ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a group of people who had one experience in common: they spent part o f their childhood in reform schools (skolehjem). They shared this experience with many others in countries where industrialisation and urbanisation were considered to have created specific problems around childhood and youth which could not be solved through traditional means; parental and social control, prison or, in some countries, charitable institutions. Other means were called for, and, in the nineteenth century, reform schools were developed in several states to counter delinquency, protect society and construct new kinds of childhood.1
