The fate of the forgotten: Chamberlain’s work reconsidered

Alexander Francis Chamberlain's work took place in parallel in anthropology and in developmental psychology under the interdisciplinary emphasis of "child study" as set up by G. Stanley Hall. The remembering of Chamberlain seems to have vanished into oblivion together with that of the rest of Hall's army of co-workers in the "child study" area. The emerging anthropology in the United States was a universalist science that was aimed at general knowledge about the cultural nature of humankind based on the empirical variability of specific collections. Anthropology was part of psychology, and psychology in itself developed within the wider context of paedology, or "child study." In the development of the child study movement as an ideology of practical suggestions for American education one can observe the intricate relationship between liberalizing religion and bureaucratizing education. Chamberlain's comparison of education of the aborigines with war against children had another extension.