Images and visual culture play a prominent role in the construction of the social and cultural image of a society in a given historical period.

In this respect, the field of history education has also begun to take an interest in visual culture as a valid source to study, thanks to the so-called visual turn, which has led to a large number of researches focusing on images as primary sources: photography, paintings, engravings, films, illustrations. These sources allow us to study what kind of image of childhood, school and education was transmitted at the time (Depaepe, Henkens 2000; Dussel, Priem 2017; Dussel 2019; Pozo Andrès, Braster 2020).

A new visual source that has not yet been considered is advertising aimed at children. Although this type of visual material did not circulate in educational contexts, it was published in children's magazines, taking up a considerable amount of space and catching children's attention. In fact, they can be seen as a mirror of a specific cultural context, providing us with information about the most popular educational objects, toys, products, and books and, more generally, about the vision that a society had of children (Sosenski 2015; Mattioni 2017).

Advertisements are a special type of text, usually consisting of both text and images. Their communication has a specific aim, which is always the same: to persuade people to buy the advertised item. To do this, advertisements specifically designed for children use a fictional story and other narrative strategies to encourage children to read/see the whole advertisement. Since advertising is a device which aims to stimulate the consumers’ desires, in most cases, these narratives were imbued with the leading social values of the moment to be attractive.

The aim of this article is to analyse advertisements that presented issues of ethnic and cultural stereotypes in order to reveal the underlying (dis)educational message.

Following the method of “longue durée” in historical research, I take into account advertisements published between 1950 and 1980 in the pages of "Il Corriere dei Piccoli", kept at Sormani Library in Milan, one of the most widespread children's magazines in Italy at that time. I analysed 1.560 issues of the magazine, for a total of 6000 advertisements. Among them, I will mainly consider advertisements for hygiene products, food and toys. The aim of the paper is to identify what kind of stereotypes these visual materials conveyed, more or less explicitly, in order to advertise specific products for children, and to show how these visual materials contributed to the “colonisation” of children's ideas about race and gender. In addition to that, the aim is to underline how the visual narrative of childhood changed in 30 years.

The modern self, as historical invention and assemblage, is often tied to social progress, carrying desires for achieving “positive” potentialities with reason and rationality. Desire is productive and continues to produce individuals in the concepts of growth, connection and self-realization toward national prospects. Knowledge has been woven into purposes of child learning and development, wherein the self is always socially constructed in different forms, at the same time, desires and potentialities are embodied in reforms. Bodies have been considered to meet national imaginaries in terms of what has historically been meant to be Americans. Tracing back to American progressive education, the self and the society has been even more closely bonded together since then. Social technologies contribute to make human kinds, in which psychology slightly altered by focusing on a spirituality of the educated subject (‘the human soul’) as attached to the ethical techniques of individual self-monitoring and control—consciousness and self-consciousness—developed through the disciplining of the child. My paper aims to understand governing technologies of society by historicizing social and emotional learning. Such historical sociology of knowledge renders a history of the present for the purpose of understanding how administration on individual beings became possible in the specific learning.