Bengt Sandin is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Thematic Studies, Unit of Child Studies, at the University of Linköping, Sweden.

1. Introduction.- 2. The Swedish Educational System and its Transformation during the Seventeenth Century.- 3. Public Education and the School System in Stockholm in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century.- 4. School and Public Education in Swedish Towns in the Eighteenth Century.- 5. Public Education in Towns in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.- 6. Family and School: One Reality and Two Perspectives.- 7. Continuity and Change.

In this book the emergence of schools in urban Sweden between the seventeenth and the nineteenth century provides the framework for a history of children and of childhood. It is a study through the lens of the changes in early modern education, spatial aspect of the life of children and systems of governance in the early modern Swedish state. Educational systems defined the spatial aspects of childhood¿where children were supposed to grow up, in the home, the school, the streets and alleys, or the place of work¿over a period of about two hundred years. Schools and education represent both a mental and a physical space; an abstract place for children as well as a local and concrete place for them, which stood out against the alternative spatial aspects of the life of children. It is also a study of how different cultural systems influence the definitions of childhood and schools, in the context of church and home instruction, poor relief, policing, surveillance, and the question of whychildren went to schools. It examines the role of the school as childcare and as a provider of food, shelter and welfare, and as governance.