4. Creating a worldview of childhood

The League of Nations made history on September 26, 1924, when it adopted a resolution declaring that children enjoyed certain rights. The Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child reflected a consensus among policymakers and reformers about what childhood meant. Despite its brevity, its idealism, and its lack of specifics—or perhaps because of them—the declaration encouraged a new worldview of children and childhood. “Creating a worldview of childhood” explains how its five clauses provide useful categories for assessing the status of childhood in the twentieth century and help to organize the many threads of reform and policymaking that appeared during the last half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries.