This article describes and compares the differences between a feature-oriented understanding and a relational understanding of a child's behavior and the different ways of educating children which these two empirical and theoretical perspectives offer. The feature-oriented perspective focuses on the nature and character of impoverished children as the cause of their life situation and behaviors. However, the relational perspective focuses on how material assets affect children. In the first case, education is a question of saving the children from bad genes or a nonexistent upbringing. In the second case, it is an opportunity to change the material conditions for poverty-stricken citizens. During the industrialization period, gender and power issues were phenomena which were full of value judgments. Hence, this article also discusses what it means for a child to be born in a tradition-bound patriarchal society and have her/his future in an emergent industrial world which, yet, was still unequal. (Contains 5 footnotes.)