categories and sub-categories. The "Children" category is the obvious place to start; here, one can find images and information in the sub-categories of children's toys, clothing, furniture, schoolbooks, and even children's own handiwork. The individual pages for each artifact all include an icon called "Look closer"; once clicked, this icon opens a second window with a sophisticated zoom feature, offering several different degrees of close-up views for the artifact. This smart device allows site-visitors an even more detailed inspection of the artifacts than they could glean in an actual museum, where exhibits are separated from visitors by glass and several feet of space. Many of these artifacts are so exceptionally well-preserved that the zoom feature is especially pleasurable; we can revel in the joy of inspecting the hand-painted decoration on an 1835 baby carriage, or the careful stitching on a hand-made cloth doll from 1887.

Artifacts like the antique clothing and dolls are immediately charming; others can be either a bit disturbing, or darkly amusing. The 19th century "baby tender," for example, looks more like a packing crate for produce than a modern play-pen, while the hand-made "Twin Potty-Chair" makes us wonder: should twins really do everything together?

The most intriguingly named sub-category, "Children's creations," shows the woodworking and needleworking products of young people. One item—a stitched sampler—was made by a nine-year-old girl. The other displayed items appear to have been fashioned by people in their late teens, who might not have been considered "children" at the time (1790s-1810s). Still, the degree of skill demonstrated in these creations suggests the many hours of practice that these young artisans must have logged in their earlier years; the images therefore attest to the activities of childhood at the turn of the 19th century.

Do not, however, restrict yourself to the "Children" category of the "Highlights" page; the other categories there also include materials about children, mixed-in with the larger collections of artifacts. As just one example, the "Documents" category offers many texts used in children's schools (different selections from the ones displayed in the Children category). "Learning by Doing at Hampton" allows viewers to see sixteen pages from a 1900 pamphlet about the The Hampton Institute in Virginia, a school where freed African-American and Native American children were taught the customs and values of White society as a means of acculturation. There you can also see pages of a teenage boy's "copy book," with his penmanship, scholarship, and artistic skills displayed, as well as many other documents about children's lives as young scholars. The Documents category also features a "Journals and Diaries" sub-category, which contains several pages of text from the 1859-1860 diary of a twelve-year-old girl. The "Women's Lives" subcategory contains some other material relevant to the study of teenage girls, like the few pages scanned from a girls' 1830 instruction book: The Young Ladies Book: A Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits, with rules for proper sitting, dancing, standing, and curtseying.

Nearly every section of the "American Centuries" site contains materials about children and youth, including photographs of children in school, at play, and among their families from the late 19th to early 20th centuries (this one shows a family in 1895 playing croquet on their front lawn).

With its easy navigability, superb detail in images and texts, and rich resources for students and teachers, this site is one of the best internet collections available for the study of childhood and youth in Eastern US history.

Cartoons is a website produced by the British Cartoon Archive, a collection based at the University of Kent (England), dedicated to cartooning in newspapers and other forms of publication in Britain over the past century. It has a collection of around 150,000 cartoons drawn by approximately 300 cartoonists. This site provides students and teachers alike with a way of enlivening their approach to British political and social history as well as the history of children and youth. The website has a huge amount of material available, and it is well organized to help the researcher find cartoons from a particular cartoonist, or on a particular theme.

The alphabetical list of cartoonists in the Biographies section will include some names familiar to anyone brought up in Britain – and many others they will never have heard of. Fortunately the names of the most famous ones (and the most important newspapers that published them) are specified in the Search section, which helps to orientate the researcher. The site gives a brief biography of each artist, written with a nice light touch. For example, we learn that Barry Fantoni was thrown out of Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1958, accused of "wrecking the home of one of the teachers in a state of drunken madness." Fortunately for him, he was able to continue at the renowned Slade School of Art, and achieve fame and fortune as a pop artist as well as a cartoonist. A particular feature of the Archive is the Carl Giles Collection donated by the artist in 2005. This reviewer must confess to looking forward to seeing his cartoon in the Sunday Express each week during the 1950s and 1960s. His most famous creation was the Giles Family, a "bizarre fantasy," according to the biography, "of a working-class household living a comfortable middle-class life." The outstanding character was surely Grandma Giles, a ferocious looking character whose "anarchic vitality" led to her being heavily into drinking and betting. Also familiar to many will be the figure of Andy Capp, drawn by Reg Smythe under orders to appeal to readers in the north of England. Andy Capp, according to the biography of Smythe, emerged as the "flat-capped, pigeon-fancying, beer-swilling, work-shy northerner," with views on marriage going back to the "Neolithic Age."

The Search facility allows one to choose among numerous subjects. Each cartoon includes: a reference number, caption, embedded text (picking out detail not easily read in the reproduction), notes, the people depicted, and the subjects covered. The very abundance of the material may be a problem, especially as much of it will probably not appear useful to the modern reader. There are, for example, 6,099 entries under the heading of Children. In some cases, the cartoonist wishes to comment on events in contemporary society. W.K. Haselden, for example, turned out dozens of cartoons under this heading during the 1900s. Concerns over the declining birth rate in 1905 led the cartoonist to envisage a future in which babies become rare specimens, exhibited in cages and labelled "born in the managerie" (ref. WHO1490). In other cases, it is a matter of poking fun at politicians by depicting them as juveniles. "A row in the play-ground," by John Doyle, reduces politics in the 1830s to squabbling between Melbourne, Peel, Wellington and others (ref. mudyx9t). The cataloguers have provided numerous headings related to childhood and youth, such as girls, childhood romance, schools, schoolboys, juvenile delinquency, and mothers. Again the researcher will need to sift through the material to separate cartoons focused on that heading in particular from those with only a passing allusion.

The site includes advice on creating a group of cartoons as a teaching pack, to illustrate a particular theme. It provides a number of these but it is doubtless best to create your own, as the site advises. The site also points out in a section on Teaching Aids that "sophisticated searching" allows one to see, for example, what was happening on a specific day in history, by assembling all the cartoons that appeared in the newspapers on that day, or to grasp how politicians or major personalities (such as Princess Diana, with 321 entries) were perceived. This section promises five "resource packages" linked to themes in the British schools curriculum, and resources to help in the reading and analysis of cartoons. There is a section on Articles to help the teacher or researcher, though it remained obstinately stuck on "G" whenever consulted by this reviewer.

Overall, it is clear that a great deal of thought and effort has gone into making the vast collection of material available to the public, and into supporting the cartoons with relevant background information. The standard of presentation and the layout are excellent. It will need an awareness of the political stance of the newspapers involved to make much sense, and a feel for popular culture in Britain. Still, it is a cornucopia of delights.

Hidden Lives Revealed: A Virtual Archive – Children in Care 1881-1918 is an attractive and well-organized website. It bills itself as an "intriguing encounter with children who were in the care of the Children's Society in late Victorian and early 20th-century Britain."

At its heart is a collection of photographs, case files, and learning materials from one of the many philanthropic societies dedicated to the care of children in Britain at this period. Most of the archive material was previously unavailable to the public, as might be expected with files giving personal details of children who were in care – though of course the anonymity of the children is respected. "No other Internet archive," it asserts, "gives you the opportunity to browse through such unique material – a kind of resource which has the type of information not recorded elsewhere."

Perhaps this is so. In any case, it can claim quite reasonably that it offers something for those studying Victorian history or for university students interested in social work. The Waifs and Strays' Society, later known as the Children's Society, is rather overshadowed in the history books by the Barnardo Homes: further proof, if needed, of the aggressive publicity campaigns that have earned Dr. Barnardo a certain notoriety among historians. 1

A brief History of the Waifs and Strays' Society in a section of the website entitled Articles usefully provides background information. (A link to the website of today's The Children's Society provides further details for those interested.) The Society was founded in London in 1881 by a civil servant and Sunday school teacher named Edward Rudolf.

Rudolf aimed to set up a central home for the poorest and most neglected children cared for by the Church of England. It made a particular point of integrating its homes with the local community, aided by the parish organizations of the Anglican church. Other articles, incidentally, give a short biography of the founder, and introductions to poverty, juvenile delinquency and reformatories during the Victorian era. There is a concise and reasonably up-to-date Bibliography in these areas as well. 2

Photographs is divided into 12 sections, covering such areas as the work, schooling, pets, clothing, illnesses and disabilities, and sporting activities. Each photograph is carefully documented with a date, location, creator, and description. The Homes includes photographs and a detailed description. By 1918 the society had a total of 175 homes. These photographs inevitably look a bit grim now, though the society did have a policy of providing a family atmosphere in homes of around 10 children aged five to 14.

The sample of about 150 Case Files will interest those who want a feel for historical research. Each one contains the detailed application form, including information on family background, health, education, current circumstances, and reasons for application. There is also interesting supplementary material in the form of personal letters, photographs, and school reports. All of these documents are reproduced in the original, and (mercifully) transcribed in print form. They can be browsed by keyword, running from "Abandonment" to "World War I ."

An example under "Running Away" documents a girl who ran away from a home in Croydon, claiming ill treatment and concerns about having her hair cut off because of lice. The file even includes a reproduction of a Christmas card sent by her brother in 1891. Finally, there is a collection of Learning Materials, with exercises to find out "what it was like to be REALLY poor in Victorian and Edwardian times." A sub-section, entitled Rescued from Poverty has, for example, a fact file and questions for students concerning life on the streets and "who would you choose?"

Inevitably with this kind of website, the society responsible gives a positive view of its activities. One might wish to ask further questions such as: whether the laundries and other commercial activities in the homes risked becoming exploitative, the relations between children and those running the homes, and why the photographs suggest that all the girls became maids and the boys soldiers! All the same, the Society is to be commended for providing a very approachable educational site, and for its innovative approach to publicizing its existence.

The Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) provides access through its Collections Search Center to over 2.3 million records, with 290,000 images, video and sound files from Smithsonian museums, archives, and libraries. More than 10 percent relate to children and youth.

The search engine, designed for researchers rather than the casual browser, is powerful and well organized, allowing both quick access to the collections and an overview of types of media. As this image shows, a user can limit the items by clicking + or –. The number of each item appears in parentheses.

Three searches are representative of the material on children and youth. "Children" results in more than 23,000 hits, including photographs and negatives, sculptures, paintings, advertisements, video, sound recordings and texts.

"Boy" returned 16455 documents, "girl" 20221, and "youth" returned 3005. Some of the results are not associated with images but refer to cataloguing data from a museum, library, or collection. Some of the thumbnail images can be magnified, while others cannot.

The terms tested above returned anything titled, tagged, or captioned with one of the keywords, or in the case of books, where the word appears in the table of contents or summaries. Much of the material on children included photographs from the late 1800s to the present, most of which are not associated with much information as to provenance or subject.

Quite a number of the photographs belong to collections of anthropological studies in various parts of the world. Such collections can be researched further under the photographer's name. Such collections would likely appear in books and articles on the subject.

A number of materials are related to soap advertisements – Ivory, Pears, Breck shampoo, and other brands. This material consists of line drawings, advertisements in magazines, trade cards and booklets. Much about the 19th- and 20th-century culture of childhood and motherhood can be learned from these images and texts. A particularly striking advertisement warns the reader that it is very difficult to find anything as pure, and features a stern patriarch leaning over to inspect socks and stacked laundry that his daughter or servant holds timidly.

These ads took it upon themselves to educate mothers on raising their children, as well as capitalizing on images of sublime motherhood embedded in domestic scenes. On the other hand, an embossed paper Pears' advertising card called "You Dirty Boy" features a buxom, no-nonsense woman roughly cleaning the ears of a chagrinned little boy over a basin. Dreamy, out-of-focus images of blond, blue-eyed Breck girls recall ideals of female beauty from only a few decades ago.

Searching large archives using keywords related to children often brings up surprising items. Children, for example, are frequent subjects of outdoor sculpture, being featured as fountains, as symbols of the virtues, and as capricious traditional bronzes, such as the large, multi-figure statue of the game called "Crack the Whip" by J. Seward Johnson, Jr. Other items include paintings of children, sound recordings of children's songs, songs about children, toys, and ethnographic arts from the National Museum of the American Indian, such as a collection of beaded balls that were fashioned by young girls for eligible young men to whom they were betrothed.

Read.gov is a project of the Library of Congress (LOC) Center for the Book. It offers a cornucopia of approaches to reading and readers through a well-integrated interface.

The centerpiece is a set of 30 beautifully scanned, rare classics with a simple, elegant reading interface. Books are divided into categories for children (23), youth (6), and adults (3). Titles include an 1886 volume A Apple Pie, Mother Goose rhymes and Aesop's fables, and The Rocket Book from 1912 about a janitor's son whose rocket shoots up from an apartment basement through 20 floors.

The book Gobolinks, or Shadow-Pictures for Young and Old portrays ink blots. These images, created by dropping ink onto paper, folding it, and pressing the paper to squeeze ink into shapes, are then interpreted and illustrated with poems. Interpretations such as the washerwomen would give way to features from today's landscapes. An interesting activity would be to cover the poems and titles, interpret the images, and then compare things that have and have not changed.

Well known classics include The Story of the Three Little Pigs, the original 1900 version of The Wizard of Oz, a 1911 version of A Christmas Carol, several illustrated poems by Edgar Allen Poe, The Secret Garden, and a 1908 printing of Uncle Tom's Cabin for Children.

Another section offers 20 Author Webcasts, including Jane Goodall, Chinua Achebe, and Tiki Barber.

Meet the Authors invites youth to write Letters about Literature, a contest that seeks to connect students' lives with the work of authors. Children write letters explaining how a work of literature was meaningful to them and these letters and responses to the writing prompts reveal much about contemporary childhood.

Other resources related to children are River of Words environmental writing and the Poetry Out Loud recitation contests. National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped includes a special list of resources for children in Braille and audio book format.

The Exquisite Corpse is a feature based on a traditional parlor game in which storytellers respond to a prompt and writers contribute to a growing story line whose ending is wide open. The story is developing as a quest adventure featuring telepathic twins searching for their parents, who are apparently in need of rescue. A cast of characters appear and disappear to build a set of clues.

The Exquisite Corpse Adventure educational resource center includes access to the episodes, reading selections, discussion questions and activities, and a feature under construction called "Talk Art!" related to the illustrations. The discussion materials are as rich as the story is complex.

Students of children in history and the culture of childhood will find plenty to analyze here. The classic books are illustrative of bygone landscapes created primarily by adults for children. They reveal time-honored tales as well as dominant and alternative historical narratives. They are readable and revealing. A class assignment, for example, could start with the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz, compare it to the 1939 Hollywood version, and then examine changing illustrations through the 20th century as the book was reprinted time and again.

The content on Art and Life in Africa is primarily the work and scholarship of Christopher D. Roy, Professor of Art History at the University of Iowa. There are rich materials on children, although finding them requires some creative searching.

The site design is not as elegantly organized or aesthetically pleasing as the rich content warrants. There are many broken links, such as the one to the Stanley Collection database. The link to a teacher's forum is also broken. Links to other sites do function.

What the site lacks in quality, however, it makes up in quantity of information. This includes photographs and videos that illustrate the landscape, arts, craft production, and everyday life of a wide variety of groups in the region and more than 60 streaming videos of craft production, dancing, singing and mask performances.

The site includes most countries of sub-Saharan Africa, which are designated on the map in black lettering. A database lists the names of 107 "peoples" (as the site designates these ethnic, clan, or tribal groups) in Africa. Each name links to a chart with information, a map of the territory, and sometimes the multiple countries they inhabit.

Materials on children appear throughout the site, but are not easy to find. The design includes an ALA search engine found only at the bottom of the index page—not on the home page. There is no easy way to navigate among sections of the site. Keyword searches such as "child," "girl," and "boy" yield only two general links, so the search engine apparently excludes a lot of site content. The keyword "doll," for example, which is found in at least a dozen articles, photo captions, and artworks, only returned the main website link.

The best strategy, then, is to browse the site looking in likely places. The beautiful and interesting pictures make this rewarding time spent. Key Moments in Life describes the stages from birth to initiation, marriage, old age and death, including both males and females, using photographs and art. Each is discussed in a paragraph with citation information.

A streaming video shows uninitiated boys in Boni and Lollio making masks out of millet stalks in imitation of the adults' elaborate masks. They play music, weave elaborate masks, and clown for the camera; in the evening they take part in the procession and dance. Watching this video is as interesting for the skill and intensity the boys bring to the process, as for the other children, both boys and girls, who mill around at the performance.

Many of the other videos and photos allow the viewer to catch glimpses of babies wrapped onto their mother's backs and of children and youth participating in daily activities or special occasions. A number of articles by Roy include information about children, the best example being the article on Mossi dolls. The article describes wooden figurines carved by blacksmiths for little girls that simultaneously fulfill the function of babies (biiga) for young caregivers as well as adult female role models.

This project is testament to a lifetime of work among people for whom the scholar Roy had great affection, and into whose lives he was able to gather deep insight. The materials here are based on a CD-ROM of the same name that is available for purchase on the site, but increasingly the CD content is available online.