ABSTRACT
By the late 1850s most Scottish cities had at least one industrial school or juvenile reformatory. The official goal of the child-saving institution was to educate and train children at risk before they fell into a delinquent lifestyle. While the bad family was identified as the chief cause of deviance, the cure was doses of education, training and discipline in the juvenile reformatory. What was thought to be fit education for girls and boys was closely marked by class and gender. According to one director, the reform school was “the Rugby and the Eton”4 of lower-working-class education. In contrast to the official version, however, former inmates, as indicated in the quotes above, remember another “education”. This chapter develops further the assertion that the power of the social rests upon its modes of intervention, in this case the disciplining of class and gender in the reform school. It considers, first, the recruitment practices, and, secondly, the formal curriculum of education and industrial training offered to girls and boys. There follows an examination of how the preceding modes of intervention were supported by a system of military discipline, and of the licensing or parole system offered to inmates who were ready to be released.
