ABSTRACT
From 1833 on when Wichem initiated a reform school for children, the Rauhe Haus in Horn near Hamburg, he belonged to the vanguard of those promoting ‘education for the wayward’, and could be seen as especially sensitive to this issue.3 The work in the Rauhe Haus quickly made two things clear to Wichem and his fellow workers: firstly, that the educational results achieved needed to be secured further, beyond the end of childhood, i.e., when children left elementary school at around fourteen; and, secondly, this was a general problem, not merely related to the ‘wayward’ in the narrowest sense. From the perspective of the Innere Mission, the problem of - as it was now formulated - ‘school-leaving youth’ consisted of them having to find their own way for roughly ten years, largely independently from traditional authorities such as parents, school, and state, in the period prior to founding their own family. During this time, they ran the risk of straying from the path of virtue, sidetracked by one of the many dangers awaiting them.
