Refiguring childhood: Encounters with biosocial power 9781526148629

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
Series editor’s foreword
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: biosocial power and normative fictions
Governing the future: childhood between the prior to and the not yet
The playground as biosocial technology
The right to play and the freedom to pay
Empowering the young citizen
Childhood as a national asset: the medical and moral framing of ‘health’
Disadvantaged childhoods and the neuroliberal fix
Casting the subject of enterprise: children as ‘architects of their futures’
Refiguring childhood
References
Index

Citation preview

Refiguring childhood

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL POWER Series editor: Mark Haugaard Power is one of the most fundamental concepts in social science. Yet, despite the undisputed centrality of power to social and political life, few have agreed on exactly what it is or how it manifests itself. Social and Political Power is a book series which provides a forum for this absolutely central, and much debated, social phenomenon. The series is theoretical, in both a social scientific and normative sense, yet also empirical in its orientation. Theoretically it is oriented towards the Anglo-American tradition, including Dahl and Lukes, as well as to the Continental perspectives, influenced either by Foucault and Bourdieu, or by Arendt and the Frankfurt School. Empirically, the series provides an intellectual forum for power research from the disciplines of sociology, political science and the other social sciences, and also for policy-oriented analysis. Already published Power, luck and freedom: Collected essays Keith Dowding Neoliberal power and public management reforms Peter Triantafillou Evaluating parental power: An exercise in pluralist political theory Allyn Fives The power of citizens and professionals in welfare encounters: The influence of bureaucracy, market and psychology Nanna Mik-Meyer The four dimensions of power: Understanding domination, empowerment and democracy Mark Haugaard

Refiguring childhood Encounters with biosocial power

Kevin Ryan

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Kevin Ryan 2020 The right of Kevin Ryan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4861 2 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

To Bernie, Leah, Toby and Buzzer

Contents

List of figures page viii Series editor’s foreword ix Acknowledgements xiii Abbreviations xv 1 Introduction: biosocial power and normative fictions 1 2 Governing the future: childhood between the prior to and the not yet 10 3 The playground as biosocial technology 28 4 The right to play and the freedom to pay 47 5 Empowering the young citizen 69 6 Childhood as a national asset: the medical and moral framing of ‘health’ 87 7 Disadvantaged childhoods and the neuroliberal fix 108 8 Casting the subject of enterprise: children as ‘architects of their futures’ 133 9 Refiguring childhood 152 References 163 Index 180

List of figures

3.1 The uncovered schoolroom (from Stow 1854: 214). Courtesy of Pearson Education Ltd. 35 3.2 The covered schoolroom (from Stow 1854: 215). Courtesy of Pearson Education Ltd. 37 3.3 Group of children playing in playground sandbox, USA, circa 1920. Universal History Archive (reproduced under licence from Getty Images). 43 4.1 Lismore playground. © Kevin Ryan. 49 4.2 Play zone in a commercial play-centre. © Kevin Ryan. 55 4.3 Viewing gallery. © Kevin Ryan. 56 4.4 Viewing gallery from inside the play zone. © Kevin Ryan.57 4.5 Double slide. © Kevin Ryan. 59 6.1 Childhood as networked governance. © Kevin Ryan. 101 7.1 ‘Forty-millionaire Carnegie in his great double role’. Saturday Globe, 9 July 1892. Archived by American Social History Project/Center for Media Learning (http://herb.ashp.cuny.edu).128

Series editor’s foreword

Bertrand Russell once argued that power is to social science what energy is to physics (Russell 1938: 10). While power is one of the most important concepts in the social sciences, it is also one of the most complex and elusive to research. Weber’s analysis of power and authority (1947, 1978) is one of the first social scientific discussions of power, and it influenced the US power debates which developed post-Second World War. In these debates Dahl’s careful analysis stands out for its clarity in providing us with a conceptual vocabulary of power (Dahl 1957, 1968). This includes an agency-based, exercise and decision-making definition of power; conceptualised in terms of powerful actors (A) making subordinates (B) do something that they would not otherwise do. This exercise of power is distinct from resources (that may or may not be exercised) and it provides power-holders with power of specific scope. However, while providing a new set of conceptual tools to analyse power relations, Dahl’s work was subject to sustained critique from Bachrach and Baratz and others, who argued that power is also exercised through structural biases that are not necessarily reducible to overt decision-making (Bachrach and Baratz 1962). Lukes followed this critique with his theorisation of the third dimension of power (Lukes 1974), which concerns the mobilisation of belief and ideology to legitimise power relations of domination. The three-dimensional model was applied in a richly textured empirical study of Appalachian mining communities (Gaventa 1982). Overall, as the threedimensional power debates develop, the focus shifts from actions of the dominating actor A to the counter-intuitive and fascinating phenomenon that subordinate actors B often appear to actively acquiesce or participate in their own domination. In a qualified critique of Lukes, Scott argued that appearances are often deceptive (Scott 1990). The relationship between public and private discourse renders the working of three-dimensional power more complex than any

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simplistic images of the oppressed willingly participating in their own domination, or internalising false-consciousness. In turn, Scott’s work has inspired an ongoing power-literature on the complexities of resistance versus acquiescence. In the 1980s, under the influence of the translation of Foucault’s work (e.g. Foucault 1979 and 1982), the Anglophone power debates shifted towards more epistemic and ontological analysis, which resonated with the shift of emphasis from the powerful to the conditions of the oppressed. This gave rise to fascinating work on the relation between power and discourse; power and truth; the way power influences the ontological formation of social subjects through discipline; and how governmentality has changed systemic power relations (including Clegg 1989; Dean 2010; Flyvbjerg 1998; Hayward 2000; Laclau 2005). However, in critique many have argued that neo-Foucauldians tend to lose sight of the significance of individual agency (Lukes 2005). Bridging the intellectual divide between those following the Dahl–Lukes trajectory and the neo-Foucauldians, another important thread to the power debates comes from Giddens (1984) and Bourdieu’s (1989) conceptualisations of structure as a verb. This way of thinking provides us with conceptual tools for making sense of how agents both structure and are structured by relations of power. In international relations, the shift from agency towards systemic, epistemic and ontological perceptions of power took the form of a gradual move from realist focus on resources to a more idealist emphasis upon soft power (Nye 1990, 2011). Similarly, in rational choice theory there emerged an emphasis upon the systemic situatedness of strategic choices (Dowding 2016). The effect of interrogating the social contexts and social ontology of agents has caused many theorists to re-evaluate the nature of power normatively, moving away from the automatic equation between power and domination to a perception of power as a condition of possibility for agency, and thus freedom (Morriss 2002 and 2009). Thus, freedom and power move from being opposing categories to being mutually constitutive. Associated with this normative re-evaluation, power theorists distinguish between power-to, power-with and power-over (Allen 1998, 1999; Pansardi 2012). To begin with, power-over was considered a normative negative, suggesting oppression, while power-to and power-with were the positives. However, some theorists argue that power-over can also have emancipatory, as well as the more obvious dominating, aspects (Haugaard 2012). Within these theoretical contexts Kevin Ryan’s book, Refiguring childhood: Encounters with biosocial power, constitutes a rich genealogical account of the micro-physics of the creation of the social ontology of the modern child as a social subject. Central is Ryan’s account of biosocial power, which he characterises as analogous to a process of choreography, where child development is orchestrated through an interweaving dance of normative



Series editor’s foreword

xi

fictions and dispositions, which fuse is and ought into a series of scripted parts along a trajectory of a present-flowing-into-future. This weaving dance is governed by a series of discursive frames that reflect wider neoliberal discourse formations. Ryan’s analysis brings us face to face with some of the complex dilemmas posed by crosscutting normative aspirations of empowerment and freedom. Using vivid examples, Ryan describes processes of biosocial power that are legitimised by social practitioners through the appeal to ‘empowerment’. The latter constitutes a normatively positively evaluative term, which renders these policies relatively immune to critique. In everyday life, social actors find it difficult to resist policies characterised as empowerment because such critique would be viewed as resistance to ‘a good thing’, and thus irrational. Ryan provides us with the conceptual tools to critique empowerment and freedom as ‘hurray’ words. Through nuanced analysis he demonstrates that the social construction of ‘empowerment’ is often a form of governmentality that facilitates certain freedoms while precluding others. While practising critique, Ryan is acutely aware that there is no such thing as freedom in itself, or freedom from power or biopolitics. This awareness makes for a nuanced analysis of the present and, furthermore, of what the alternative to contemporary biosocial power might look like. By fusing a number of conceptual tools drawn from Arendt’s account of natality, Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of ‘becoming-child’ and Vatter’s work on normatively desirable biopolitics, Ryan concludes on an upbeat note on how we might envision a biosocial power that transcends the idea of childhood as a prefigured trajectory of scripted parts. In general, the book series, Social and Political Power seeks to build upon the plural traditions of power analysis, which currently make the study of social and political power one of the most vibrant fields in the social and political sciences. In this regard this book constitutes an exciting cutting-edge contribution to the series, which develops the tradition stemming from Foucault and governmentality theory. The book series is open to any of the multiplicity of traditions of power analysis, and welcomes research that is theoretically oriented, as well as empirical research on power or practitioner-oriented applications. Mark Haugaard National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland References Allen, A. (1998). Rethinking power. Hyptia, 13, 21–40. Allen, A. (1999). The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity. Boulder: Westview Press.

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Bachrach, P., and Baratz, M. S. (1962). The two faces of power. American Political Science Review, 56(4), 947–52. Bourdieu, P. (1989). Social space and symbolic power. Sociological Theory, 1(7), 14–25. Clegg, S. (1989). Frameworks of Power. London: Sage. Dahl, R. A. (1957). The concept of power. Behavioural Science, 2(3), 201–15. Dahl, R. A. (1968). Power. In David L. Shills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 12 (pp. 405–15). New York: Macmillan. Dean, M. (2010). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Dowding, K. (2016). Power, Luck and Freedom: Collected Essays. Social and Political Power. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Flyvbjerg, B. (1998). Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. In H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (pp. 208–26). London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Gaventa, J. (1982). Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Haugaard, M. (2012). Rethinking the four dimensions of power. Journal of Political Power, 5(1), 35–54. Hayward, C. (2000). De-facing Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Lukes, S. (1974). Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan. Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A Radical View (2nd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Morriss, P. (2002). Power: A Philosophical Analysis (2nd ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Morriss, P. (2009). ‘Power and liberalism. In Stewart Clegg and Mark Haugaard (eds), The Sage Handbook of Power (pp. 54–69). London: Sage. Nye, J. S. (1990). Soft power. Foreign Policy, (80), 153–72. Nye, J. S. (2011). Power and foreign policy. Journal of Political Power, 4(1), 9–24. Pansardi, P. (2012). Power to and power over: Two distinct concepts of power? Journal of Political Power, 5(1), 73–89. Russell, B. (1938). Power: A New Social Analysis, London: George Allen & Unwin. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Weber, M. (1947). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Talcott Parsons (ed.). New York: Free Press. Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (2 vols). G. Roth and C. Wittich (eds). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Acknowledgements

Producing a monograph is by no means a solitary endeavour, and although the people I would like to thank are too numerous to name individually, I wish to acknowledge colleagues from IPSA Research Committee 36 (Political Power), as well as students of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway, who in one way or another (conferences, workshops, seminars and lectures) were the first audiences for this book as it gradually acquired its present form. I thank you all (you know who you are) for your thoughts, comments and constructive criticisms. There are also a few people who warrant special mention: Mark Haugaard, Siniša Malešević, Kathy Powell, Liam Farrell and Jonathan Hannon, partly for keeping me on my toes when it comes to working with social and political theory, but also for many years of friendship in a working environment that is becoming increasingly brutal. For the opportunity to learn from their commitment to radical politics and emancipatory struggle, I am indebted to Mark Devenney and Clare Woodford, from the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at Brighton University. Some of the chapters in this book draw from a body of work previously published as articles and chapters, and I wish to thank the publishers for permission to use this material, all of which has been substantially reworked, revised, expanded and updated here. Parts of chapters 1 and 9 draw from ‘Refiguring childhood: Hannah Arendt, natality, and prefigurative biopolitics’, Childhood 25 (3): 297–310 (2018). Sections of chapter 2 were originally published as ‘Childhood, biosocial power, and the “Anthropological Machine”: life as a governable process?’, Critical Horizons 15(3), 266–83 (2014), and ‘Governing the freedom to choose: Biosocial power and the playground as a “school of conduct”’, in Playgrounds and Battlefields: Critical Perspectives of Social Engagement, edited by F. Martínez and K. Slabina (pp. 85–108) (Talinn: Tallinn University Press, 2014). Sections of chapters 3 and 4 draw from ‘On power, habitus, and (in)civility: Foucault meets Elias meets Bauman

xiv Acknowledgements

in the playground’, Journal of Power 1(3), 251–74 (2008). An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as ‘Governing the future: Citizenship as technology, empowerment as technique’, Critical Sociology, 37(6), 763–78 (2011), and chapter 6 as ‘Governing the future: children’s health and biosocial power’, in: Reframing Health and Health Policy in Ireland: A Governmental Analysis, edited by C. Edwards and E. Fernández (pp. 25–45) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

Abbreviations

JA NCS NFTE NGO NPP UNCRC WHO

Junior Achievement Worldwide National Children’s Strategy Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship Non-governmental Organisation National Play Policy United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child World Health Organisation

1 Introduction: biosocial power and normative fictions

In 2018, Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research marked its twenty-fifth anniversary by publishing a series of textual ‘conversations’, with participants discussing the state of the field of childhood studies. It makes for an interesting exercise to inhabit the space of these conversations as a way of taking up a critical perspective on the wider arena of academic research and inquiry. As argued by Joanne Faulkner and Magdalena Zolkos (2015: xii), childhood is often ‘hidden in plain sight’ amid the partitioning of academic disciplines and associated areas of inquiry. Disciplinary enclosures also discipline the scope and substance of inquiry; a problem which is particularly acute when it comes to examining childhood through the lens of social and political power. In the disciplines of sociology and political science for example, the ways in which social and political power relate to childhood are routinely subsumed by the concept of ‘socialisation’ (see for example Elias 2000: 153–4; Lukes 2005: 96–7; for critical discussion see Jenks 2005: 31–2), only to re-emerge when the issue of incomplete or inadequate socialisation is evoked in the form of ‘deviancy’, ‘juvenile delinquency’ or, more recently, through debates on so-called ‘anti-social behaviour’ (see Faulkner 2011a: 100–9). The objective of this book is to bring the relationship between power and childhood into sharper focus, eschewing quasi-functionalist concepts such as socialisation and drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Zygmunt Bauman and Norbert Elias (among others) to stage encounters with biosocial power. I will discuss biosocial power in detail in chapter 2; suffice for now to sketch an initial outline of its coordinates.1 The first and perhaps most important thing to note is that biosocial power is not outside of/external to biopower. Instead, it demarcates a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics – ways of administering life that span the disciplining of individual bodies and the regulation of populations (Foucault 1998: 139–40).

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Secondly, and borrowing from Agamben (1998), biosocial power operates at the threshold of zoē (bare life) and bios (properly political life), and affords a way of engaging critically with the nature/culture dualism as this applies to histories of childhood (see Lee 2001; Lee and Motzkau 2011; Prout 2005; Ryan 2012). Finally, examined in context biosocial power can be compared to choreography, as a spatially patterned process which is orchestrated through the interweaving of normative fictions (discourses that span the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of childhood), and the scripting of parts, places and positions within the field of social relations. Deployed at the intersection of thought and practice, biosocial power attempts to bring envisioned futures into the present, taking hold of life in the form of childhood, thereby bridging being and becoming while also shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children. In terms of how biosocial power is configured, an important consideration concerns the discursive framing of childhood. Frames condition our affective and cognitive relation to what is framed, which of course may include ourselves to the extent that we perceive and act from within the frame (see Butler 2009: 1, 8–12; Goffman 1974). Frames can also be conceptualised as figurations of power/knowledge – they operate as filters to enclose ways of seeing, thinking and doing while foreclosing upon or subduing other frames, whether actual or possible. Perhaps most importantly in terms of grasping their political significance, frames are contingent – they can be shattered or enlarged, thereby bringing that which exceeds the frame, or that which is outside or excluded from the frame, into the politics of framing. Yet, in practice frames are often difficult to contest, particularly when they sediment in social practices as doxa, and thus acquire power over other (possible) ways of perceiving and apprehending. Otherwise put, frames carry the weight of common sense, which has a bearing on how childhood is figured in the form of normative fictions. Fictional childhoods and normative fictions Childhood has long been imbricated in normative fictions such as ‘Man’. I will have more to say about the figure of Man shortly (and in chapter 2), but first I want to reflect on a work of fiction that speaks to contemporary conceptions of childhood, and which calls attention to certain tensions and frictions in how childhood is currently framed, in particular the relation between liberty rights and welfare rights, which in turn relates to issues of agency and vulnerability. The fictional work in question is a movie called Captain Fantastic.2 Captain Fantastic begins with a portrait of an unconventional family living in a remote forest in the US State of Washington. The father, Ben Cash, treats his children (irrespective of age or gender) as equals,

Introduction 3

tolerating nothing remotely childish in any of them. From the youngest to the oldest, the members of the Cash family relate to one another as peers, with each and all expected to strive for intellectual and physical excellence, whether through academic study, martial arts, athletic endeavour or domestic chores. Daily life for the Cash family is regulated by a tightly organised schedule of work (e.g. a watering roster for the kitchen garden), with each day punctuated by ‘training’ – uphill running, rock-climbing, gymnastics and martial arts. There is also time devoted each day to book learning, and the children must demonstrate their analytical skills by being able to ‘discourse’ what they have been studying. Asked to comment on a novel she’s reading for example, one of the children says ‘it’s interesting’ and is called out by her siblings for using an ‘illegal word’. Ben explains – his tone suggesting that this is something the children have heard many times before – that ‘interesting is a non-word, you know you’re supposed to avoid it; be more specific’. Eschewing established societal traditions, the family invent their own, celebrating annual ‘Noam Chomsky Day’. The Cash family hunt with knives and bows, they play musical instruments in the evening around the camp-fire and are skilled at navigating by the stars at night. Moreover, none of this is a means to some socially scripted end – the children do not study to acquire a degree or hone their skills to earn a wage. The knowledge and skills they are striving to acquire and perfect are about the pursuit of excellence as an end in itself, in the ancient Greek sense of arête. There is a problem that haunts the family however, because the mother (Leslie Cash) is absent, and we learn that she is in a psychiatric hospital. When Ben makes a phone-call from the local village and learns that his wife has taken her own life, it precipitates a decision that resembles the philosophical tradition of the social contract. In other words, the Cash family leave their intentional state of nature in a bus fitted out as a camper-van, with the objective of retrieving Leslie’s remains so that she can be cremated in the wild in accordance with her wishes.3 It is this journey that spells the end for the decade-long experimental life the family have been living because, as it transpires, there is no returning to the state of nature. The catalyst that brings the story to its climax is a clash of wills between Ben and the children’s maternal grandparents, and there is a pivotal scene where the Grandfather accuses Ben of child abuse and threatens to have the children taken away from him. This, I think, is the crucial question: is this a story of abuse? Is it abusive to dispense with the division that separates the worlds of adults and children; to give children real tools and weapons to use as opposed to toy replicas to play with, and to burden them with the freedoms and responsibilities we

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associate with adulthood? Or perhaps the underlying issue is the family’s commitment to uniqueness, which the children are reminded of each time someone speaks their one-of-a-kind names – Bodevan, Vespyr, Kielyr, Rellion, Zaja and Kai – and which is enunciated in the form of a dogma the children have learnt to chant (as one): ‘Can unique be modified? … No!’ Has this become too unyielding, to the point of becoming a fundamentalist creed? An issue that comes into sharper focus as the story develops is that the world the Cash family have created is a cage forged from a triple constraint. First, even if it didn’t begin as such (the absent mother was a co-originator of the dream, after all), life in the woods has become a patriarchal mode of rule. Secondly, the future is prefigured by the present, and promises to be nothing other than repetition. Thirdly, highly competent though the children are within their own world, they are at a loss when it comes to relating to the wider world. Even though the adult/child distinction is all but erased within the relational space of the family, the father nevertheless exercises patriarchal power by acting upon as well as with his children, claiming to know what is best for them and schooling them in accordance with a utopian vision created by his desire for a particular form of life. The Cash children may be peers in the unique world they inhabit, but they are living a story that has been scripted for them by its architect, and as they look ahead to the future all they can see is more of the same, denying to them the untrammelled possibilities that lie beyond the borders of their world. In short, this is a story of power relations, and it is an asymmetrical relation between the one and the many. As the architect of the world they share, the patriarch has taken it upon himself to govern the biosocial process known to us as childhood. But this is not the end of the complicated rendering of adult–child relations as figured in Captain Fantastic. As a result of the misadventures that follow the family from the woods to the city, and faced with the prospect of losing his children, Ben begins to re-assess his life. His ideology becomes less certain and, in the words of William Connolly (1991: xxiii), the fundaments of his creed acquire a ‘stutter’. Certainty gives way to doubt. Most importantly – the issue of patriarchal power notwithstanding – Ben does not merely relate to his children as peers, censoring nothing, disguising nothing in order to protect their ‘innocence’; he also listens to them. What they say matters to the decisions that determine what happens next. In short, Ben is still learning, growing, changing, maturing – just as his children are. By exposing them to another form of life that serves to question social norms and conventions, his children are capable of independent thought, of questioning not only the wider world around them but also the micro-world they have created as an alternative.

Introduction 5

With Captain Fantastic we have a portrait of childhood which is poised on the tightrope of children’s rights. If we take the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) as a reading principle, using this to gauge the extent to which this fictional story resonates with lived experience, then what stands out is how the narrative structure of Captain Fantastic takes the liberty rights of children to their logical conclusion in order to summon – and problematise – children’s rights to protection, thereby tensioning the relation between agency and vulnerability (on this issue see Archard 1993: 58–61). Perhaps this also serves to remind us that we all live this tension, however old or young we happen to be. Moreover, I think this particular work of fiction, whereby a utopian vision is thwarted by human plurality, speaks to Hannah Arendt’s critique of ‘Man’, which is a very different type of fiction and is captured succinctly in The Human Condition when Arendt explains what she means by ‘action’: Action … corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world … if we had a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a ‘who’ as though it were a ‘what’. (1998: 7, 10)

At one time or another – whether in philosophical, scientific or policy discourse – what Arendt has to say about the abstract figure of Man applies also to childhood. Although this has recently begun to collapse under the weight of its own universalising pretentions, the concept of childhood still exhibits a tendency to dissolve a who into a what. From roughly the mideighteenth century onwards, mass societies in the global North – and this is the context under investigation in this book – have spawned a constellation of techniques and technologies that seek to take hold of life in the form of childhood with the aim of prefiguring human futures. To mention one pervasive and enduring example: by carving that portion of human life known as childhood into developmental milestones and stages, a fictional ‘normal’ child was fashioned through a process of measurement, comparison and aggregation (Rose 1990: 131–43). This is one of the ways that childhood has come to answer to a benignly descriptive assertion which, in everyday practical terms, is merely a matter of applying the appropriate category. Posed from the perspective of an authoritative gaze that assumes the stance of objectivity, the assertion assigns positions within the social order while also enacting an injunction to know one’s place, and in this way it anticipates – indeed insists upon – a response from the subject that affirms the judgement concealed within the assertion itself, and it goes as follows: this is a child;

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Refiguring childhood

you are a child; I am a child. This is the ontological touchstone that has long grounded a constellation of prefigurative practices aimed at governing the future by governing childhood. This brings me back to the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, which is characterised by growing attentiveness to the agency of children. In their influential Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood for example, Allison James and Alan Prout announced the arrival of a ‘new paradigm’ and re-presented children as ‘active social beings’ (1997: 25). Nick Lee has since taken this a step further. Whereas in the past, he writes, ‘there were two types of humans, the new paradigm sees only one – the human being who is a social agent’ (2001: 47). While it may once have seemed obvious, or at least unproblematic, to distinguish adult ‘human beings’ from child ‘human becomings’ (Qvortrup 1994: 4), in the age of labour flexibility, life-long learning and what I will present later in this book as neoliberal enterprise culture, adults and children apparently co-habit a situation described by Lee as ‘becoming without end’ (2001: 85). While agreeing with Lee’s focus on context, as well as his fluid rendering of the being/ becoming duality, there is more that needs to be excavated from the conceptual weave that threads the being/becoming relation through the adult/child relation.4 Nested within is another axis around which the question of childhood pivots, and this concerns the distinction noted above: between the what and the who in question. Moreover, this too has a crucial bearing on how childhood has been – and still is – used to prefigure the future. In other words, childhood persists as a declarative category articulated in situations where authority is at stake, where compliance is expected and where vulnerability or ‘risk’ is invoked, so that the obviousness of being able to say: s/he is a child is accompanied by the conventional mode of address: you are a child, and thus the expected response is always-already assumed: yes, I am a child. However, there are exceptions – situations where the mode of address framed by the whatness of childhood is displaced by an insistence on a who, and I will present one such case in the concluding chapter, which figures a scenario where an open question displaces the self-assuredness of assertion; a question that is not pre-loaded with the category of ‘child’, thereby traversing the being/becoming relation while also troubling the child/adult distinction. The question is not ‘what are you?’ but rather ‘who are you?’ This question is derived from Arendt’s critique of ‘Man’, and I will return to Arendt in the concluding chapter (chapter 9), which explores the possibility of refiguring childhood. In approaching that task, I first need to present my case, and do so by staging a series of encounters with biosocial power. As noted above, I will be drawing on social and political theory where appropriate, but only with a view to elucidating policy and practice. To this

Introduction 7

end, chapters 2–8 combine as a transversal genealogy that moves across and between multiple spaces, zones and scales, remaining attentive at all times to the how, where and when of biosocial power. Chapter 2 examines how childhood has become a means of projecting the present into the future and of making such imagined futures practical and technical. Drawing from Agamben’s analysis of the modern ‘anthropological machine’, the chapter presents childhood as a threshold spanning animal/human, nature/ culture and voice/language, tracking this through a textual analysis of Rousseau, J. S. Mill, G. Stanley Hall, James Sully and Phillip Pettit. This in turn serves as the historical backdrop used in subsequent chapters, specifically in terms of examining how biosocial power is deployed in the form of playgrounds, children’s citizenship, health initiatives, as a way of preventing or ameliorating ‘disadvantage’, and in the form of entrepreneurship education. Chapter 3 commences the task of staging encounters with biosocial power in the form of social practices. The chapter begins by reviewing Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process, as well as more recent Eliasian perspectives on a ‘de-civilising’ process, using this literature as an interpretative lens in commencing a genealogy of playgrounds. Examined as a biosocial technology, the playground is shown to originate as a pedagogical practice that (to borrow from governmentality theory) attempted to act upon the actions of children through a blend of carefully calibrated techniques, bounded space and purpose-built equipment, the strategic objective of which was to prefigure the future. The empirical focus of the chapter is early nineteenth century Britain and Progressive Era America. Chapter 4 extends the analysis of playgrounds, using contemporary public playgrounds and commercial play-centres as a vantage point on the framing of play as a right, which is codified by Article 31 of the UNCRC. Anchoring the genealogical approach in chapter 3 in a specific context (a National Play Policy (NPP) in the Republic of Ireland), this chapter takes up a critical perspective on the broader policy landscape, which in Ireland as elsewhere has been shaped by an ongoing process of neoliberalisation. It is this context that is shown to tension the relation between the right to play and the freedom to pay (to play). Chapter 5 moves beyond the genealogical question of how we have come to be who we are. The question that follows is: ‘what are we in the process of becoming?’ In opening out this question, the chapter examines how biosocial power operates in the guise of empowerment, specifically in the form of children’s citizenship. Approaching citizenship (from Rose 1999: 101) as a moral technology of discipline, the chapter focuses on how children’s citizenship has been configured in Ireland, where children have recently been incorporated into the policy process, initially as ‘active participants’ and subsequently as ‘active citizens in their own right’. The chapter

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uses the case study to investigate the idea of the ‘whole child’ and the figure of the ‘resilient’ child, and concludes by presenting children’s citizenship as a form of biosocial empowerment that, on closer inspection, proves to be a mode of subjectivation. In chapter 6 I present a genealogy of reformatory education and public hygiene, focusing on how ‘health’ has come to traverse medical and moral conceptions of childhood, and how the figure of the healthy child – once configured as a ‘national asset’ – has since become a form of ‘capital investment’. Tracking this through the datafication of childhood, the core concern is how neoliberal enterprise culture has become a Procrustean bed, with biosocial power doing the work of fashioning life by empowering and supporting children in accordance with prescribed ‘outcomes’. The chapter concludes by taking up a critical perspective on the issue of obesity, examining the battle against childhood obesity as one of the ways in which neoliberal enterprise culture is immunised. Chapter 7 examines how ‘disadvantage’ has become a pervasive way of framing inequality, tracking this from the United States during the 1960s, where the theme of cultural deprivation gave rise to a series of experiments in compensatory education, through to the present, showing how the neuroliberal figuring of disadvantage sustains neoliberal enterprise culture. To this end the chapter explores how neuroliberalism is imbricated in philanthrocapitalism and the ‘first three years’ movement, the core message being that ‘the first three years last forever’, and that as a society we either ‘pay now or pay later’. In this scenario, biosocial power aims to reduce the future costs of crime, welfare dependency and teenage pregnancy by optimising the ‘brain architecture’ of children. Chapter 8 stages an encounter with biosocial power in the form of entrepreneurship education, using the history of Junior Achievement Worldwide (JA) as a point of departure in examining how entrepreneurship education has become a ‘method’ aimed at cultivating non-cognitive entrepreneurial competencies in school-going children, from primary education onwards, and how this prefigures the future as an enterprise culture. Focusing on the relation between the normative fiction of an entrepreneurial mindset and the material conditions underpinning necessity entrepreneurship, the chapter argues that ‘disadvantage’ has become the engine of enterprise and innovation. In the context of an enterprise culture, equal inequality becomes a horizon of opportunity. Finally, chapter 9 poses the following question: might a natality-enhancing biopolitics somehow exist; a life-affirming biopolitics that doesn’t use children as raw material to prefigure contingent and contestable visions of the future? Using Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on natality, and bringing this into conversation with Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of ‘becoming-child’, as well as Miguel

Introduction 9

Vatter’s work on ‘positive’ biopolitics, this concluding chapter reflects on what it might look like to refigure childhood as a way of reconfiguring biosocial power. As the chapters build, they will layer the analysis while also converging on contemporary neoliberal enterprise culture, which is approached as a conjuncture that helps to explain, and also to trouble, the growing emphasis on the agency and rights of children. This in turn relates to the current emphasis on childhoods (emphasising plurality) in the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. To the extent that this is now informing policy and practice, it is also the case that plurality continues to give way to uniformity through discourses that generate universalising conceptions of childhood. Against the backdrop of this tension between a growing attentiveness to the plurality of childhoods on the one hand, and the ways in which normative childhoods flatten plurality into uniformity on the other, the book makes its case for refiguring childhood. Notes 1 My approach differs from that of Paul Rabinow, who used the idea of ‘biosociality’ to examine how the ‘new genetics’ dissolves the old certainties concerning the categories of nature and culture. More specifically, by ‘biosociality’ Rabinow was anticipating ‘the likely formation of new group and individual identities and practices arising out of these new truths’ (1996: 102). 2 Written and directed by Matt Ross, distributed by Bleecker Street (2016). 3 The bus itself, which seems at odds with the family’s adopted lifestyle, is something of a plot device, and might be accounted for as the vehicle originally used to transport the Cash family to their new life in the woods. 4 I have discussed this in more detail elsewhere (Ryan 2012). Even as the declaration of a new paradigm was announced, it was already undergoing a transformation informed by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, with concepts such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘multiplicity’ used to deconstruct the dichotomies from which modern Western childhood has (apparently) been forged, foremost among these being nature/culture. More recent developments have drawn from post-humanist and new-materialist perspectives, an example being Affrica Taylor’s Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood, where she works with hybrid concepts such as ‘naturecultures’ and a ‘common worlds’ approach, intending to ‘mess up the categorical divisions between nature and culture in order to queer the natures of childhood and to reconfigure them as enmeshed natureculture common worlds’ (2013: xxii).

2 Governing the future: childhood between the prior to and the not yet

When Michel Foucault introduced the related concepts of biopolitics and biopower, he wrote that ‘a society’s “threshold of modernity” has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies’ (1998: 143). More recently, in Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben examined biopolitics as a ‘zone of indistinction’ whereby zoē, which is ‘bare’ metabolic life, is imbricated with bios, meaning forms of life which are ‘proper to an individual or a group’ (Agamben 1998: 9–10). What I want to suggest by way of an introduction to this chapter is that this entwining of zoē and bios affords a line of approach to biosocial power as sketched in the introduction to this volume. Put otherwise, what Agamben refers to as the ‘politicisation of bare life’, or ‘the entry of zoē into the sphere of the polis’ (1998: 10) offers a fruitful way of examining how the figure of the child came to articulate an idiom of unruly otherness: ‘nature’, ‘animal’, ‘primitive’ – these are among the remainders which have been constituted by (and are constitutive of) the modern ‘quest for order’ (Bauman 1991). As the embodiment of order’s excess, the figure of the child is at times the sign of an innocence or original purity to be preserved or restored (see Faulkner 2011a, 2011b), and at other times the sign of a brutish or savage nature that must be tamed, cultivated and civilised (Hall 1911; Sully 1903). Either way, childhood is a means of projecting the present into the future and of making such imagined futures practical and technical. At the same time, childhood remains a type of historical accretion – a residue of the past that inhabits the present. While not the focus of Homo Sacer, elsewhere Agamben has examined childhood as an ‘unstable signifier’ (2007). Conceptualised in this way, childhood is a disruption between past and future, nature and culture, animal and human – relations that appear dichotomous but which are, as with the zoē/bios relation, configured as indeterminate thresholds. It is through attempts to govern this indeterminacy that modern Western childhood has been constituted as a particular zone of intensity within the wider field of



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biopolitics, and to grasp this intensity – the way it is assembled and configured – it is necessary to attend to the centrality of the imagination in figuring and staging biosocial strategies, that is, the ways in which childhood is deployed both as a technical project and as an imaginary projection.1 This chapter begins with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, focusing specifically on how his critical social theory and his normative political theory meet as a conception of childhood that would come into sharper focus during the nineteenth century, largely through the efforts of educationalists and hygienists (and I return to this in more detail in chapter 6). This was a social economy (Procacci 1991) characterised by experimentation and also at times by competing strategies, but its anchoring point was the figure of the child as an analogue to Rousseau’s state of nature: a way of hitting the re-set button, of returning to the beginning so that the passage from nature to society, from animal to human, from savage to civilised could be governed. Rousseau marks a beginning (which is not to posit the beginning) in the story of how childhood came to prefigure the future while at the same time representing humanity’s past. This is the thread I will follow in this chapter, passing from Rousseau through the work of John Stuart Mill to the beginnings of a science of childhood. By moving between philosophical and scientific discourses of childhood, this chapter examines biosocial power as an ‘anthropological machine’ which, as argued by Agamben, is in part an optical machine (2004: 26–7). The anthropological machine is a way of visualising ‘Man’, and it is powered by political philosophy and practitioners in the field of science who construct their object in the form of a fictional subject; a subject moreover which is pictured as though reflected in a broken mirror.2 It is as though the human can only be recognised as a reflection of the non-human, and childhood has proven to be an effective way of figuring this not-yet-human in proto-human form. The anthropological machine acquires narrative form as the subject of Rousseau’s ‘general will’ and the subject of Mill’s ‘liberty’, as well as scientifically coded conceptions of the ‘normal’. When read alongside each other, Rousseau and Mill approximate a touchstone that can be used to assay the substance of political subjectivity as configured in the context of liberal democratic state-formation. Additionally, to move from political theory/philosophy to the science of childhood is to track how biosocial power has been depoliticised even as science entered into a productive relation with the biopolitics of modern state-craft, and in this way we encounter one of the ways in which the space of politics itself has been conditioned and corralled. In the concluding section I look to the influential work of Phillip Pettit as an example of how political theory continues to instate childhood at the margins of its normative vision, as though this act of remaindering does not in itself constitute the very purity of the normative ideals so envisioned

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(see Farrell 2019). This is one (but not the only one) compelling reason to be cautious of the conceit at work when ‘childhood’ is evoked as a figure of thought, because on closer inspection it becomes apparent that the removal of children from the centre of political life is also the exclusion of those people deemed to be ‘child-like’. Biosocial power and the anthropological machine Rousseau occupies a special place in the field of childhood studies. Historians have noted that he was pivotal in linking childhood to nature, and his treatise on education, Émile, is said to have ‘captured the imagination of Europe’ with its ‘validation of nature’ (Hendrick 1997: 36; also Cunningham 2005: 63–5). By the end of the eighteenth century there were over two hundred similar treatises published in England alone, all influenced in some respect by Émile (Cunningham 2005: 64). This might be taken as confirmation, as suggested by Michael-Sebastian Honig (2009: 65), that ‘the question of the child is a modern question’ which was posed by Rousseau ‘as a question of the child’s nature’. However, this is complicated to the extent that this positing of the child’s nature was in fact a way of thinking human nature, which is further complicated in that Rousseau endows the category of ‘nature’ with mercurial properties, so that it becomes something of a shapeshifter. Honig goes on to suggest that ‘The “discovery of the child” in the eighteenth century was the discovery of the indeterminacy of the future determination of humans’ (2009: 65). This, I will suggest, is how we should approach Rousseau’s conception of childhood, and it is also the significance of the many techniques to train, educate, correct, reform and rescue children that emerged throughout the nineteenth century, and which gradually solidified as a constellation of practices that Jacques Donzelot described as a ‘tutelary complex’ (Donzelot 1979: 112). As is often the case with original thinkers, there is scope for interpretation in Rousseau’s writings. Rather than lay claim to a definitive reading, my interest is in the way he provides a concise diagram of biosocial power. As discussed here, Rousseau should be understood as a nodal point in an expansive body of ideas and practices that coalesce around what Joanne Faulkner presents as the ‘birth of the modern political subject’, with the child appearing as the ‘remnant of an animalistic past that threatens the ordered life of the polis’ (2011a: 51–2). Otherwise put, framed by the fiction of the social contract, ‘children are associated with a state of nature within the political order’ (Faulkner 2011a: 52).3 To begin with Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (published in 1755 and hereafter referred to as the Discourse), this might be characterised as a ‘diagnostics of the present’ (see Dean 1999: 6), engaging as it does with



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questions which are comparable to those posed by Foucault in his genealogical studies: how are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge, as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations, and as moral subjects of our own actions (Foucault 1984: 49)? Though not expressed in precisely the same way, the questions posed by Rousseau in the Discourse are broadly similar, and his way of staging a critical diagnostics utilised what was then a conventional analytical device: the state of nature. However, the way he assembled this device and put it to work marks a departure from convention, and it is this that places Rousseau at the threshold of biopolitical modernity. According to Rousseau, ‘the philosophers who have inquired into the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of going back to a state of nature; but none of them has got there’ ([1755] 2004: 15). What has led them astray, he argues, is an enduring tendency to project ‘social man’ into the past, thereby neglecting to distinguish what is ‘fundamental’ in human nature from the ‘changes and additions’ which have occurred during the long transition from nature to society (2004:15). Rousseau had studied the works of the naturalists and comparative anatomists, and was aware of the difficulties encountered in discerning what, if anything, distinguished Man from the apes (see Agamben 2004: 23–7).4 His solution to this problem was to dispense with conjecture and to commence his discourse on the basis of an assertion which was also a constitutive decision: Man came into the world standing upright, with opposable thumbs, and ‘measuring with his eyes the vast expanse of Heaven’ (Rousseau [1755] 2004: 17–18). Further to this, Rousseau acknowledges the impossibility of actually returning to the state of nature, and so this is to be understood not as a ‘historical truth’ but as a figure of thought. Within the textual space of Rousseau’s Discourse, Man emerges in the form of a decision which is anchored in a fiction that functions as a conceptual machine, and this is put to work so that Rousseau can both ‘explain the nature of things’ and ‘form a proper judgement of our present state’ ([1755] 2004: 11–16). Openly oscillating between fiction and fact, fact and judgement, the contingency of this decision rapidly dissolves so that it becomes a firm foundation that supports Rousseau’s critical diagnosis. Returning to the problem of distinguishing Man and animal, Rousseau notes that in the state of nature, ‘without industry’ and ‘without speech’, Man ‘remained a child’ and ‘lived the life of an animal limited … to mere sensations’ ([1755] 2004: 38–41). Furthermore, ‘every animal has ideas’ and it is merely by ‘degree that Man differs, in this respect, from the brute’ ([1755] 2004: 23). Yet, there are two faculties that only Man possesses according to Rousseau, and both are beyond dispute: ‘free will’ and an irrepressible desire for ‘self-improvement’. It is this unique combination

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Refiguring childhood

that spawned speech and language, and this is what enabled ‘savage man’ to commence the journey that would culminate as Man-in-society ([1755] 2004: 23–5). Rousseau admits that he can only speculate as to how the transition from voice (‘the simple cry of nature’) to language occurred, yet somehow it did ([1755] 2004: 28–31). Here Rousseau seems oblivious to the paradox he creates as a result of this blend of assertion and speculative reasoning, because what he is saying amounts to this: that in the state of nature ‘savage man’ was merely one animal among others, but at the same time this proto-human was already more than an animal. The Discourse might thus be mapped onto Agamben’s concept of the anthropological machine,5 in that it produces Man by ‘excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human’ (Agamben 2004: 26, 37). A century before Darwin published his Origin of Species, Rousseau wrote this quasi-evolutionary account of Man that reaches its climax as a moral tale of ‘degeneracy’ – a version of the Fall (Rousseau [1755] 2004: 22). As noted already, Rousseau has no answer to the question of why or how language became ‘necessary’, but once it did there was no turning back. With language came self-understanding, with understanding came knowledge, with knowledge came property and industry, and with the technological revolution in ‘iron and corn’ came inequalities born from vanity, envy, rivalry and contempt (Rousseau [1755] 2004: 39, 46–50). The Discourse concludes on a wholly negative note which, Rousseau insists, is the consequence of self-imposed ignorance: if we had the courage to ask ourselves how we have become what we are, he suggests, then we would be obliged to admit that ‘we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness’ (Rousseau [1755] 2004: 65). He offers no remedy to this state of affairs in the Discourse, but would go on to do so in two later works, one his essay on principles of political right (The Social Contract) and the other his treatise on education (Émile). As with the state of nature in the Discourse, The Social Contract hinges on a fiction, but it also differs to the extent that it explicates a normative ideal. In The Social Contract Rousseau prescribes a freedom that comes from willingly submitting to a sovereign power which is stretched between the rule of law and the ‘general will’, and this is a power that becomes insistent in cases of recalcitrance, so that – as Rousseau phrases it – those who ‘refuse to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body’ ([1762] 1968: 64). When Rousseau invokes this particular species of constraint, which concerns those who are to be ‘forced to be free’, he is thinking of cases where individuals are enslaved by passions and thus externalise the general will. Coercion would remind transgressors that the



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general will mirrored their own free will when released from mere self-interest; that it was in fact nothing other than the collective manifestation of the unique qualities which, as noted in the Discourse, distinguishes the ‘human machine’ from the beasts ([1755] 2004: 23–5). But there was a far more effective way of ensuring voluntary submission, and this is the significance of Émile, which completes Rousseau’s triangle in a way that redoubles on itself: first by moving from a critical diagnostics (the Discourse) to normative ideal (The Social Contract) to method (Émile), and secondly by connecting sovereign power to government and to discipline (see Foucault 1991: 102). In Émile, the sovereign power that orchestrates the transition between the two fictions – state of nature and social contract – takes the form of a Tutor, whose sole purpose is to take charge of Emile’s education from birth, preparing the boy for the freedom that awaits him upon reaching adulthood. The Tutor anticipates and controls the desires and temptations he knows will lead Émile astray, and he organises everything in such a way that Émile learns without being aware that he is in fact, and at all times, being unobtrusively governed. The hidden power to which the child is subject is to be experienced as autonomy, but this is a regulated and supervised freedom which, gradually yet relentlessly, is constitutive of Émile’s subjectivity. As he approaches adulthood – with his long education about to conclude – Émile entreats his Tutor to continue to ‘advise and control us’ ([1762] 1993: 533). ‘As long as I live I shall need you’ he declares, and at this point, which completes the passage from nature to society, the distance between external control and self-discipline is effaced, so that subjectivity folds into subjection, and the mature Émile willingly embraces – and embodies – the guiding constraint of the general will. The figure of the child in Émile (representing humanity) mirrors the relation between animal/human, voice/language, savage/civilised as examined in the Discourse, while the Tutor (a pedagogical mode of biosocial power) governs the transition from nature to society, thereby restoring what has been lost – Man’s natural vigour and independence – while also modifying nature’s bounty by engineering a vital and virtuous self-governing subject. Of course, Rousseau did not have the last word on these matters, but of significance here – because this would be generative of a whole series of practical innovations – was the enigmatic nature of Man, as a figure of thought which is assembled at the threshold of zoē and bios and takes the form of a normative fiction. It is in large part because Man appears in fictional form that this way of figuring the properly human could function as a catalyst that fuelled the anthropological machine, and would do so by keeping multiple relations and relays in play. Pinning fiction to fact, and fact to norm, it constitutes a subject that summons an Other which is also nothing other than itself: childhood. Neither entirely animal nor

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human, childhood figures humanity’s infancy and opens out the possibility of governing life itself. To borrow from Nikolas Rose (1985: 20), this way of figuring childhood marks the birth of subject that ‘a positive science of man would take as its object’, and it emerged at the threshold of nature/society, animal/human, voice/language, savage/civilised, all of which combined to make the double fiction of natural state and social contract into a technical task. Modern Western childhood was assembled from this series of thresholds and, as will be seen in more detail in chapters 3–8, this normative childhood would become a vehicle for biosocial technologies and practices spanning the physical and the moral, the medical and the pedagogical. Liberal despotism and the ‘anteriority’ of childhood Joanne Faulkner has described childhood as a ‘deceptively dense and complicated figure of thought’ (2011b: 326). As can be seen from the discussion above, this complexity arises in part through normative fictions which are spun like a web around figurations of childhood. One such fiction concerns the innocence of children, which Faulkner examines as ‘a space of experimentation for the imagining of human futures’ (2011c: 78). The association between childhood and innocence has become an established way of constituting and confronting the unruly remainders – such as libidinal desires and appetites – that are to be mastered by the subject who inhabits such imagined futures. Positioned within the frame of normative fictions as incomplete subjects, children are not yet sufficiently rational, capable or moral, and so must be protected by those who would defend the innocence of children (2011b: 326). In terms of how this division between innocence and its others is configured, Faulkner looks to Agamben’s writings to explore the ways in which childhood articulates the relation between human and animal, arguing that ‘the child, conceived as an underdeveloped, nascent human, has come to represent the anthropomorphous animality adult humanity leaves in its wake, and which must be worked upon in order to create a better humanity’ (2011c: 74). Faulkner’s argument is important and convincing, particularly when she characterises childhood as an ‘intangible reserve’, meaning a ‘store of humanity that is assiduously watched over, drawn upon and controlled by adults’ (2011c: 79). And yet the childhood that Faulkner is analysing is also more than a posited future. As we have seen from Rousseau’s Discourse, childhood is also a foundation story – a story of origins. In this section I examine John Stuart Mill’s theory of liberty as a variation on this theme – as a foundation story that situates childhood within a discourse of liberty even as it positions childhood at the threshold of domination. The concept that does the heavy lifting for Mill is ‘anteriority’. There are



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certain presuppositions packed tightly into his notion of anteriority which, as the nineteenth century wore on, would continue to fuel the anthropological machine. In his On Liberty (published in 1859), Mill posed the question of whether, and to what extent, ‘power can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual’ ([1859] 2004a: 5). His question was specific to what he called ‘civilized communities’, which is important for reasons to be discussed shortly, and in answering his question Mill states emphatically that ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others’ ([1859] 2004a: 14). In all other cases, the most that can be done is to ‘reason’ with the person: to persuade, to ‘remonstrate’ and to ‘entreat’. Resorting to force is ruled out, because ‘over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign’ ([1859] 2004a: 14). However, there are exceptions to this principle of non-interference: [T]his doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age of which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their actions as against external injury. ([1859] 2004a: 14)

Here we see how the principle of non-interference is bounded by what it excludes, and it is important to note that Mill is not referring solely to biological immaturity in this passage, but also to ‘barbarians’, meaning ‘backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage’. Once the threshold of non-interference is crossed, then ‘despotism’ is recommended as ‘a legitimate mode of government’, though on the condition that it be a benevolent despotism designed to ‘improve’ those who are subject to it (Mill ([1859] 2004a: 14–15; see also Rose 1999: 106; Valverde, 1996).6 My interest in these well-known passages from Mill is not to judge his words by measuring them against present standards and sensibilities, but to examine how Mill constructs this exception to the principle on non-interference, and the key concept, as noted already, is anteriority. According to Mill (echoing Rousseau’s claim that a desire for selfimprovement is one of the characteristics that distinguishes Man from the beasts), the principle of liberty ‘has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion’ ([1859] 2004a: 15). Here, life is split and divided, and again echoing Rousseau (though without evoking the state of nature), we encounter the distinction between voice and language: children

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and ‘barbarians’ (Mill’s word, not mine) can utter sounds and communicate, but the life they embody is not (yet) capable of comprehending or articulating the language or logos that corresponds to reason, that distinguishes the just from the unjust and which makes possible a civilised form of life – a deeply normative word that encapsulates the logic of continuous improvement and which serves as justification for a despotic power intended to improve those who Mill describes as lacking ‘the spring of spontaneous improvement’ ([1861] 2004b: 454). The concept of anteriority cleaves life into a relation of inclusion and exclusion which is stretched along a temporal axis, and yet that which is cast outside also remains at the centre of civilised life as its constitutive condition of possibility. Here we see how Mill’s liberalism powers the anthropological machine by excluding as not (yet) human what is in fact constitutive of the properly human. Joined by the notion of anteriority, the figure of the child is more or less interchangeable with that of the barbarian, together representing life in its nascent and undeveloped form. This depiction of life is neither zoē nor bios because it is necessarily a mixture of both: the child-like barbarian and the uncivilised child together denote a form of life which is more than bare life, and yet is not yet sufficiently ‘clothed’ or cultivated by language and reason, and thus is prior to the liberty bestowed upon those who have mastered their animal nature. Anteriority is a zone within a process whereby the biological and social vectors of life are tensioned. Liberty demands that this mixture be taken in hand so that the outcome can be assured, and Mill’s despotism aims to ensure that the ‘virtues of freedom’, as a blend of ‘feelings and conduct’, are habituated by the child and, as a result, later experienced as a ‘natural’ inclination or disposition (Mill [1869] 2004c: 518–19). In this way, Mill’s defence of despotism articulates a biosocial mode of power that seeks to take hold of life with a view to both constituting the liberal subject and governing the future. What this means in practice is that ‘the existing generation is master both of the training and the entire circumstances of the generation to come’ ([1859] 2004a: 91). What is striking in these words is how they figure liberty not as somehow given by nature or naturally occurring (as in Rousseau’s state of nature) but as a task or technical undertaking, the aim of which is to govern life as it extends into the future. Mill’s despotism is linear in the case of social evolution and recursive in the case of individual development. There may come a time when despotic power exercised over ‘backward states of society’ is no longer required, but the same cannot be said of childhood. A ‘civilised community’ has to renew itself continually, and it does so by educating and training its children. Within the generational order, the need for despotism ends only when the child ceases to be a child, so that the passage from childhood to adulthood mirrors the transition from ‘backward society’ to ‘civilised community’, but



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despotism ends only to begin again as the next child is born. And so it goes. The state of nature reappears each time a child is born. Faulkner is correct when she argues that the figure of the innocent child is constructed in the form of an incompleteness (the realm of the not yet), but to leave it at that is to overlook other ways in which childhood functions as a form of ‘anthropogenesis’ (Agamben 2004: 68). The not yet of childhood anticipates a future which is imagined and projected, but as a state of anteriority, childhood (and its cultural analogue: ‘nonage’) signifies the historical birth of civilised humanity, and in this sense is prior to. Anteriority– despotism–liberty are laced together as a narrative that makes implicit sense given that the relationship between the prior to and the not yet reads like a book of life. Resembling both the genealogy of families and human history, Mill’s book of life is configured in such a way that childhood is constituted at the threshold of domination. This biosocial mode of power is despotic not simply because it is an analogue to the sovereign exception (Agamben 1998) which, in this case, entails suspending the sacrosanct principle of non-interference; it is despotic too because it is anchored in a stock of social knowledge which, though historically constituted, sediments in culture and consciousness so that it becomes true knowledge, and the idea of anteriority is a very particular type of truth (on the politics of truth see Foucault 2000: 131). To be sure, it exhibits traces of the past: for example, Rousseau’s conception of childhood as being equivalent to the state of nature, thus providing the raw material from which the subject of the social contract is to be fashioned. But what Mill is referring to in the idea of anteriority takes its cue less from the past than from ideas emerging at that time, specifically in the field of natural science, and this resonates strongly with what Agamben refers to as ‘the decisive event of modernity’: the ‘politicisation of bare life as such’ (Agamben 1998: 4). In Mill’s writings, as in Rousseau, we see the relation between zoē and bios conceptualised as a passage, and yet the twin vectors of his despotism – the two modes of anteriority relating to cultural progression and biological maturation – remain more or less distinct. This would soon change. A new science of childhood, grounded in the theory of evolution, began to take shape in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and this would align the vectors of life so that they merged into a unified and governable arc that was to be brought under technical control. The raw material of morality Among those who pioneered the science of childhood were James Sully, Grote Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London, who established one of the first British psychological laboratories

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in 1897, and G. Stanley Hall, first President of the American Psychological Association, and also the original President of Clark University, Massachusetts.7 Sully was strongly influenced by Hall, but not to the point of strict emulation, for he focused on the infant child while Hall claimed that adolescence was the most important stage of life. In Hall’s eyes, the child was a ‘human sapling’ and, with more than a sprinkling of hyperbole, he argued that ‘the whole future of life’ was dependent on how the ‘feral instincts’ of the young were ‘fed and formed’ (Hall 1911: xi–xiv). In the case of Sully, we might begin with the way he dismissed theologians ‘who maintain the doctrine of natural depravity’ in children, and also poets who wrote only of the ‘charm of infancy’ (Sully 1903: 228–9). Whether the assumption was that of innate evil or innocence, all such attempts to ‘fix the moral worth of the child’ made the error of judging things by the wrong standards. The correct approach, he insisted, was to examine the child ‘in his naked primitiveness, looking out for those instinctive tendencies which according to modern science are only a little less clearly marked out in the young of our own species than in a puppy or a chick’ (Sully 1903: 229). In these ideas we see something of how the anthropological machine migrates from philosophy to science, and how questions concerning the difference and the relation between animal/human, nature/culture, savage/ civilised continue to bear down on childhood, though it must be added that this biosocial machinery was now fuelled by an urgency born of a context where the spectre of ‘degeneration’ loomed large. This had gone through several incarnations since the middle of the nineteenth century, and when Hall and Sully were making their mark it shaped a variety of debates on the relative strength and weakness of nation-states (see Pick 1989). Nested within the degeneration issue were theories of heritability concerning moral disposition, such as the idea that ‘degenerate’ families passed on ‘defective germ-plasm’, which became a way of explaining a whole variety of social problems, foremost among these being crime and the cost of public assistance to the poor (Rafter 1988). By the start of the twentieth century the theory of evolution had spawned a universe of ideas and activities that coalesced around the insight that evolution was by no means a unidirectional process, and that reversal and regression remained a possibility due to instincts, urges and appetites which were a residue of the past but also recapitulated in the present. The theory of recapitulation originates in Ernst Haeckel’s ‘biogenetic law’ (the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny), and it was this that provided the theoretical armature around which the new science of childhood was assembled (Cunningham 1991: 129). Agamben notes that Haeckel’s work on evolution received a boost in 1891 when Eugen Debois, a Dutch military doctor, discovered skeletal fragments on the island of Java. Haeckel announced that these ancient



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remains – a femur and part of a skull – were proof of ‘the much-sought “missing link”, supposed to be wanting in the evolutionary chain of the primates’ (cited in Agamben 2004: 34). For Agamben, the significance of this episode lies in the way Haeckel’s ‘missing link’ functions as a sort of black box: absent the Javanese remains, the idea itself is sufficient to explain that which is presupposed, which in this instance concerns the passage from animal to human. For Hall and Sully, childhood functioned in much the same way. According to Sully, the ‘mental life’ of the child was a ‘brief résumé of the more important features in the slow upward progress of the species’. Childhood thus provided a window through which the trained eye could study the ‘mental history of the race’ (Sully 1903: 7). This knowledge was of more than academic interest, for just as savagery was being tamed by civilisation, so the ‘wild untamed nature’ of the child could be ‘subdued’ by education, which would ‘fashion’ it into ‘something higher and better’ (Sully 1903: 8, 235). The ‘momentous problem of rearing children’ was to be solved by ascertaining the ‘raw material of morality’, which would be sifted from the evidence accumulated by studying manifestations of rage, the impulse of obedience, the propensity to lie or, in more general terms, the relationship between a ‘primitive egoism’ and the ‘moral qualities distinctive of civilized man’ (Sully 1903: 228–66). For his part, Hall stressed the need to ‘further coordinate childhood and youth with the development of the race’, and he was convinced that the scientific study of children would yield ‘true norms’ that would serve as ‘criteria by which to both diagnose and measure arrest and retardation in the individual and the race’ (Hall 1911: viii). These words, which echoed back and forth across the Atlantic in the form of university lectures, scholarly publications, research reports and conference papers, and which were made practical in schools and playgrounds (as will be seen in chapter 3), transformed the normative force of Rousseau’s Tutor and Mill’s despotism into a normatively neutral body of knowledge that gradually acquired the authority to adjudicate on cases of ‘abnormal’ behaviour and development (see Rose 1990). Hall’s ‘true norms’ were nothing more than aggregates derived from the accumulation of data on individual children, and it is worth noting that Adolphe Quetelet, one of the pioneers of statistical inquiry, described the figure of ‘average man’ – produced from the aggregation of numbers – as a ‘fiction’ (Quetelet 1842). But this was proving to be an extremely powerful fiction, and those who built on the foundations laid by Hall and Sully – people like Arnold Gesell, who conducted his research at the Yale Psycho-Clinic from 1911 – would develop techniques that transformed such aggregations into objective standards against which individual children were measured and assessed. In cases where a particular child was deemed to be troublesome

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or disturbed, what took place was not simply an exercise in classification but also a judgement that formed the basis of normalising interventions (Rose 1990: 130–1, 141–50). This, then, is how biosocial power was configured as a normative science of childhood, or, as Foucault put it, the psy-sciences were established as ‘a general authority for the analysis of conduct through a kind of angled trajectory that increasingly focused on the little confused corner of life that is childhood’ (Foucault 2003: 307). In his Governing the Soul, Nikolas Rose makes the point that what distinguishes this mode of expertise – what marks it out from earlier philosophical inquiries into childhood as a way of thinking the inborn versus acquired attributes of humanity – is that it brought ‘a new scientific gaze’ to bear upon childhood (1990: 141). This idea of a gaze, which appears frequently in Foucault’s work as a way of denoting the interlacing of power/knowledge/ technique, seems particularly apt in the way that Sully and Hall both ground the certainty of knowledge in their ability to see through and beyond the figure of the child. Sully explains that ‘the evolutionist sees’ how ‘the infants of civilized races’, as with ‘the lowest races of mankind’, stand ‘in close proximity to the animal world’ (Sully 1903: 5, emphasis added). Hall noted that ‘our slums are putrifying sores whose denizens anthropologists believe lower in the moral and intellectual scale than any known race of savages’, and he insisted that ‘an evolutionist must hold that the best and not the worst will survive and prevail … I see clearly the beginnings of better things’ (Hall 1911: xviii, emphasis added). The specular gaze of the child psychologist recalibrates the transition from state of nature to general will – suspending childhood within the space of an ambiguous temporality which is at once ‘not yet’ and ‘prior to’. In other words, childhood is once again constructed as a book of life: a story of origins, a diagnosis of present problems and a vision of the future. Of course Sully and Hall did not exercise a monopoly over how this normative fiction was assembled and narrated, and it would be foolish to suggest any type of consensus, but disagreement can also provide traction in transforming conjecture into truth. It was assumed/ asserted that because they had not yet acquired habits of discipline and control, children felt the presence of the animal and the savage most acutely, and this provided an opportunity for creative experimentation – to work out how the biological, psychological and social vectors of life could be aligned, coordinated and mastered. Agamben suggests that biopolitical modernity was forged through a symbiosis of medicine and politics, which constitutes an ‘ambiguous terrain in which the physician and the sovereign seem to exchange roles’ (Agamben 1998: 143, 159). Without suggesting Agamben is wrong, it could be added that one of the sites that makes this ambiguous terrain possible is the school and the many pedagogical techniques and technologies that move in and



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out of the school in forging the alliance not only between politics and medicine, but extending also to social work, philanthropy and the many other modes of intervention that have combined in making childhood ‘the most intensely governed sector of personal existence’ (Rose 1990: 121). If we were to pose the question of how developmental psychology succeeded in establishing itself as a distinct branch of the human sciences, then one important answer would be mass compulsory education, which made large numbers of children available for inspection, and which also sorted children into age-specific cohorts whereby tests could be standardised and statistically reliable test results could be accumulated and systemised (Hendrick 1997: 34–62; Rose 1990: 142). It is thus worth noting that, when it was created in 1907, the thousand-strong membership of the British Child Study Association comprised not only psychologists but also teachers (Cunningham 1991: 198). When Sully identified education as the means of subduing the wild, untamed nature of the child, he was not speaking figuratively. This, then, is the scientific-pedagogic analogue to Mill’s despot: it connects the prior to and the not yet of childhood; it ties them together as a narrative that spans the relation between zoē and bios so that the twin vectors of Mill’s despotism converge and merge: childhood was now the intersection of ontogeny and phylogeny, and Mill’s despot was overwritten by an impartial (depoliticised) scientific truth which would henceforth fuel the anthropological machine. The subject of non-domination? Biosocial power was assembled around the objective of taking hold of life by harnessing the process of human maturation/evolution so that it could be governed. What was imagined was an achieved state of mastery – a future that entirely subdues the residues of humanity’s animal or brutish past. And yet this quest constructed its own paradox because childhood would remain – in Sully’s words – ‘representative of wild untamed nature’ (1903: 235). ‘Wild untamed nature’ is a figure of thought that frames the human and the non-human alike. As a representation of this zone of indistinction (to use Agamben’s phrase), childhood has been constituted at the threshold of zoē and bios – a biosocial nexus that positions children in such a way that they are prior to and not yet fully within the realm of bios. An example: when children speak they are not always qualified to be heard, which marks the distinction between ‘voice’ (the animal cry of pain and pleasure) and ‘language’ (logos). The example is not hypothetical. Article 12.2 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that ‘the child shall … be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the

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child’ (UNCRC 1989). Article 12 is closely related to Article 13, concerning freedom of expression, which is widely considered to be a cornerstone of democracy and citizenship (see for example Detrick 1999: 232). The right to speak and be heard is an important indication of how childhood is being rethought, and Herdís Thorgeirsdóttir makes the point that children have ‘been given the power of speech so that they are no longer a mere voice indicating pleasure and pain but equipped with the means to have a more perfected impact on their lives and destinies than if simply regarded as a lower sort’ (2006: 51–3). However, let us not overlook the fact that Article 12 includes important caveats, relating in particular to age and maturity, which might serve to deny speaker’s rights to children, or it may be that the views of certain children (for example the very young, children with learning disabilities) must be routed through a mediator or representative before they are heard. Furthermore, not everyone seems prepared to acknowledge that children are qualified to speak from within the realm of ‘language’ proper, or logos, and I will conclude this chapter with an example from the field of contemporary political theory: the work of Phillip Pettit (chapter 7 will examine the contemporary science of childhood). Pettit claims to have broken new ground with his republican theory of freedom (1997), which he distinguishes both from the ‘negative’ liberty championed by liberals such as Mill (freedom from interference) and the ‘positive’ freedom (freedom as self-mastery) that makes it possible, qua Rousseau, to force those who deviate from the general will to be free. In short, Pettit’s theory of freedom is based not on the absence of interference but on the principle of ‘non-domination’, and the key to understanding what he means by this is whether or not the constraints to which we are subject are ‘arbitrary’. On the side of freedom is non-arbitrary interference, which is interference that tracks the interests of the person or group subject to it. Opposite this is arbitrary interference, which is to be subject to the will and caprice of another, so that even if a person who can exercise power over others at a whim chooses not to, those people at the mercy of power are nevertheless in a situation of subservience. It is within the space of this oppositional relation between freedom and domination that Pettit assigns children a ‘special position’: I think it is important to recognize that children, and perhaps some other categories of people, are in a special position relative to the state and society. Children cannot be given the same opportunities as adults if they are to be enabled, when they become adults, to enjoy the sort of non-domination which a republic would confer: they must be subject to the disciplines inherent, as any parent knows, in fostering education and development. (Pettit 1997: 119)



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Much of the first part of this quote can be taken as a statement of fact: children are in a special position relative to state and society, and have long been subject to controls and interventions intended to nurture, protect, train and mould them. But there is also a clear normativity at work here, which is already in evidence in the first sentence. Not only does this unsettle the claim that freedom and domination are ‘antonyms’ (Pettit 1997: 110), but Pettit’s mention of ‘other categories of people’ might well be a recipe for a paternalism that reaches well beyond childhood. Pettit defends his view on the special position of children by insisting that it does not constitute a form of domination because all such interference must ‘be designed to track the children’s interests according to standard ideas’ (Pettit 1997: 119–20). To take a step back from the reasoning at work here, and to view the argument through the lens of history, or more specifically the histories of the anthropological machine and biosocial power, is to glimpse a type of Mobius strip. The end is the beginning, and to follow the thread of the argument is to arrive back at the point of departure. This looping configuration presupposes the shaping of life in accordance with ‘standard ideas’. But what are ‘standard ideas’ other than historically constituted and contingent ideas that have sedimented as doxa? Whatever differences might exist between liberal and republican conceptions of freedom, these seem to dissolve when it comes to the positioning of children. Similar to Mill, Pettit assumes childhood to be a state of anteriority, and on this basis he advocates subjection to the disciplines. There is also a strong trace of Rousseau’s general will at work in the way Pettit pitches his argument, suggesting a type of Procrustean power which is justified without the need for rigorous justification.8 It is simply a given that life must be bent into a particular shape, albeit in accordance with the perceived interests of those who are to be acted upon in this way, which is not all that different from assuming that it is both necessary and inevitable that some ‘categories of people’ must be forced to be free. As for the contentious issue of ‘standard ideas’, I think Jacques Rancière’s more radical approach to politics can offer a critical perspective on this. A distinctive feature of Rancière’s approach is that he does not project the principle of equality into the future as a goal to be achieved through politics. Instead he begins from equality as axiomatic (see Farrell 2019). Further to this point, the way that Pettit positions children and ‘other categories of person’ is typical of a mode of thought that Rancière calls ‘police’ (2010). This is not to be confused with the everyday meaning of policing, as in police force or police service. A police order is founded on a distribution of places and parts that incorporates – even as it excludes – some

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who are not counted among ‘the people’ and/or not qualified to speak or be heard. These are persons who cannot part-take or participate in political life because they are ‘the part of those without part’ (2010: 35–6). Moreover, this relation of inclusion and exclusion is sustained by what Rancière calls a ‘distribution of the sensible’ – meaning that what we can sense within a police order is conditioned by power/knowledge. In other words, what we can see, what we can think and say and do, is conditioned and constrained by the ‘standard ideas’ that Pettit uses to assign children a ‘special position relative to the state and society’. This way of partitioning those who claim to know from those who are not (yet) equipped to know, takes inequality as its starting point. Against this, Rancière starts from ‘an equality of intelligence’, which is not to suggest ‘the equality of all manifestations of intelligence’ but rather ‘the equality of intelligence in all its manifestations’ (2007: 275). The axiom of equality is a way of putting equality to the test – it is to begin from the supposition that there is an equality of intelligence, thereby opening out the possibility of seeing what can be accomplished under that supposition (Tanke 2011: 36). The alternative is all too familiar, and merely restated by the way that Pettit commences from a partitioning of intelligence that assigns children to a ‘special position’, thereby suspending the cardinal principle of ‘non-domination’ pending the outcome of subjection to ‘the disciplines’. To follow Rancière’s argument is to conclude that Pettit’s republican theory of freedom is in fact a blueprint for a police order (Farrell 2019), and he builds his theory by doing what Rousseau, Mill and the Child Study practitioners did before him: he fabricates a fictional, idealised, standardised subject as the subject qualified to part-take in freedom as non-domination. Here it is worth recalling the words of Arendt as noted in chapter 1, that is, by way of a reminder that biosocial power is staged in precisely this way, by constructing abstractions which are also normative fictions, and which dispense with plurality in favour of a singular entity which is recognisable only as a what. The target of Arendt’s criticism was that old familiar abstraction known as ‘Man’, and as I have tried to show in this chapter, childhood is figured in relation to Man (or the properly human) at the juncture of the prior to and the not yet, while at the same time serving as a screen upon which normative visions of the future are projected. As Faulkner says in her critical encounter with the social contract theorists, and I would add that this is applicable to Pettit too, even though he is not part of that philosophical tradition, childhood is configured as ‘a place of containment for whatever is withheld from political subjectivity’ (2011a: 64). In this way, as noted earlier, biosocial power corrals the space of politics, and this extends into the realm of practice, which is what I want to focus on next, beginning with playgrounds.



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Notes 1 The notion of ‘the West’ or ‘Western’ should not be taken at face value. As argued by Devenney (2020: 48), ‘The narrative linking the West back to Athens and Rome is of recent invention. It does violence to historical fact and ignores a polyglot history that puts paid to any notion of a unified West.’ While agreeing with Devenney on this point, I also think it is important to consider how this narrative has been assembled in such a way that the idea of ‘the West’ comes to denote/represent the apotheosis of all that is deemed properly ‘human’. Childhood is one important part of that how (his)story. 2 For a fascinating account of the broken mirror in philosophy, see Foucault’s analysis of the ancient Cynics (2011: 231–47). 3 Falkner also examines the work of John Locke. When Locke posited the child as a blank slate or tabula rasa, he was in fact thinking about humanity, or as Faulkner puts it, ‘Locke’s child is … an apt synecdoche for humanity, a part representing the whole in its essence as pure and untainted by inscrutable, unworldly truths’ (2011a: 69). 4 Rousseau’s usage of the word ‘man’ is at times gendered, while at other times it signifies humanity. Here I use it only in the latter sense, and capitalise it to underscore this usage. 5 In borrowing this concept from Agamben, I am departing from his trans-historical rendering of biopolitics and the anthropological machine. Here I take Rousseau’s Discourse as coinciding with the emergence of biopolitical modernity, or as Foucault puts it (1998: 141–2), ‘the entry of life into history … the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques’. 6 For a compelling (and moving) analysis of how this notion of improvement relates to ‘racial capitalism’ and to histories of logistics and capitalist extraction, see Cuppini and Frapporti (2018). 7 For more on Sully see Cunningham (1991: 198); on Hall see Ross (1972). 8 I discuss Procrustean power in more detail in chapter 6.

3 The playground as biosocial technology

In discussing the Child Study movement in the previous chapter, I began to enlarge the scope of the anthropological machine by connecting it to the field of education. To take this step is to move towards the realm of social practices, which is what I will be doing from this point onwards, thereby staging encounters with biosocial power by conducting what I presented in the introduction as a transversal genealogy. This chapter lays the groundwork for chapter 4 in that both focus on play and playgrounds, and in opening out this material I also want to pick up some of the threads explored in the book thus far, specifically in terms of how childhood is figured in the social sciences. In chapter 2 we saw how the normative register of ‘civilised’ (‘civilised man’, ‘civilised communities’, ‘civilised races’) has articulated the relation between zoē and bios, and how this set the scene for biosocial power to take hold of life in the form of childhood with a view to governing the future. The first part of this chapter follows this particular thread, relocating it in the work of the founding father of figurational sociology (also known as process sociology), Norbert Elias, who in 1939 published a book titled The Civilising Process. The axioms of this text remain the currency of figurational sociology, which has some interesting things to say about childhood. Moreover, as I hope to show in this chapter and chapter 4, the central tenets of Eliasian sociology are resonant with the histories of the playground, right up to the present in fact. Of equal importance here is the idea of a de-civilising process which, I am going to suggest, is in step with contemporary trends whereby children and youth who do not conform to the scripting of normative childhoods are perceived as a threat to social order and, of greater consequence, are judged and sanctioned in accordance with instruments such as the infamous Anti-Social Behaviour Order, or ASBO, in Britain (more on this in chapters 4 and 5).



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Before engaging with Elias, I want to briefly address the question of ‘why playgrounds?’, that is, why examine histories of the playground, and what can these tell us about contemporary childhood(s)? During the early decades of the nineteenth century in Britain (part two of this chapter), the playground was but one element of an emerging pedagogical apparatus. Without isolating it from this larger arena, in what follows I will be examining the playground as a biosocial technology – a method and an instrument, but also an experiment that gathers ideas concerning childhood and puts these to the test of practice. When I say ‘ideas’, I am referring to the sorts of ideas discussed in chapter 2, acknowledging that what I have surveyed are merely a few selected examples. I will be adding to these examples in due course, but already can be seen something of how childhood – as a figure of thought – travels and circulates in such a way that its ideational substance is untethered from the authority of authorship, such that ideas from a variety of sources might be combined even as the originals are modified and tailored to fit the glove of specific circumstances, strategic objectives and visions of the future. In other words, I am not suggesting a causal relation of the ‘dependent and independent variables’ variety. Instead what I am suggesting is that childhood is at once a figure of thought, a technical undertaking and a socially scripted practice, and the playground provides one way of reconstructing this as a generative process of formation and transformation. The playgrounds assembled by early nineteenth century educationalists in Britain were anchored in a particular configuration of power/knowledge, which was superseded by new configurations that moved the playground beyond the school setting and into public space. In Progressive Era America (part three of this chapter), the playground, which was framed as an ‘ethical laboratory’ and a school for democracy, figured childhood as a civil engineering project, or, to be more precise, the playground was tasked with engineering civility. In terms of overall structure (spanning two chapters), the analysis of playgrounds approaches the present via the past, with chapter 4 focusing on the right to play and the freedom to pay to play in commercial play-centres. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of ‘liquid modernity’, chapter 4 takes up a critical perspective on the kinds of unrestrained behaviours that the Eliasians interpret as symptoms of a de-civilising process. Childhood as a zero-point in de/civilising processes In The Civilising Process, Elias examined the long-term processes that apparently combined to reduce the incidence of aggression and violence in everyday life. In visual terms, the theory can be depicted as a snowball rolling down

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a long, shallow incline. Nobody really knows how the civilising process was set in motion, and yet it exhibits a definite direction, gaining momentum, mass and density as it moves through time so that it becomes an almost unstoppable developmental force. I say ‘almost’ because (as a process) the snowball is in a state of motion, and thus may collide with obstacles that alter its course or shatter its structural integrity. More recent Eliasian scholarship suggests that this may have happened; that the civilising process has gone into ‘reverse’, in which case it is possible to speak of a ‘de-civilising’ process (Fletcher 1995; Mennell 1990, 1995; Wacquant 2004). The core idea here is that new patterns of behaviour are being habituated, with the self-restraint and mutual forbearance characteristic of civilising processes giving way to more impulsive, aggressive and violent behaviours. Stephen Mennell presents the contrast between civilising and de-civilising processes in tabular form as a set of opposites; for example ‘increased mutual identification’ (civilising process) is set against ‘decreased mutual identification’ (de-civilising process), ‘decreased violence’ is set against ‘increased violence’, and so on (1990: 206). This would suggest that the notion of a reversal is to be understood as a process of un-doing rather than transformation (see Pratt 2004), and with a view to examining how this is explained by figurational sociology, it is necessary to back up slightly so as to bring the Eliasian rendering of childhood into the frame. When Elias used the word ‘civilising’ he was careful to point out that he was not using it in the everyday evaluative sense. Yet the ‘pacified’ habitus he believed was the solution to violence is like a persistent itch in his writings to the extent that it unsettles his claim that The Civilising Process is a normatively neutral theory – the product of ‘reality-adequate’ thought and ‘detached’ analysis (see Elias 1987, 2008: 138). To substantiate this claim requires piecing together several elements of Elias’s theory, and I’ll begin with his reference to a ‘civilising curve’ which, as he explains, has a bearing on ‘the question of childhood’ – by which he means ‘the adaptation and moulding of growing children to the standards of adults’ (2000: 153–4). According to Elias, absent such moulding and adapting, human beings are ‘brutish animals’ (2000: 447), and this is apparently a matter of degree. With respect to the medieval world for example, Elias explains that the ‘degree of restraint and control over drives expected by adults of each other was not much greater than that imposed on children. The distance between adults and children, measured by that of today, was slight’ (2000: 120). Further to this, he explains that ‘the psychological problems of the growing person cannot be understood if individuals are regarded as developing uniformly in all historical epochs’ (2000: 153). Nearly seventy years after Elias wrote these words, Stephen Mennell published The American



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Civilising Process, where he picked up the thread of Elias’s thoughts on childhood: Eating, drinking, urinating, defecating, spitting, blowing one’s nose, sleeping, having sex are things that human beings cannot biologically avoid doing … Since the lifetime point of departure is always the same … there is a zero-point [to the civilising process] in the individual lifetime: human infants are born without such habitual constraints and have to learn whatever are the standards prevailing in their time, place, social stratum, national or ethnic group. (2007: 6–7; see also 1990: 209)

This would suggest that context is crucial to civilising processes, which in turn brings contingency to the fore, and yet it is still apparently possible to trace a ‘civilising curve’ that begins (and begins again, and again …) from the zero-point of childhood. Elias spoke of psychogenesis and sociogenesis as the lynchpins of his method, yet The Civilising Process is really all about ontogenesis recapitulating the socio-cultural equivalent of phylogenesis. In other words Haeckel’s biogenetic law looms large.1 As with Rousseau’s normative fiction, Eliasian sociology frames childhood as a living substrate which is subject to a social process of habitus-formation. Perhaps this is merely a way of restating the banal sociological truism that children are ‘socialised’, or maybe there is more at stake here – akin to Mill’s notion of ‘nonage’. In other words, the zero-point that Mennell refers to is not merely the ‘unsocialised’ child, but also humanity in its pre-civilised state, and this complex biosocial relation is further complicated by the notion of a historical reversal – the spectre of a de-civilising process – suggesting a return of the repressed. If in the past the gap between children and adults was narrower than it became at the height of the civilising process, then this is also what the future looks like as the civilising process shifts into reverse. To reprise the discussion thus far: core tenets of Elias’s theory hinge on comparison between the behaviour of children and adults, with the figure of the child also serving as a representation of pre-civilised humanity, or humanity in its infancy. If in the past the gap between adults and children was narrow, then across the centuries it widened significantly, which lends itself to an equation: size of the gap = (de-)civilising process. The adult/child relation is thus a scale that provides a normative standard against which individuals, groups and social trends can be measured. In other words, the civilising process begins with zoē or bare life – the zeropoint of childhood, which also figures a time (akin to the fictional state of nature perhaps?) when the distance between adults and children was slight – and it points towards a normative horizon, a scenario where the civilising process has enveloped the globe and violence is more memory than actuality.

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At the most general level, Elias’s theory might be seen to operate within the orbit of a concept which, as with ‘socialisation’, is a staple of sociology: ‘modernity’. This is a contentious concept, exhibiting as it does a Eurocentric bias, and the discipline of sociology has long obsessed about modernity in terms of its temporal scope, duration, characteristics and, of course, its omissions. Conceptualised as a puzzle, sociology can be said to have pieced the puzzle of modernity together in a variety of ways. The end result – the picture we are presented with – may be theoretically sophisticated, it might be empirically comprehensive, it may be stripped down to bare essentials, or it may be deconstructed and scattered to the wind; either way, the pieces present in one account may look very different in another, or indeed be absent altogether. In the case of Elias, what is offered is a Western-centric story of historical progress which is apparently now under threat. Insofar as this is also a story of childhood, the story is plausible only if we view it through blinkered eyes, ignoring questions of cultural assimilation, class inequality, racialisation and gender politics, not to mention the whole spectrum of issues spun around the notion of the ‘normal’ child. To borrow from Hanna Arendt once more, as discussed in the introduction, the habitus associated with the civilising process flattens human plurality into a homogeneous subject which is comparable to the fiction of Man, and as the negative image of progress, the theme of a de-civilising process approaching from the future injects a normative valance into this abstraction. But if the abstraction is little more than fiction, why or how does it matter? As I hope to show later in this and subsequent chapters, it matters because the childhoods conjured by philosophy and science (including social science) sometimes cross over to the realm of practice, and this can have consequences for those who are placed on the negative side of a divide such as the civilising/ de-civilising distinction. To cut to the chase, there is by no means a world of difference between the assumptions at work in Elias’s theory and recent trends in the policy arena, specifically with respect to reforms in the fields of welfare and punishment. Biosocial power is a living relation, and this makes the power/knowledge interface dangerous, particularly when aimed at childhood, and especially when childhood is framed as raw material to be fashioned by the engineers, technicians and architects of the future. It is as though parents, teachers, policy-makers and adults more generally must make a stark choice between two options. Option 1: we somehow get back to the civilising game of selfrestraint (which means impressing the corresponding habitus upon the minds and bodies of children), or option 2: we embrace a situation where emotional abandon thrives and violence begets violence. But this is a type of blackmail built on the axioms of contingent and contestable truth claims,



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and, as Foucault once noted (1984: 42–3), this type of binary reasoning also acts as a brake on critical inquiry. As a way of removing this brake, I am going to proceed by suspending judgement on whether or not the civilising process has gone into reverse, instead following Foucault by conducting a historical ontology of ourselves: an inquiry into how we have come to be who we are (1984, also 1982: 216). The scope of such inquiry can be extended by asking: what are we in the process of becoming? Without claiming to have a definitive answer to this question, I want to use it as a navigational tool in commencing a transversal genealogy of biosocial power. Regulating the practice of freedom: the playground and the infant training system2 This section will focus on how the playground was conceived and assembled in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. I also want to keep the Eliasian theme of a civilised habitus to the fore, and with this in mind begin with a quote from James Kay (later known as Kay-Shuttleworth), who had a significant part to play in establishing a public system of elementary schools in Britain (Stewart and McCann 1967: 179–97): during the period when the children are taking recreation they are not abandoned to the mischievous influences of the street or lane in which their parents reside, but they take their recreation under the superintendence of the teachers, who endeavour, by careful attention to what occurs, without applying any restraint, to exclude the influence of vicious propensities; and, by degrees, to establish in the playground mutual good offices among the children. (Kay 1838: 19)

The quote is from Kay’s testimony before a Select Committee on Educating the Poorer Classes in England and Wales, and in it can be seen the key elements of the early nineteenth century playground: supervision and moral training, while at the same time envisioning something more, something both Elias and Foucault would recognise, though of course it carries a different significance in the context of their respective approaches to inquiry: a biosocial technology whereby external control is habituated, leading to self-control on the part of the child. This was a period of pervasive experimentation in the field of education. Among the better known schools at that time were those of Johann Pestalozzi, Emanuel von Fellenberg and Friedrich Froebel on the continent; in Britain were the monitorial schools of Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster, Robert

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Owen’s experiment in ‘character formation’ in New Lanark, and the infant schools of Samuel Wilderspin and David Stow. Notwithstanding variation in pedagogical techniques, a common objective emerges within this field of experimentation. For Pestalozzi it was to cultivate a ‘second nature’ in the child ([1801] 1977: 180–1); for Owen it was to ‘impress’ upon children habits, manners and sentiments so that these would seem ‘natural’ (1817: 82–3); in the case of Wilderspin, morality was conceived as an ‘art’ acquired through practice so that it ‘becomes a part of our very selves’ ([1852] 2004: 97); for Stow childhood was to be ‘moulded’ by the ‘moral machine’ of education (Stow 1854: 87); and perhaps the most intriguing of all is Froebel, for whom education entails ‘a conscious being acting upon another being which is growing into consciousness’ ([1826] 2005: 129). Froebel is referring to the school master here – a person who has mastered the art of educating, and is committed to the cultivation of childhood as though it were a garden of virtue ([1826] 2005: 64), which encapsulates the strategic aim that quilts this field of experimentation together. With clear echoes of Rousseau’s Tutor in Émile, all envision power being exercised over children in such a way that constraints would be experienced as freedom. This is important and I will return to it in the next chapter, because although the intentionality at work in the above examples has since faded into the background, the unobtrusive mode of power they evoke is very much a feature of contemporary discourses concerning the developmental and educational benefits of play. While all of the practitioners mentioned above considered play to be essential to the education of children, it was the British reformers, in particular Wilderspin and Stow, who developed a distinctly spatial model of training comprising distinct yet interrelated zones, and it was this that spawned the playground. Wilderspin had taken a practical interest in infant education (for children under seven years of age) from as early as 1820, commencing his career at Spitalfields Infant School in London, and he was also briefly involved with the Infant School Society (established in 1824), before breaking his connections with the Society and continuing his work on a freelance basis (McCann 1966). Stow was also a pioneer of infant schools – in Scotland – establishing his first such school in Glasgow in 1827 and inviting Wilderspin to lecture there having been impressed by what Wilderspin had accomplished in Spitalfields. The back-story to these initiatives connects Wilderspin and Stow’s efforts to the quote from Kay above, and it concerns a view widely shared by the propertied and so-called respectable classes – that crime was increasing at an alarming rate, and that the solution was to be found in the form of education. In short, more infant schools would mean fewer prisons (McCann 1966: 189). I will have reason to return to the topic of preventive education in chapter 6, and to examine the relationship between education and crime



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in more detail, but here it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the playground originates as a deterrent – a way of diverting children deemed to be on a collision course with the courts away from a life of crime. It is no coincidence, then, that readers familiar with Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977) will recognise something of his theory of panopticism in what follows.3 Though, as will be seen, the design of the playground – which was to function as part of a more extensive biosocial apparatus – went beyond the unidirectional gaze envisioned by Jeremy Bentham in his principle of central inspection, which was the ingenious heart of his failed attempt to convince Parliament to support his plan for a national system of Panopticon penitentiaries and poor-houses (Bentham [1787] 1995). Both Wilderspin and Stow approached infant education as a ‘training system’, which for Stow included teacher training, for he was interested in training the trainers, and in both cases the playground was an integral feature of the system (figure 3.1). Wilderspin’s design included fitting playgrounds with flowers and fruit trees, because as a constant temptation these would compel the child to ‘set due bounds to his desire’ ([1852] 2004: 88). Wilderspin was essentially re-staging the Fall, and if a child gave in to temptation, the infraction would not be wasted and would form the basis of a more explicit lesson in morality once the children returned to the classroom (more on this shortly). The rotary swing, which can be seen in figure 3.1, was equally important. Unlike the conventional swing (a short plank suspended from parallel ropes), which Stow equated with ‘stupefaction’,

3.1  The uncovered schoolroom.

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the rotary swing required each child to be the ‘regulator of his own movement’. To set the swing in motion, all of the children holding the ropes would work together until airborne, at which point it was at the behest of individuals to keep the swing moving. In this way the swing would teach the child to be independent and to cooperate (a similar logic can be seen in what would later become a standard piece of playground equipment: the see-saw). Complementing these technical innovations was the technique of trained observation. Children at play were ‘free and unconstrained’, and the supervised playground would provide the ‘arena’ in which the ‘true character and dispositions of the children were exhibited’ (Stow 1854: 209; Wilderspin [1852] 2004: 46). Similar to Kay’s argument above, Stow was of the opinion that unsupervised play left the child free to ‘develop evil habits and a corresponding disposition’ (Stow 1854: 6). Wilderspin was in agreement – supervised playgrounds would instil ‘a sense of obedience and order in the child’, so that the child would come to ‘do everything in a regular manner’ and ‘have a command over itself ’ (Wilderspin [1852] 2004: 20). The playground was but one half of the training apparatus, for the key to self-command was a constraint that Wilderspin called ‘sympathy’, and this required a second piece of equipment and an associated technique. In the playground the master would observe the children, learn about each child’s true character and disposition, and note incidents of waywardness. But it was only when the children returned to the schoolroom that the moral lesson would commence in earnest. This was the purpose of the gallery (figure 3.2). When the children were back in the classroom and seated in the gallery, the master could observe them as individuals and collectively, and, in contrast to panoptic power, visibility would work in both directions, with the master being visible to the children. This two-way visibility would enable the master to ‘conduct’ what Stow called the ‘sympathy of numbers’. The technique, borrowed from Wilderspin, was derived from an understanding of the power of large numbers (of people) (Stow 1854: 156; also Rose 1999: 197–232). What Stow called the ‘new state of society’, meaning industrial towns and cities, brought a mass of bodies into close proximity, and this created a space of ‘concentrated feelings’ (Stow 1854: 60). Amid the concentrated feelings of the urban slums, the untrained child was exposed to the wrong associations and influences, thus developing a fellow-feeling that would corrupt the child’s nature and, in the longer term, ensure that society underwent a downward spiral of crime and moral degeneracy (1854: 106). Stow was primarily concerned with children of the ‘sinking’ classes, believing that the children of the ‘sunken’ classes were all but lost to the restorative possibilities of education. Wielded by the trained teacher, the sympathy of



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3.2  The covered schoolroom.

numbers would ennoble the child, thereby rescuing those ‘sinking’ into habits of crime and vice. Like the conductor of an orchestra (see Foucault 1982: 220–1), the master was to pool the feelings of the children assembled in the gallery, directing this pool of sympathies so that immoral tendencies would be counteracted. If a child came to school with dirty hands for example, the master should not simply tell the child that this was wrong, and then instruct the child in the rule of washing one’s hands. That would be teaching. Instead the child’s hands should be held up for all to see, whereupon the master would pose questions to the class and direct the process of answering. Modifying conduct in this way was training (Stow 1854: 79). The sympathy of numbers was a technique to bring ‘mind to bear upon mind’ (Stow 1854: 17). By assembling a body of children within the bounded space of the school, the trained trainer had a whole variety of temperaments and ‘mental powers’ to work with: some were better at apprehending facts, others at abstract reasoning, but in the gallery, properly conducted, each of these faculties could ‘be made to operate upon all’ (Stow 1854: 17, 156). There would inevitably be cases of wrongdoing and recalcitrance, and these would be corrected, but not through the use of the rod. Instead the master would induce a sense of shame in the wrongdoer by organising a student jury to pass judgment, and as punishment the child would experience the feeling of being temporarily excluded from the circle of sympathy (Stow 1854: 262–3). As a technique, the sympathy of numbers was an attempt to act – indirectly – upon the emotions as much as the actions of the child by orchestrating

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thoughts and feelings in such a way that, by their own efforts, the children would strive to reach a destination already mapped out for them. This is where the disciplinary features of the playground become apparent – it was intended to move an unregulated childhood into a bounded space that would train children in the arts of self-regulation. In Eliasian terms, the playground was an instrument to train children in habits of self-restraint. Projected into the future, it was also a strategy of human self-mastery. The strategy of self-mastery In linking technical equipment (the rotary swing) to pedagogical techniques (the sympathy of numbers), the early nineteenth century playground was a means of making biosocial power into a practical undertaking. We have already seen that Rousseau produced a diagram of the method in Émile, a text John Dewey (1916: 112–18) considered to be still relevant in the context of Progressive Era reforms in America (discussed below). Indeed, there is a passage from Émile that can be read as prefiguring the infant training systems of Wilderspin and Stow. Here the Tutor lays down one of the axioms of Rousseau’s envisioned method of education: ‘do not constrain him in anything, the better to see him as he really is’ ([1762] 1993: 68–9). In one example of what this might look like in practice, a conjuror at a local fair is employed by Émile’s Tutor to confound the boy by leading a wax duck around a bowl of water without touching it. Émile returns home to ponder the secret behind the trick, and when he concludes that the answer to the riddle lies in the use of a hidden magnet, he returns to the fair to upstage the conjuror and bask in the applause of the crowd. But this vainglorious intention has already been anticipated; it is in fact part of the lesson, anticipated by the Tutor, and when the plan backfires Émile experiences shame and disgrace, with the experience serving as a moral lesson regarding the personal cost of arrogance, vanity and hubris. The point I am trying to make here – and this is the connection between Rousseau’s text and the context of Wilderspin and Stow’s experimental mode of education – is that Émile believes himself to be free, because he experiences nothing but the freedom to be the author of his own actions. Yet he is free to act only within the bounds of what is orchestrated by his Tutor, which brings me again to the Eliasian investment in a civilised habitus and, more specifically, to biosocial power. Using the fictional Tutor in the way that a ventriloquist uses a dummy, Rousseau speaks of ‘conscience’ as the ‘training of a sort of sixth sense’, which he also calls ‘common sense’, explaining that this ‘is not common to all men’ but ‘results from the well-regulated use of the other five [senses]’ ([1762] 1993: 145). By indirectly governing Émile’s experiences, thereby



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also conditioning his senses, the lessons imparted by the Tutor are to be ‘embodied in deed’ and ‘engraved’ on Émile’s soul, ‘never to fade away’ (1993: 340–1). This is broadly similar to Elias’s conception of habitus, which he says is ‘imprinted on individuals from early childhood’ and ‘kept alert … by a powerful and increasingly strictly organised social control’ (2000: 441). Configured as ‘conscience’, the biosocial power wielded by the Tutor and enforced by the General Will (or in the case of Elias, the Freudian ‘super-ego’) is inseparable from Émile’s self – it is embodied in thought, feeling and action. Herein lies the paradox, because ‘conscience’ is simultaneously posited and presupposed (see Žižek 1989: 215–16). It is part of a sensible order (or police order as Rancière might say) which is fabricated by biosocial power. It is neither zoē nor bios because it is both. Of course, the social world of practice should not be confused with the world of fiction or the idealisations expressed in texts written by philosophers and reformers such as Rousseau, Wilderspin and Stow. I am not suggesting that the ideas, aspirations and projects outlined above were seamlessly translated into reality, and it would be foolish to lose sight of the fact that there were (and are) always inventive, cunning, insistent and resistant children who are unable and/or unwilling to comply with the demands of biosocial power. Yet an educational apparatus that might well be called a training system gradually began to take shape during the nineteenth century. Populated by teachers and pupils, this would give corporeal form to the strategy of self-mastery, with the unobtrusive mode of power envisioned by the likes of Wilderspin and Stow shored up by more coercive forms of control and more intrusive technologies of surveillance, including industrial and reformatory schools, school medical inspections and the juvenile justice system. I will discuss these later innovations in chapter 6, but here I want to follow the historical trajectory of playgrounds by examining how the strategy of self-mastery was reconfigured towards the end of the nineteenth century. Biosocial power as civil engineering The playgrounds of Wilderspin and Stow were organised around a conception of childhood as the human equivalent of the state of nature, providing a living substrate upon which a second nature could be inscribed. By the middle of the nineteenth century, debates on hereditary crime, pauperism and vice – and it should be noted that the notion of ‘hereditary’ had previously been cast in a moral register of ‘neglect’, meaning inadequate parenting on the part of the ‘sinking’ and ‘sunken’ classes – were placed on a very different epistemic footing. In other words ‘hereditary’ became a scientific as opposed to a moral category, lending authority to various attempts to

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elucidate a biological mechanism of transmission that bypassed human will and intention. It was the currency of evolution and the challenge this posed to the authority of religion (creationism) that opened out novel ways of explaining ‘moral’ problems such as crime, prostitution and vagabondage. From tentative beginnings in the work of Jean-Baptist Lamarck through to the ground-breaking impact of Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin’s work, this posed a problem of some magnitude. Amid the post-Enlightenment investment in reason, virtue and self-command, something had been overlooked, and it was apparently busy working its mischief among the population. The optimism that had characterised the experiments conducted by educationalists and social reformers such as those discussed above was shaken (if not quite shattered) by the appearance of an evolutionary gap, and this fundamentally altered the meaning of J. S. Mill’s distinction between ‘civilised communities’ and those ‘barbarian’ and ‘backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage’. That familiar universalising abstraction – the figure of Man – was now partitioned, placing the higher and lower ‘races’ on an evolutionary arc which was also a hierarchical ladder. Darwin narrated the story of human evolution as The Descent of Man ([1871] 1981), but as this gradually became doxa the idea of ‘descent’ came to mean the exact opposite. Moreover, as noted in chapter 2, the distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ races found its domestic equivalent in discourses of degeneration, or individuals and groups residing among the general population who were perceived to be on the same evolutionary plane as so-called primitive races. Human nature was now mutable, subject to evolutionary forces which had always been at large. And the embarrassing part of the story is that even the most enlightened philosophers and architects of the future had remained ignorant of these forces. Because the great minds and initiators of progress had been blind to the evolutionary process, so the process itself had been blind, not in Darwin’s sense of natural selection being a process of ‘blind chance’ (Darwin [1871] 1981: 396), but in the more technical sense of being outside of human management and control. While this could have been a moment of profound humiliation, in fact it offered up a new horizon of possibilities: the opportunity to reinstate the strategy of selfmastery. The great evolutionary struggle for existence was now visible to anyone who cared to pay attention to the evidence. If it could be adequately grasped by science then, in the words of the biometrician and eugenicist Francis Galton, it could also be directed (Galton 1901: 665). Concerned over the numbers among the ‘rising generation’ who were not attending any type of school, organisations such as the Playground and General Recreation Society of London had begun to move the playground beyond the school setting by the middle of the nineteenth century. As to



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why, in an article endorsing the Playground Society’s efforts to establish ‘ragged playgrounds’ for the children of the poor, the editors of the satirical magazine Punch warned that ‘stint of wholesome play not only blights young muscles and debilitates young minds, but … also has a damaging effect upon young morals’ (1858: 181; see also Englishwoman’s Review 1859). By the end of the century, growing concern about the ‘deteriorating’ state of the population saw the theme of social defence become more urgent (Pick 1989; Stedman Jones 1971). British defeat in the first Boer War galvanised the imperialist Lord Reginald Brabazon for example, and he responded by founding the Metropolitan Parks, Boulevards and Playgrounds Association in 1882, which instituted a discourse of racial hygiene. The city needed ‘lungs’ claimed Brabazon – open spaces, parks and playgrounds – so that its younger inhabitants would develop broad chests and strong moral fibre: the city was to raise its children as sturdy men capable of defending the empire (Brabazon 1887; Brehony 2003; Malchow 1985; Reeder 2006). Similar activity was in evidence on the other side of the Atlantic, except that in America the status of the playground would be radically transformed, no longer merely a supplement to the school or the park but instead the centrepiece of a movement that brought together civic enterprise, philanthropy, state legislatures and the White House. At the helm of the movement, established in 1906, was the Playground Association of America (PAA) (Knapp and Hartsoe 1979). Playgrounds had by then been around for some two decades in the bigger American cities, but according to Luther Gulick, one of the founders of the PAA, earlier efforts had floundered because they lacked a systematic theory connecting play to moral and physical development (Cavallo 1981: 35). The PAA would provide this missing link. Psychology, not as a branch of philosophy or theology but as a positive science, was established as an authoritative discipline in North America towards the end of the nineteenth century. Of the theorists involved in the PAA, it was Karl Groos, William James and, above all, G. Stanley Hall who stand out as the most influential representatives of the new psychology. As noted in chapter 2, Hall was a neo-Lamarckian, and he proposed that individual development, from foetus to adolescent, recapitulated the stages of human evolution. Childhood was thus understood (and examined) as a foreshortened repetition of human history. Hall’s theory found its dramatic moment in the way it framed the passage from past to present, childhood to adulthood as problematic. Modern society was deemed to have become too sedentary, leading to muscular atrophy and moral decay. Otherwise put, flabby muscles were the cause of weak morals (Curtis 1907: 282; Gulick 1898: 794). The adolescent’s inclination to masturbate, the capitalist’s indifference to the public good, the labourer’s willingness to strike, the

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politician’s proclivity for corruption and the rise of degenerate habits among the population – saloons, brothels and pool halls – provided the evidence. The population was in a state of moral and physical degeneration, necessitating an urgent course of action, and the scope for intervention was opened out by Hall’s theory of the relationship between mind and body. According to Hall, the human brain existed on a continuum with the nervous system and muscles, so that training the body would also condition the mind (Gagen 2004: 427–8). With adolescence, the child was perceived as being analogous to the most recent stage of human evolution, and because this marked the apotheosis of civilised society, so it afforded the possibility of shaping the direction of future evolution (Gagen 2004: 427). It was here, at the intersection between scientific knowledge and social concerns, that the supervised playground found its proper place. While most clearly articulated by Gulick (mentioned above) when he wrote that ‘play is the ontogenetic rehearsal of the phylogenetic series’ (1898: 803), the theory of recapitulation was also prominent in the thinking of Henry S. Curtis (1910), a former student of Hall’s at Clark University and a former director of New York City’s playground system, and Joseph Lee, who served as President to the PAA from 1910 until his death in 1937 (see Cavallo 1981; Knapp and Hartsoe 1979). In his Play in Education, Lee exhibits teleological reasoning when he explains that ‘children do not play because they are young; they are young in order that they may play’. According to Lee, the simpler ‘ready-made’ animals were fundamentally different from humans, who are born in an ‘unfinished’ state and are ‘fashioned in obedience to the great play instincts’, so that just as a muscle grows by exercising it, so too does the ‘growth’ of a child’s ‘mental ability’ and ‘moral power’ come from effort, practice and training (Lee 1915: 5–6). Gulick, who had an M.D. from New York University, gave this a distinctly medical gloss when he published a paper tracing weak minds and morals to soft muscles (Gulick 1898: 794). Though expressed in different ways, the core idea was that the ‘play-built animal’ was ‘partly made to order’ (Lee 1915: 30–1). This was the objective of play as a mode of training: the playground would take hold of life and govern the future by steering the child’s development. Lee partitioned childhood along a developmental axis comprising seven ‘play instincts’: creation, rhythm, hunting, fighting, nurture, curiosity and team play. Not all were salient at a given stage of the child’s growth, so that a correct understanding of ‘nature’s prescribed course’ dictated the appropriate mode of play. Here we can see how J. S. Mill’s notion of childhood as an anterior state was modified in accordance with developments in the biological sciences. During ‘babyhood’ the ‘creative impulse’ was said to be strong, so that by learning to grasp, wield and strike, the young child



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3.3  Group of children playing in playground sandbox, USA, circa 1920.

recapitulated the discovery of tools and weapons. The sandbox was deemed the most appropriate play environment for children during this initial stage of growth, where infants would also learn ‘fundamental lessons in mutual rights’ (Gulick 1907: 481, see figure 3.3). This stage was followed by the rhythm and cooperation of ring games during the ‘dramatic age’, with children holding hands while singing or chanting a rhyme. From six to eleven years was the period of the ‘big injun’, when instincts that pre-dated the constraints of civilisation came to the fore. This was a stage that effectively dispensed with the sociality characterising the dramatic age, disposing the child – boys in particular – to disobedience and law-breaking. As a period of self-assertion, this required careful handling on the part of play instructors in order to prepare the child for what was to follow when the ‘belonging instinct’ took over. Lee characterised this final phase of growth as the ‘age of loyalty’, when self-fulfilment was achieved through membership. It was also the point at which everything hung in the balance, for this instinct found expression in the gang. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with gangs; gang membership was simply part of nature’s prescribed course (with its evolutionary root in tribes and kinship groups),

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but there was an ever-present danger in that a gang could become an antisocial force. The solution was to mould the gang into a team. In the context of the city, which had become a sort of compressor for the problems associated with accelerating urbanisation and increasing population density (the latter also related to immigration and the formation of ethnic enclaves), the activities of youth gangs had come to symbolise urban disorder and moral decay (Curtis 1907; Gulick 1920: 91–2, 1909: 36; Lee 1915: 362). Childhood became a way of focusing these concerns. Gangs existed in abundance, but rather than try to eradicate the menace, the playground activists set out to channel, harness and re-deploy the sanctioning force of the gang. The ‘belonging instinct’ could be steered and directed, and this would have a lasting effect because, in the words of historian Dominick Cavallo, the playground activists believed that it ‘would not fade once its recapitulatory force was spent at the end of adolescence’ (Cavallo 1981: 92). Membership of a team would thus prepare the child for life in a society based on growing specialisation and interdependence (Lee 1902: 210). As a blend of competition and cooperation, the team was a vehicle to harmonise ideals that might otherwise conflict: loyalty and interdependence on the one hand; individuality and rivalry on the other. Moreover, modern mass society demanded that all children experience their ‘conscious individuality’ becoming ‘submerged in a sense of membership’ (Lee 1907: 489, cf. Gulick 1907: 481; Curtis 1917: 226–7). This could not be accomplished by instructing the minds of children; instead it had to be felt, experienced not in the head but in the ‘heart’ as an ‘intense controlling ideal’ (Lee 1907: 489). The idea was that individuals would act under the ‘keen and silent’ judgement of team-mates (Cavallo 1981: 97–8), or, as pointed out by Gulick, ‘if a boy plays baseball and does not know the difference between playing for himself and playing for the team, his mates will teach him very promptly and with more energy than any other method could provide … The essential rules are not written in the statute books; they are expressed in public opinion’ (Gulick 1920: 193–4). As with Wilderspin and Stow’s sympathy of numbers, peer-pressure was deemed to be far more effective than either force or fear of authority, with the possibility of being ostracised and excluded from the game the most effective lever in securing compliance (Gulick 1920: 245). Gulick was of the view that the command–obedience relation was necessary, and it found its proper place in the school and the home, but only the playground could train the child in the practice of freedom because to be free was to exercise choice: to willingly submit to constraints and to exercise self-control when it was possible to do otherwise (Gulick 1920: 250). As an ‘ethical laboratory’ (Gulick 1907: 483) and a ‘school of conduct’ (Lee 1915: 374), the supervised playground was conceived as the basic



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‘unit’ of membership nested within the ‘larger units’ of city and nation, both of which were ‘but the gang writ large’ (Lee 1915: 366). The belonging instinct was to be harnessed and directed by surrounding the child with myths and symbols: flags, songs, stories of ancestors and legends of past heroes, reinforcing the feeling of membership and sense of loyalty by fabricating a shared sense of past, present and future (Lee 1915: 367). The larger purpose of this civil engineering project was to tap into and deploy the ‘great fusing power’ of the gang, so that the team would function as a ‘pioneer plant’ and cultivate the seed of patriotism (Lee 1915: 367, 385; also 1907). According to Lee, the problem of the city was in essence the ‘atrophy of the neighborhood’, which allowed the individual to act in a manner unencumbered by public opinion as a check on individual conduct (Lee 1915: 382). Beginning with the sandbox and culminating in the team, this would be countered by establishing a ‘body of opinion’ that ‘squeezed’ each child into the ‘desired pattern’, thus ‘molding’ the child’s ‘standard of behavior’ (Lee 1915: 260, 375). The ultimate objective was that each child would ‘carry his city and his country with him in imagination’, so that state and nation would be felt and experienced as an extension of the self (Lee 1915: 389). If the strategy of supervised play succeeded in its aims, then the problem of self-mastery would be solved: the player would not simply be part of the team; instead the team (or city or nation) would become an integral and inseparable part of the player. The playground was the idealised republic in miniature, and while this ideal could be symbolised and communicated in the form of flags, pageants, architecture and urban planning (see for example Atherton 1983; Boyer 1978), most important were the social constraints that Elias associates with the civilising process. As future citizens, children were to be habituated in democratic ideals of mutuality, cooperation and interdependence, and these in combination with the axioms of liberalism: individuality, competitive rivalry and specialisation. The Progressive Era playground might be seen to have recalibrated the sympathy of numbers by dispensing with the gallery and moving the master further into the background. Supervision took one step back; it was the equipment, rules and, above all, the child’s playmates that together functioned as the boundary conditions conducting the conduct of the child. As it migrated out of the school to become a feature of public space, the playground connected up with other experiments such as public baths, parks and libraries, together giving material form to the ideal of the moral city (Boyer 1978). Childhood – once imagined as a garden of virtue to be nurtured and plucked of its weeds – was now transformed into an engineering project: park administrators, playground supervisors and city planners would engineer civility. Furthermore, the strategy of self-mastery was now anchored in the

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authority of science. The recapitulationists claimed to be in possession of true knowledge derived not from metaphysical speculation, but from empirical facts: from ‘a more careful study and better understanding of children’ (Curtis 1907: 280). It was simply a fact that ‘play is the ontogenetic rehearsal of the phylogenetic series’ (Gulick 1898: 803), and this factual claim supported the normative vision: ‘What we want is the dedication of free, selfdirected individuals to a common purpose, not the literal welding of subordinated fragments into a common whole’ (Lee 1907: 487). The similarity to Rousseau’s general will is striking, but of course we should not lose sight of context in making such generalisations. The Progressive Era playground was an attempt to give practical form to a particular normative fiction – one that was of its time and place. Are things fundamentally different today? Notes 1 Elias distances himself from recapitulation theory in his preface to The Civilising Process (see his footnote in 2000: xi), but what he seems to have in mind is a very crude version of the theory, along the lines of the growing child recapitulating specific historical epochs such as an ‘agrarian feudal age’ or ‘a Renaissance’ (these are Elias’s examples). I think this merely confirms his awareness of Haeckel’s influence, but does nothing to convince me that his own theory is not in tune with the same reasoning. 2 Though my focus is different from Ian Hunter’s analysis in his Rethinking the School (1994), this section is indebted to his discussion on playgrounds. 3 The idea of panoptic power was developed by Foucault (1977) and originates in the work of Jeremy Bentham at the end of the eighteenth century. Envisioned as an architectural solution to the problem of self-government (Bentham [1787] 1995), and designed by Bentham’s brother Samuel, the panopticon itself – which was to function as penitentiary, school, factory, poorhouse or hospital – was conceived as a circular building, with cells arranged around the outer perimeter. In the centre, like the hub of a wheel, was an inspection tower from where each cell, and each inmate, could be observed. The genius of the design was the way it was based on one-way visibility: through the use of slatted blinds, the person in the inspection tower could see without being seen. The inmates would thus never know exactly when they were being observed, and so would be obliged – or at least this was the idea – to act at all times as though under surveillance. Bentham envisioned the gaze of power entering into the ‘soul’ of the inmate, so that external control would be embodied as self-regulation. In short the panopticon was an architectural and administrative machine that would produce self-governing subjects, and thus reduce the need for coercive controls in securing social order.

4 The right to play and the freedom to pay

From the discussion on figurational sociology in chapter 3, it might be suggested that the question of social order becomes most urgent when we can no longer take the world as we know it for granted. The disturbances in Britain during August 2011 provide a concrete example of what I am alluding to. It is by no means without consequence that the events which began with a march protesting the death of twenty-nine-year-old Mark Duggan – shot and killed by police in Tottenham – were dubbed by the media and the ensuing political debate as ‘riots’, a word that summoned what was subsequently deemed to be the only appropriate response.1 As order was being restored, Prime Minister David Cameron delivered his ‘fight back’ speech, picking up the thread of his ‘Broken Britain’ theme and announcing ‘the broken society is now at the top of my agenda’ (Cameron 2011). But what exactly does it mean to say that a society is ‘broken’? According to Cameron, the ‘riots’ had little if anything to do with inequality. Instead, the disorder was down to individuals who, Cameron insisted, exhibited an ‘indifference to right or wrong’, a ‘twisted moral code’ and (note the Eliasian register) an ‘absence of self-restraint’ (Cameron 2011). Given the emphatic judgement contained within this explanation, it was no surprise that the question of how to ‘fix’ the broken society placed childhood squarely in the spotlight. An example that contextualises Cameron’s rhetoric concerns a debate that gained traction in the wake of the ‘riots’: the idea of shortening the summer holiday for school children. The idea was being piloted in the city of Nottingham in 2012, driven by the laudable goal of promoting academic achievement and, more specifically, of closing the ‘attainment gap between poorer children and more affluent children’.2 Britain’s Channel 4 News featured a report on the initiative filmed against the backdrop of a children’s playground (Channel 4 News 2012), with the images of swings, slides and climbing frames creating a scene that evoked the ideal of a happy childhood, in tune perhaps with the notion that

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every child should be given the opportunity to achieve. There is however an acute tension at work here that comes into focus if we locate the Channel 4 News report within the broader socio-political context. The images broadcast by Channel 4 News were made meaningful not merely through the story being reported but also by the wider debate on crime, with these words articulated by Cameron well before the events of 2011 had reignited the Broken Britain debate: ‘Take any marker of our broken society, and educational failure lies at its root. Four in every five youngsters receiving custodial sentences have no qualifications. More than two-thirds of prisoners are illiterate. And nearly one-third of those excluded from school have been involved with substance abuse’ (Cameron 2007). The problem of an ‘attainment gap’ encompasses much more than academic performance, and in the context of ongoing debate about the ‘NEET’ problem3 (young people not in education, employment or training), the playground that featured in the Channel 4 segment can be read as exhibiting a trace of its original purpose – to divert the children of the ‘sinking and sunken’ classes (David Stow) away from a life of crime. In this portrait of a broken society, civil unrest and the inequities figured by the notion of an attainment gap, there is little that we have not seen before (or indeed since, and I will look at ‘disadvantaged’ childhoods in chapter 7). Cameron’s theme of social fracture spirals back through the histories of childhood – echoing debates on the notion of a predatory ‘underclass’ and a ‘culture of poverty’ in Britain and the US during the 1970s and 1980s (Murray 1994), an earlier incarnation of which was the idea of a ‘residuum’ at the end of the nineteenth century (see Rafter 1988; Stedman Jones 1971), which had in turn reconfigured the perceived threat posed by the notion of a ‘criminal class’ a century earlier (see Hughes 1986). Continuities notwithstanding, it is also the case that the innocuous-looking playground – used as a framing device in the Channel 4 News report – was itself framed by something that affords a rather different perspective on the attainment gap: children’s rights. In chapter 2, I mentioned Articles 12 and 13 of the UNCRC, presenting these as an indication of how childhood is transitioning from ‘voice’ to ‘language’. This chapter begins by situating Article 31, which concerns the child’s right to play and participate in cultural life, in the Republic of Ireland (hereafter referred to as Ireland). I will outline my reason for taking Ireland as a case study in the first part of this chapter, beginning with some discussion on public playgrounds and the right to play. Part two focuses on commercial play-centres and the freedom to pay to play. The chapter concludes with a close analysis of the National Play Policy in Ireland, launched in 2004 and notable for the way it incorporated children into the policy process as participants, thereby serving as evidence of the Irish State’s commitment



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4.1  Lismore playground.

to the UNCRC. As will be seen in due course, it is within the space of children’s participation in this process of scripting policy that the right to play can be grasped as a vehicle for biosocial power. The right to play Since the late 1990s, new public playgrounds have been appearing throughout Ireland. Some have been renovated and retrofitted while others have been purpose-built from scratch. Figure 4.1 depicts the playground in Lismore, a small town in the south-eastern county of Waterford, and is typical of public playgrounds more generally, that is, in terms of design and equipment. All of the children in the photograph are under adult supervision, and even the woman to the right of the image, seated on a bench – and thus physically remote – maintains eye contact with her child/children. Of course, playgrounds are not always this orderly, but to view this through the lens of the material presented in chapter 3 is to see something of the playground’s histories at work here. We have already seen how the playgrounds of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were anchored in the idea that children should be supervised while at play. Play was to be directed to specific ends, with the equipment itself – such as swings and sandpits – tasked with training children in habits of self-control and cooperation. Residues of this can still be found

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in the swings, slides and see-saws found in many playgrounds today, though the newer equipment exhibits notable modifications. See-saws now typically work on the principle of a spring rather than a fulcrum, which means they can be operated by an individual and no longer require a partner, and the slides that once stood independently of climbing frames are now integrated into a single piece of equipment. I will return to the significance of these small changes later on, but for now I merely want to use this image as a reminder of the playground’s histories. Today the renewed interest in playgrounds is framed by the rights of children. In Ireland the main reference points from a policy perspective are a National Children’s Strategy (published in 2000), a National Play Policy (2004) and a National Recreation Policy (2007), all of which defer to the UNCRC, ratified by Ireland in 1992. Article 31 of the UNCRC, which is in two parts, sets out rights relating specifically to play, recreation, leisure and culture: 1. States Parties recognise the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts. 2. States parties shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate freely in cultural and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity. (UNCRC 1989)

When the Government of Poland first proposed a convention on children’s rights in 1978, it based its draft on the 1959 UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Play and education were written into a single Article (Article VII) of the Polish initiative and directed to the same ends: to ‘enable’ the child to develop her or his ‘abilities’, ‘individual judgement’ and ‘sense of moral and social responsibility’, and ‘to become a useful member of society’.4 A decade later, when the UNCRC was finally adopted, this apparent equivalence between play and education had become unstable. Notwithstanding the fact that the UNCRC is based on the indivisibility and interrelationship of rights (David 2006: 15), play and education have to some extent been prised apart, and the gap articulates a growing emphasis on the liberty rights of children. Articles 28 and 29 – those dealing specifically with education – contain words like ‘compulsory’ (primary education) and ‘discipline’ (to be ‘administered in a manner consistent with the child’s human dignity and in conformity with the present convention’). Article 29 also stipulates that education should be ‘directed’ to particular ends, such as preparing children for ‘responsible life in a free society’. That education should be compulsory,



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at least at the elementary level, that it should entail some kind of discipline and that it should prepare the child for responsible life in a free society: all of this seems obvious if education is equated with schooling. The relationship between education and play is somewhat different. In the decade it took to produce the UNCRC, a consensus of sorts emerged on the need to broaden the meaning of education beyond schooling, training and instruction (see Detrick 1992). A 1982 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights captures this succinctly: [T]he education of children is the whole process whereby, in any society, adults endeavour to transmit their beliefs, culture and other values to the young, whereas teaching or instruction refers in particular to the transmission of knowledge and to intellectual development. (Campbell and Cosans judgment of 25 February 1982, in Detrick 1999: 475)

Schooling is a right which is also compulsory up to a specified age, as well as requiring authoritative guidance so that it can be directed in accordance with specific ends. Article 31, though still a dimension of education in the broad sense, recognises children’s rights to ‘participate freely’ in play, recreation and cultural life. This emphasis on the liberty rights of children is very much to the fore in the National Play Policy in Ireland. With its overall objective to plan ‘for an increase in public play facilities and thereby improve the quality of life of children living in Ireland’ (NCO 2004: 8), the NPP defines play as follows: Play is freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated behaviour that actively engages the child … Play is what children do when no-one else is telling them what to do. (NCO 2004: 11)

Though sometimes referred to as the ‘forgotten right’, partly because the rights recognised under Article 31 are considered a luxury in comparison to other rights ‘whose violations bear more cruel, visible and spectacular consequences’ (David 2006: 17), Ireland has taken Article 31 very seriously. It is in part for that reason that the Irish case is worth examining in detail. It perhaps needs to be noted also that from now until the middle of chapter 6, the discussion will make particular demands on readers unfamiliar with recent policy initiatives in Ireland. In geographic and demographic terms, Ireland is of course a small country – a minor player in the global scheme of things and easy to overlook, and yet the Irish State has attempted to position itself as an international leader in instituting child-centric policies. There is much to be discerned from a detailed analysis of this particular

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policy landscape, initially by examining the National Play Policy, and subsequently through analysis of how children’s citizenship is being configured in Ireland (chapter 5) as well as health initiatives organised on the principle of Health in All Policies (chapter 6). With respect to the National Play Policy specifically, in its second periodic report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC),5 the Irish Government claimed that Ireland was ‘the first country in the world with a detailed national play policy’ (NCO 2005a: 2). The definition of play in the NPP is actually borrowed from the British policy context (NPFA 2000: 6), though, as will be seen later, it could well have been written by Rousseau some two hundred and fifty years ago. This is not to suggest that nothing has changed. We have already seen in some detail how, for Rousseau, it was important that the growing child thought that he (or she, though he had far less to say about girls) was the master of his own actions, while in fact being subject to a directing power that would unobtrusively act upon his actions. Today we speak of the right to play, and of the freedom of the child while at play, as if the conduct of the child at play is no longer circumscribed by a directing power. But there is a tension built into the NPP, a tension which is more or less apparent depending on whether we locate its objectives within or outside of the field of formal education. On the one hand children at play are apparently freely choosing and self-directing agents. On the other hand, in line with contemporary thinking on the benefits of play (Coalter and Taylor 2001; CPPF 2019; Wood and Attfield 2005), the NPP directs the child’s freedom towards specific ends: play should aid the development of the ‘Whole Child’ 6 (emotional well-being, cognitive skills, problem-solving skills and social skills), it should assist in producing healthy children (both physically and mentally), and it should contribute to a more inclusive society. Additionally, and here the cross-over to debates on school holidays and social unrest in Britain is apparent, the NPP aims to tackle ‘anti-social’ behaviour and juvenile offending. And a final objective, which might provide a clue as to what exactly it means to ‘prepare the child for responsible life in a free society’ in today’s world: play should ‘aid the economy by developing autonomous adults’ (NCO 2004: 12–13). All of these objectives are steeped in the histories of the playground, and yet the rights-based approach is a major innovation for reasons alluded to earlier: because children now have a say when it comes to making decisions that have a bearing on their lives and their futures. Childhood has transitioned from ‘voice’ to ‘language’ or logos, and yet it is also the case that a complex question arises within this field of discourse. In part it is a question of how the right to play relates to the regulation of freedom, and this in turn combines with the issue of provision – the places and spaces where children exercise their freedom to play (part 2 below). Perhaps more important is the question of



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how children are positioned as participants within the policy-making process itself (part 3). The freedom to pay (to play) This section begins by briefly revisiting the Eliasian theme of a de-civilising process as discussed in the previous chapter, that is, as a way of engaging critically with commercial play-centres. In contrast to the rights-based provision of public playgrounds, commercial facilities are organised on a pay-to-play basis. The guiding question here, recalling the Eliasian equation (size of the gap between the behaviour of adults and children = de/civilising process), is whether the claim that adults are behaving more like children offers any critical traction on the present. As an alternative working hypothesis, I am going to suggest that the commercial play-centre is a space where children rehearse certain features of adulthood in the context of a neoliberalised world. In other words, it is not that adults are behaving more like children, but that the future is prefigured in how children play. Zygmunt Bauman offers an interesting way of approaching this scenario, specifically with respect to examining inter-personal relations through the lens of what he dubbed ‘liquid modernity’ (which I take to be Bauman’s way of figuring neoliberal enterprise culture). According to Bauman, the retreat of the social state (the state of security and welfare) shifts the burden of life’s uncertainties onto the shoulders of individuals. The message: rely on your own wits, skills and entrepreneurial acumen. To what end? This is by no means straightforward. According to Bauman, the dissolution of ‘we-feeling’ goes hand in hand with situations whereby ‘frightened individuals huddle together and become a crowd’, meaning people who turn to fundamentalist beliefs and insular identities such as ethno-nationalism for a sense of security (Bauman 2004: 58; 2002: 42–8). Elias (2008: 38) would say that the decline in mutual identification and the concomitant demise of ‘detached’ and ‘reality-adequate’ thinking are the result of ever more threats, dangers and risks that we can no longer control. Bauman might add that if this is indeed the case, then it is also the case that control is diminishing on unequal terms. When the individual becomes a self-administered microenterprise, as seems to be the case today (Miller and Rose 2008), then, as Foucault suggests, we find ourselves in a situation characterised by an equality of inequality (2008: 142–3). In contrast to the Eliasian emphasis on mutual-identification – the basis of cooperation and solidarity – Bauman suggests that social relations are increasingly configured as a fluid and shifting field of strategic alliances (Bauman 2000, 2002, 2004). As Bauman puts it: ‘Since the task shared by all has to be performed by each under sharply different conditions, it divides human situations and prompts

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cut-throat competition rather than unifying the human condition inclined to generate cooperation and solidarity’ (2000: 90). For Bauman the shopping mall is the archetypical ‘public but not civil’ space of liquid modern interaction. The consumer at large in the mall has little use for the arts of civility, exemplified by the person who speaks loudly into a mobile phone while remaining oblivious to others who are close enough to touch. Public space becomes a constellation of private worlds, and there is an ugly side to this, manifest in the suspicion directed at those who seem out of place. The neoliberal consumer and the xenophobe are not necessarily different people. Bauman’s observations are penetrating and insightful, and yet his is a timeless definition of civility. Bauman tells us that civility is ‘the ability to interact with strangers without holding their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or renounce some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place’ (Bauman 2000: 104–5). It is not entirely clear whether Bauman is here describing something he believes once existed but is lost to us in the context of his liquid modern shopping mall, or whether he is prescribing a code of conduct under the rubric of civility. Perhaps he is doing both. But if he is adopting a normative position then he risks short-circuiting his own analysis. A recurring theme in Bauman’s later work is obsolescence. Not only is it that people, things and identities become disposable in an enterprise culture (like a single-use paper plate), but our ability to grasp our situation – the conceptual tools we have at our disposal – may also face redundancy. Mourning the loss of something such as ‘civility’ is insufficient because it risks creating yet another normative fiction. Rather than equating contemporary trends with ‘decivilising’ processes or the demise of ‘civility’, it might be a better strategy to take our cue from Foucault, and specifically his work on governmentality (Foucault 1991, 1982). In other words, instead of taking up a vantage point that measures behaviour against some type of categorical imperative, we might examine conduct itself – how social relations are being (re) configured or, to return to my Foucauldian-inspired question from chapter 3, to reflect critically on how we have come to be who we are, and to give some thought to what we are in the process of becoming. This way of apprehending the present lends itself to exploration rather than statements of certainty, and the playground is one place we can look for clues. Earlier I suggested that a major innovation has taken place in the histories of the playground: the playground has been more or less decoupled from the school, along with its modes of discipline and authority. It was also noted that the revival of public playgrounds articulates a complex discourse made up of several strands: the rights of the child, social inclusion, health promotion, employability and crime prevention. But of course public playgrounds are not the only place where children play outside of schools.



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Children also play on beaches, in parks and forests, in their gardens at home, in their bedrooms, on the street, on waste ground – there is no definitive list. But if we focus on how play is staged within designated spaces, then it is possible to distil some general insights by contrasting public playgrounds with commercial play-centres. I will continue here to focus on Ireland, where commercial play-centres have proliferated at a rate comparable with public playgrounds,7 but I will also be drawing from research on commercial play facilities in the UK. With a view to focusing the analysis, the discussion is limited to a very specific type of play-centre, described by one group of researchers as the ‘stand-alone indoor adventure soft playground’ (McKendrick et al. 2000a) – thus setting aside play-centres and play zones found in pubs, restaurants and shops. The facility depicted in figure 4.2, which is located in the West of Ireland, is a typical example in terms of design, layout, entry fee, access and location. These amenities are generally situated on the edge of a town or city, usually in a small industrial- or business-park which is often inadequately serviced by public transport (see Cole-Hamilton et al. 2002: 30). Unlike public playgrounds, play-centres are accessible on a pay-for-play basis (McKendrick et al. 2000b). In terms of supervision, staff patrol the perimeter of the main play area, using a whistle to check unruly or risky behaviour, but there are many blind spots, especially if the children are on the upper tiers. There is also a viewing gallery for the adults who accompany children to these places (and children must be accompanied). This can be seen from the perspective of adults in figure 4.3 and from the perspective of children in figure 4.4. Adults can keep an eye on their children while relaxing over a coffee, chatting with

4.2  Play zone in a commercial play-centre.

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4.3  Viewing gallery.

friends, reading a magazine, working on their laptop, and so on. However, this is a two-dimensional view of a large three-dimensional play area, and adults sitting in the viewing gallery will only make occasional eye-contact with their child/children. In some play-centres adults are prohibited from entering the main play apparatus, but they generally do not venture inside even if permitted, preferring instead to remain outside the play zone, looking inwards and upwards as they track the movements of their child/children. When added together, these characteristics add up to what Bauman calls ‘behavioural conditions’ which, consistent with his allegorical style of thinking and writing, he associates with ‘jungles’ and ‘gardens’, with each depicting a specific type of environment. The analogy is useful in comparing playgrounds, past and present. The playgrounds discussed in chapter 3 were very much in the tradition of gardening, in that they aimed to cultivate childhood, and the playgrounds of the Progressive Era America – which I presented as a type of civil engineering – moved in the groove of a similar logic. Indeed, the horticultural language used by G. Stanley Hall (adolescence as ‘psychic soil’), who, as we have seen, influenced the playground movement in America, is a case in point. Moreover, public playgrounds and the right to play continue to replicate something of the gardening logic, certainly if



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4.4  Viewing gallery from inside the play zone.

aligned to the UNCRC. So, what of the jungle metaphor? To pick up the thread of Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity – his argument is that behavioural conditions are now less important than a specific mode of behaviour: the hunter (Bauman 2008: 113). Bauman has a point, but I think he may be underestimating the continued importance of behavioural conditions. Play-centres are the synthetic equivalent of untamed nature (i.e. the jungle as opposed to the garden), and in Ireland they go by such names as Jungle King, Funky Monkeys, Go Bananas, Run Amuck and Monkey Business.8 Not all play-centres adopt such names but many do, to the point that it becomes possible to interpret this as a type of grammar that encapsulates the behavioural conditions that await children once they enter these spaces. The kind of play found in play-centres fits with what is described in the play literature as ‘rough and tumble’ play, ‘deep’ play and ‘locomotor’ play. A 2000 report co-authored by the National Playing Fields Association,9

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PLAYLINK and the Children’s Play Council – and this is a key reference point for the Irish National Play Policy – defines rough and tumble, or ‘close encounter’ play as having: less to do with fighting and more to do with touching, tickling, gauging relative strength, discovering physical flexibility and the exhilaration of display. For example playful fighting, wrestling and chasing where the children involved are obviously unhurt and giving every indication that they are enjoying themselves. (NPFA 2000: 33)

Deep play ‘allows the child to encounter risky or even potentially life threatening experiences, to develop survival skills and conquer fear. For example leaping onto an aerial runway, riding a bike on a parapet, [or] balancing on a high beam’ (NPFA 2000: 33). Finally, locomotor play entails ‘movement in any and every direction for its own sake. For example chase, tag, hide and seek, [and] tree climbing’ (NPFA 2000: 34). All of these require specific behavioural conditions, and when threaded together – as they are in commercial play-centres – then they add up to activity focused on movement, agility, risk-taking, bodily contact, on developing personal survival skills and mastering fear. These modes of play are about fun and enjoyment, and the play literature includes them among fifteen distinct types of play, together contributing to a comprehensive process of psychological, intellectual, emotional and social development (Coalter and Taylor 2001: 3; NPFA 2000: 33–4).10 However, in commercial play-centres the other twelve types of play are all but absent, and I have witnessed many cases where play becomes aggressive, usually on the upper tier of the play zone where interaction escapes the gaze of adults. What happens is that a child becomes scared and backs off when overpowered by a stronger or more aggressive child, and in this way the situation is typically diffused before it becomes violent. There may be a valuable lesson in this type of interaction, but it is not entirely clear what that is, unless it somehow equips the child for adult life (on the way to becoming Bauman’s hunter perhaps, or surviving situations where one has become the hunter’s prey).11 It is all but impossible to describe the mood of a play-centre in full flight – the noise, the atmosphere – these places are about pure excitement, and the double slide provides a graphic illustration of this (figure 4.5). The traditional slide, which can still be seen in some public playgrounds, channels children into a line from the bottom of the ladder to the top of the slide. Irrespective of whether an adult is present to watch over the child, the equipment itself has a training effect. If more than one child wants to use the slide, then queuing, turn-taking and patience are required, even though of course the children may find ways around the requirement (such as



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4.5  Double slide.

jumping the queue by running up the slide before coming back down again). In contrast, the double slide provides multiple possible routes to the top and from the bottom, and to observe children using this type of slide is to recognise that it very often becomes a race. Padding around the steel scaffolding which supports the multi-level play zone prevents impact injuries, while nets prevent the children from falling out of the play area. Beyond the constraints of padding and netting, just about anything goes.

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It is often noted by parents and teachers that children, especially young children, often play alone while in each other’s company. Commercial playcentres encourage this type of individualised sociality, similar in fact to people dining together or walking along the street in each other’s company while focusing almost exclusively on the screen of their personal(ised) smart phone. Insofar as children play with each other in commercial play-centres, it tends to be competitive and self-assertive play. The play-centre unobtrusively tutors children (and parents) in the knowledge, skills and aptitudes demanded by what Bauman calls a liquid modern world: that access is granted to those who can pay (it cannot be claimed as a right or entitlement); that the pleasures on offer are available only to those who can make their own way there (do not rely on public transport to ferry you); that once inside, the appropriate behaviour is a blend of self-assertiveness, flexibility and innovation: to stay in the game is to stay on the move, choosing direction and (transitory) destination without pausing to reflect on why you have chosen that path. In the play-centre the world is transformed into the bounded anarchy of a bouncy castle, yet the padded surfaces are of little help when bodies collide. Viewed in tandem, the revival of public playgrounds and the proliferation of commercial play-centres add up to something of a social experiment. Of course many children never frequent either of these places, but if we take the playground and the play-centre as together forming a ‘segment’ of ‘the totality of socially instilled forms of conduct’ (Elias 2000: 59), then it is possible to suggest that childhood is positioned, and possibly divided, between the public playground, which more or less (depending on the playground in question) continues the logic of Elias’s civilising process, and the commercial play-centre, which articulates the logic of Bauman’s liquid modernity. However, with an eye to Foucault, it might be wise to pause before choosing sides, because it is not necessarily the case that the playground promotes civility while the play-centre engenders incivility. Earlier I mentioned some of the small changes which have appeared in the newer public playgrounds. When slides and climbing frames are combined in a single piece of equipment (as can be seen in figure 4.1), then the need for queuing and turn-taking becomes less pronounced, and see-saws that operate on the basis of a spring instead of a fulcrum make it possible for an individual child to play alone. Furthermore, in recognising the right of the child to personally direct his or her own actions, the playgrounds situated in public space and framed by rights discourse are by no means incommensurate with those provided on a commercial basis. Whether we look to the public sphere of rights or the private realm of commercial services, the child at play has been released from the disciplinary grip of the supervised playground. We might conclude that children are being empowered, or we might raise an eyebrow and ponder the fact that



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the discourse of human rights and the pervasiveness of consumer choice converge in reconfiguring the practice of freedom. It could be argued that this is preferable to the moulding techniques of the past. But it is also the case that thinking about where and how children do play or should play leads to decisions: we are still acting upon the actions of children. But to what end exactly? The strategy of self-mastery was a dream, perhaps a promise, itself never mastered, and for the children subject to the grip of the old disciplinary playgrounds it was possible to see through the strategy, to decode its logic and stage ‘counter-conducts’. The phrase is borrowed from Foucault, who coined it to denote a form of ‘active’ resistance or ‘struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others’ (2007: 201). However, when the playground is devoid of purpose other than meeting the rights or servicing the desires of its users, then there is little to resist other than freedom itself. Where, though, is the agency of children in all of this? The neoliberal figuring of childhood Let me begin with a few remarks that move away from Bauman’s lexicon and towards the neoliberal figuring of childhood. Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose (2008) have argued that one of the defining features of neoliberalism is that it ‘governs at a distance’ by regulating the practice of freedom. Initiatives to govern skateboarding in urban space provide one proximate example. Skating is at times perceived through the lens of so-called ‘anti-social behaviour’, especially when skaters use public spaces which are not designated for such use (see Sandhu 2015).12 Ocean Howell (2008) has examined how the regulation of skate-parks has shifted from prohibition to what Adam Crawford (2003: 480) characterises as ‘regulated self-regulation’. In other words, these are situations where skaters – keen to have their own space where they are free to assemble and practise their sport – enter into a contractual relation with city managers, with the result that the skaters undertake responsibility for the park and begin to manage themselves and each other in accordance with city ordinances and bylaws. Playgrounds merit close attention for comparable reasons, and this final section returns in more detail to the National Play Policy in Ireland, specifically in terms of how this is presented as responding to the needs of children as identified by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and children themselves (more on this below), thus providing concrete evidence of the Irish State’s commitment to implementing the UNCRC. Additionally, as with the example of skate-parks, the provision of playgrounds operates within a context where biosocial power operates through and upon the agency of the subject who is also its object.

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Public playgrounds have existed since the 1930s in Ireland, but many if not most were in a general state of neglect by the 1980s, often perceived to be dangerous spaces that children might be warned against (see Kernan 2005). During the 1990s however there was a renewed interest in playground provision, which found an anchoring point in the UNCRC. In its 1997 report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child for example, the Children’s Rights Alliance13 expressed views on a range of issues, among them the child’s right to play, which, it was claimed, should be ‘facilitated by the development of a national play policy’ (CRA 1997: 47). The UN Committee responded by noting that ‘There had been insufficient information reported on recreational facilities, playgrounds, access to holiday programmes, etc. The child’s right to play should be facilitated by the formulation of a national strategy in that area’ (CRC 1998b: 14; also 1998a). The following year a study commissioned jointly by the Centre for Social and Educational Research at the Dublin Institute of Technology, and the Children’s Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin, found ‘a lack of clear direction, no recognition, no strategy, and no structure for children’s play services … at government or departmental level’ (Webb & Associates 1999: 3). Play and recreation had moved to centre stage, providing stakeholders with something tangible: something that could be used both to exert pressure for reform and measure the extent to which the UNCRC was being implemented in Ireland. It was this contentious issue of lack – lack of provision, lack of political will, lack of resources – that provided the Irish State with a means of demonstrating commitment to the rights of children. Before going further, I need to pause in order to sketch the wider policy landscape in Ireland at this time, because the NPP was but one strand of a comprehensive and complex policy process relating specifically to childhood. The core instrument was a National Children’s Strategy (NCS), launched in 2000,14 and I mention it here only in passing, returning to it in more detail in chapter 5, which examines children’s citizenship. The reason I mention it here is to highlight two novel features of the policy process that culminated in the NCS. First, children were invited to participate in a process of public consultation as part of the lead-in to the launch of the NCS,15 and secondly, the NCS was published in two formats, one of which is a typical policy document with the usual technical jargon around targets and projected outcomes, while the other was written specifically for children, adapted from its parent text by an author of children’s books (NCO 2000b). This approach is mirrored by the reports documenting the public consultation, with one version published as a Report to Children (NCO 2000d). Not only were children consulted in accordance with Article 12 of the UNCRC, but key state actors



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were also apparently making themselves accountable to children. It was as though biosocial power had come to a halt, with children now positioned at the centre of political life as young citizens. To bring this back to the NPP, the Report to Children on the Public Consultation explains that ‘one of the things nearly all of you wrote about was that you need more places to play and hang out’ (NCO 2000d: 4). The adult version is less coy. Not only was this ‘the most pressing issue in the course of the consultations’, but children and young people were also ‘really clear that there is an intrinsic link between the lack of facilities and a whole range of social and personal problems [that] go on to manifest themselves as serious problems for communities and for society as a whole’ (NCO 2000c: 20–2). And in a more explicit restatement of the same point: ‘The young people involved in this consultation repeatedly make a clear case for investment in leisure facilities as a preventive strategy for a whole range of social problems’ (NCO 2000c: 22). Here the provision of play facilities is explicitly framed as a strategic investment in the future, folding back onto the histories of preventive education – from Wilderspin and Stow’s infant training systems, to industrial and reformatory schools (which I will discuss in chapter 6), and passing through Cameron’s ‘broken society’ theme as discussed earlier. There is no apparent reason why this strategic objective should be anything but explicit. After all, the evidence informing the NCS is allegedly derived from listening to what children have to say. Yet, in reporting back to children, this is a discourse that speaks only of responding to their wishes and delivering on their rights. To grasp this slippage and prise it open is to encounter biosocial power masquerading as something else – or at least this is what I am about to suggest. The documents mentioned above provide some evidence to support the claim that children themselves identified playgrounds and leisure facilities as a way of preventing social problems, but it is sparse and inconclusive at best. If there is a pattern in the evidence, it concerns the sanctions that children and young people meet with when they use public space in ways that deviate from its prescribed uses. For example, several contributors reported abuse and harassment on the part of neighbours and Gardaì (police) when they used their skateboards. Similarly, several younger children reported that they had constructed their own swings and tree-houses, but these had been removed by local authorities (in one case a tree was felled to prevent the children from rebuilding their playground) (NCO 2000c: 22–8). The provision of play and recreational facilities is a way of positioning children in social space, so that they are free to act as children are expected to act (by whom?) in those spaces so designated as appropriate. In the absence of such spaces, sanctions may apply. Playgrounds are visible and make visible:

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the ‘inside’ of the playground is observable to the ‘outside’ world of passers-by, and the normative gaze that comes to bear on children playing within the boundaries of the playground is refracted onto the wider society. In short, the playground is a prism that helps to figure a normative childhood. As noted earlier, according to the NPP play is ‘freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated behaviour that actively engages the child … Play is what children do when no-one else is telling them what to do’ (NCO 2004: 11). Actually, this is not quite the whole story. We have seen from examining the histories of the playground that it originates through experiments in the field of education, and its modus operandi is to attempt to take hold of life in the form of childhood with a view to governing the future. Whether cultivating the child’s nature, moulding the child’s moral character or engineering civility, the playground has long been a vehicle for biosocial power. Public playgrounds today are no longer staffed by trained supervisors and instructors as they would have been in the past, but this in itself does not mean that the playground no longer regulates the practice of freedom. Of the various disciplines with a stake in this field, psychology stands out as the one which has probably done most to shape our understanding of the child at play. The ‘ages and stages’ approach to human development has provided an enduring platform for those who claim that children have an innate play ‘impulse’ or ‘instinct’, and that this can be directed, managed or governed. Today, the question of why children should have the time, freedom and space to play is framed by individual and social ‘benefits’ (Coalter and Taylor 2001; Cole-Hamilton et al. 2002; CPPF 2019; NPFA 2000). The thrust of the NPP is that the benefits of play can and should be harnessed and directed to specific ends, and this disturbs how play is defined by the policy itself. It may well be the case that children at play are engaging in ‘freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated behaviour’, but that does not mean that the freedom experienced and exercised by children while at play is not in itself conditioned and directed. A recent statement by the Children’s Play Policy Forum16 in the UK for example warns of a ‘crisis in childhood’ as a result of ‘modern life squeezing play to the margins of children’s lives’, and it goes on to measure the impending ‘cost to society’ in terms of physical and mental health, increasing demand on public services and ‘damage to the economy through lost productivity and skills gaps’ (CPPF 2019). Couple this to a claim made in the Irish NPP that play should ‘aid the economy by developing autonomous adults’ (NCO 2004: 13), and we start to get a clearer sense of the future being prefigured here. And let us not forget that the NPP identifies ‘a national play infrastructure’ as a means of prevention and diversion in the field of juvenile justice (NCO 2004: 45). Put all of this together,



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and it can be argued that the NPP moves in the groove of its historical antecedents. The inclusive playspace: Ready, Steady, Play! The NPP can be interpreted as envisioning the future as an inclusive playspace, which will serve here to sketch an initial outline of childhood in the context of neoliberal enterprise culture (chapters 5–8 will gradually add detail and substance to this outline). The inclusive playspace deploys a Whole Child approach, encompassing all aspects of childhood and all situations and settings so that no child is excluded. It gives children a say in designing policy, it maximises the range of opportunities to play, it guarantees that all children have access to play facilities, and it improves the quality and safety of play equipment and play areas (see NCAC 2006; NCO 2004: 9; 2000a: 6–9, 61). The boundaries of the inclusive playspace extend to a whole variety of situations and settings, such as local communities, childcare facilities, schools, hospitals and public parks. However, moving from the vision to the practice, the NPP states that ‘the provision of fixed equipment playgrounds is the most tangible evidence of a national commitment to supporting play’ (NCO 2004: 16). As a practice, the NPP moves in step with international trends in public sector reform, key features of which include mechanisms of financial transparency and an emphasis on accountability to consumers of public services (Page 2005; Power 1997: 43–5). In Ireland as elsewhere this is operationalised as New Public Management (see Osborne and Gaebler 1992), with indicators of performance the means of demonstrating efficiency, accountability and value for money. Fixed-equipment playgrounds are among the countable things which can be presented as evidence of accountability: the number of playgrounds opened since the NPP was launched; the ratio between playgrounds and population in a given administrative area; the percentage of local authorities with recreation and amenities officers; the proportion of local authorities with a recreation strategy … and the audit trail extends to the inspection and maintenance of playground equipment: the frequency and intensity of inspection, the cost of maintenance and improvement – a universe of numbers demonstrating that action is being taken and the policy is being successfully implemented. In focusing on the provision of fixed-equipment playgrounds, it should not be forgotten that in Ireland and in the UK, so-called ‘anti-social behaviour’ is associated with children and youths ‘hanging around’, or playing ball in the street, or, as noted above, using public spaces and street furniture as ad hoc skate-parks (see Burney 2005; Squires and Stephen 2005). Children who do not conform to social expectations concerning where they play and

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how they play are likely to be confronted by coercive measures of control. Playgrounds are more than an indicator of performance – an auditable entity demonstrating efficient and effective policy implementation: that the Irish State is fully committed to the UNCRC, that it recognises children as young citizens and participants in the policy-making process, and that it will empower and enable children to realise their potential. Playgrounds also give corporeal form to a normative childhood that prefigures the future. Just as the playgrounds of Progressive Era America were conceived as the ideal republic in miniature, so the inclusive playspace is a diagram of the future, and it derives its authority and legitimacy from the process from which it was constituted. As an open, inclusive, transparent process of public deliberation and consensual decision-making, one that breaks new historical ground by giving children a say in the decisions shaping their lives, the NCS and the NPP were both produced with and for children. This amounts to a landmark event, a major innovation both in terms of how policy is made and in terms of transforming adult–child relations. But let us not forget that this also conditions the practice of freedom. The actual title of the NPP is Ready, Steady, Play!, which gives narrative form to biosocial power in the context of neoliberal enterprise culture. It figures a normative childhood, one that resembles a trained athlete (Ready …), awaiting the signal (Steady …) for the game to commence (Play!). The young player knows in advance what to expect, while the context – the posited mode of action – is a contest that generates winners and losers, distinguishing the best from the rest. This marks the significance of what is identified in the NCS as ‘the pressure to compete and succeed’ (NCO 2000a: 6). I will be drilling deeper into this feature of childhood in subsequent chapters, examining in more detail how policy intended to ‘empower’ the young citizen aims to equip children to participate in the game of enterprise, for this is what awaits them in the future. In cases of failure, the fault lies with the player, not with the game. Notes 1 Using a very different register, Mustafa Dikeç examines the events of 2011 as an ‘uprising’ sparked by ‘widespread deprivation, exclusion and anger’ (2018: 55–6). 2 This was a point made by Matt Grist, a senior researcher with the think-tank Demos, in the Channel 4 news report (see also Martin 2012). For a more recent version of the argument see The Economist (2018). 3 Since 2012, the NEET issue has been coordinated at the EU level through the Youth Employment Initiative (YEI) and at the level of member states through Youth Guarantee Schemes. See: http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1176 (accessed 15 July 2019).



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4 Principle 7 of the 1959 Declaration reads as follows: ‘the child is entitled to receive education, which shall be free and compulsory, at least in the elementary stages. He shall be given an education which will promote his general culture and enable him, on a basis of equal opportunity, to develop his abilities, his individual judgement, and his sense of moral and social responsibility, and to become a useful member of society. The best interests of the child shall be the guiding principles of those responsible for his education and guidance; that responsibility lies in the first place with his parents. The child shall have full opportunity for play and recreation, which should be directed to the same purposes as education; society and the public authorities shall endeavour to promote the enjoyment of this right’ (in Detrick 1992: 33, 643–4). 5 The CRC is a panel of independent experts tasked with monitoring implementation of the UNCRC. Details here: www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/CRC/Pages/ CRCIntro.aspx (accessed 12 September 2019). 6 The figure of the ‘Whole Child’ has a history that resonates with the concerns of this book, with antecedents to be found in the writings of Pestalozzi, Froebel and, of course, Rousseau, though some renderings of the Whole Child approach to education decentre this Western-centric heritage by looking to the work of Gandhi (Miller 2010). I will examine the contemporary significance of the Whole Child in more detail in chapter 5. 7 The NPP in Ireland devotes a single paragraph to ‘the commercial involvement in play’, noting that ‘there are a growing number of commercial play facilities around the country, although the actual number is unknown’ (NCO 2004: 34). 8 This list of examples from Ireland, the UK and Australia was compiled in September 2019: Monkey Business (Galway, Republic of Ireland); Jungle King (Donegal, Republic of Ireland); Rumble in the Jungle (Clydach Vale, Wales); Jungle Buddies (Melbourne, Australia); Cheeky Monkeys (Bristol, England); Funky Monkeys (West Bromwich and Stockton-on-Tees, England; Belfast, Northern Ireland; Dublin, Republic of Ireland); Monkey Mania (Melbourne, Australia); Go Bananas (Radstock, England; Tuam, Republic of Ireland; Perth, Australia); Run Amuck (Waterford, Republic of Ireland); Tiny Tearawayz (Bristol, England); Crazy Tykes (Wetherby, England); Kiddy Chaos (Burnley, England), Tunzafun Xtreme (Melbourne, Australia). 9 I am referencing a text published before the NPFA changed its name to Fields in Trust in 2007. The charity aims to protect and promote open spaces for sports and recreation in British cities and towns. See: www.fieldsintrust.org/ (accessed 20 March 2019). 10 The remaining twelve types of play are: symbolic play, socio-dramatic play, social play, creative play, communication play, dramatic play, exploratory play, fantasy play, imaginative play, mastery play, object play, role play (NPFA 2000: 33–4). 11 I owe this point to Stewart Clegg. 12 On the use of Public Space Protection Orders (PSPO) in the UK since their introduction in 2014, see Garrett (2015). The PSPO is covered by the Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act, 2014, and has been described as a ‘geographically defined ASBO’ or anti-social behaviour order. Further details

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here: www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2014/12/part/4/chapter/2/crossheading/ public-spaces-protection-orders/enacted (accessed 25 September 2019). 13 The Children’s Rights Alliance was founded in 1995. For further information see: www.childrensrights.ie/about-us (accessed 15 September 2019). 14 Its successor was launched in 2014 as Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures, which runs until 2020, and is discussed in chapters 5 and 6. 15 2488 children and young people took part in the public consultation. According to the National Children’s Office, 60 per cent of respondents were girls and 40 per cent were boys, with 35 per cent of respondents under the age of thirteen. The age range of participants was 3–19 years (NCO 2000c: 10). 16 The CPPF ‘works to advocate for, promote and increase the understanding of the importance of children’s play and quality, inclusive play provision by working with devolved, national and local government; and the voluntary, public and private sectors throughout the United Kingdom’. See: https:// childrensplaypolicyforum.wordpress.com/ (accessed 2 September 2019).

5 Empowering the young citizen

Stripped down to basics, citizenship is both an equality of status grounded in legally circumscribed freedoms, and a way of allocating rights and duties in accordance with membership of a political community. In the more historically informed sense, citizenship is what Nikolas Rose calls a ‘moral technology of discipline’ (1999: 101). Histories of the playground as discussed in chapter 3 offer a glimpse of what is at stake when we view citizenship in this way, because although we are now witnessing a historically novel event to the extent that citizenship, or at least limited forms of citizenship, are being extended to children, it would seem that citizenship has always encompassed childhood. As Jeremy Roche notes, the ongoing debate around children’s citizenship extends to the ‘symbolic and practical reordering of what it is to be a child, an adult, and a citizen … In our arguments about childhood, children’s rights and citizenship we are arguing about ourselves and our place in the world: it is an argument about politics and how we want to be and live our lives’ (1999: 483–4). Indeed it has long been thus, which is not to suggest some sort of unbroken historical continuity. On the contrary, even to confine the scope of analysis geographically and historically, and I will take T. H. Marshall’s influential theory of citizenship as my point of departure, is to encounter significant contrasts between past and present conceptions of citizenship. Marshall narrated the story of modern citizenship as a linear process gradually unfolding from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, giving rise to a comprehensive bundle of civil, political and social rights. Among the rights that Marshall designated as social was the right to education, which is how he positioned children relative to citizenship: The education of children has a direct bearing on citizenship … The right to education is a genuine social right of citizenship, because the aim of education during childhood is to shape the future adult. Fundamentally it should be

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Before commenting on this passage, I also want to quote Marshall on his views concerning the significance of compulsory education: It was increasingly recognised, as the nineteenth century wore on, that political democracy needed an educated electorate, and that scientific manufacture needed educated workers and technicians. The duty to improve and civilise oneself is therefore a social duty, and not merely a personal one, because the social health of a society depends upon the civilisation of its members. And a community that enforces this duty has begun to realise that its culture is an organic unity and its civilisation a national heritage. (1992: 16)

Originally delivered as two lectures in 1949, Marshall’s account of citizenship provides an indication of the extent to which the ideas I examined in chapter 2 had, at that time, become doxic, or incorporated into what Rancière (2004) calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’. In other words, in Marshall’s account can be seen the extent to which the partitioning of childhood from the rights, duties and freedoms of citizenship was anchored in what Rancière presents as a ‘system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it’ (2004: 12). Otherwise put, the ‘social duty’ that Marshall invokes – to ‘improve and civilise oneself ’ – echoes J. S. Mill’s despotism and Rousseau’s general will (and also the Eliasian theme of a civilising process discussed in chapter 3), though what had transpired in the interim is important, because of course when Marshall addressed his audience at Cambridge University, the state had assumed responsibility for ensuring that children would be civilised. Moreover, as we saw from the earlier discussion on the Playground Association of America, civil society organisations were not always prepared to entrust the training of future citizens to the state or the family. To drill down into citizenship in this way is to begin to see the shortcomings of Marshall’s benign evolutionary account. As argued by Turner (2015) and Bottomore (1992), histories of citizenship are mired in conflict and struggle, orchestrated by people who have had to fight for the rights that Marshall evokes. Important as these histories are and continue to be – think of the Black Lives Matter movement for example – we should not overlook other struggles staged in the name



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of citizenship, including efforts to control or manage the biosocial processes tasked with producing future citizens. The contemporary extension of citizenship to children might be understood as the latest chapter in this generative process of struggle and contestation. A case in point is Tom Cockburn’s Rethinking Children’s Citizenship, where he uses a historical approach to ‘reclaim’ what has been foreclosed upon thus far in the story of citizenship, thereby arguing for an ‘inclusive and progressive citizenship’ (2013: 190). For Cockburn, what is at stake in children’s citizenship is more than a bundle of codified rights to be bestowed upon children. More important is that citizenship holds out the possibility of reconfiguring the power relations that structure adult/child relations. By ‘rethinking’ children’s citizenship, Cockburn’s argument boils down to this: ‘An empowered, confident and interested generation is surely in the interest of all’ (2013: 223). Here is surely a glimpse of biosocial power in the guise of empowerment, which is not to say that I disagree with Cockburn. But what I would add is this: context is crucial. In other words, as suggested by Rose (1999: 226), we need to approach citizenship at the level of historically specific and culturally situated practices. Let me briefly contrast past and present conceptions of citizenship. According to Marshall, it was the combination of democracy, welfare and capitalism that created the conditions of possibility for a distinctly social conception of citizenship. Marshall was no leveller, and he acknowledged that material inequalities would persist, but he believed that political equality combined with the civil and social rights of citizenship would provide the basis of solidarity, or at least a sufficient degree of social stability. Marshall’s theory, which has been extensively critiqued (see for example Walby 1994), tells a story of gradual inclusion and continuous expansion: over time, citizenship was extended to more people while also encompassing a more complex bundle of rights. But what expands can contract, or indeed move in new directions altogether. In his genealogy of social citizenship, Rose calls attention to the significance of the word ‘social’ in a situation where the very idea of the social has become something of an anachronism. In substantiating this point, Rose uses an example from Britain where it was once common to refer to welfare recipients as being ‘on the social’: Those who were on the social were not fellow citizens entitled to support to enable them to cope with temporary difficulties brought about by the ups and downs of a life-cycle, or by unexpected ill health or accident. They were spoken about as if they were somehow different, demeaned, dependent … the source of fiscal, economic and moral problems, to be feared and condemned or pitied and reformed. (1999: 99)

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Rose is here charting what he describes as the ‘death of the social’, which is by no means unique to Britain, and it helps to grasp the nettle of citizenship, by which I mean the innocuous phrase at the start of the quote above: ‘fellow citizens’. Who is counted among the citizenry, who does not qualify and who is disqualified – maybe not de jure but de facto? Until recently, and referring back to Marshall’s lecture, children would have been among those who were automatically discounted and disqualified. Though this is no longer always or necessarily the case, citizenship is still an instrument of division. On the one hand is the politics of Brexit in Britain, US President Trump’s travel ban and his rhetoric on walling-off Mexico, and the long-standing Fortress Europe debate, not to forget the increasing number of stateless people (many of whom are children) seeking asylum – and here it is worth recalling Hannah Arendt when she wrote of stateless persons as devoid of ‘the right to have rights’ (1973: 296). At the risk of generalising, the boundary between those who qualify as ‘fellow citizens’ and those who are disqualified is being policed with increasing vigour, and not just by the state (see Dikeç 2018).1 On the other hand, the scope of citizenship is expanding to include children, or at least those who are counted among ‘the people’. Taken together, these trends might be perceived as pulling in opposite directions – one exclusionary, the other inclusive; yet the ways in which a particular citizenry is constituted through the exclusion of those deemed foreign or alien (nor should we overlook the situation of those with partial or tentative citizenship) is not entirely distinct from how citizenship is configured from within a given population. The extension of citizenship to (some, but not all) children who reside within the boundaries of a nationstate, and the partitioning of the population into those who qualify and those who are disqualified – these are imbricated in the same process of dis/counting, and in this sense there is no radical discontinuity between past and present, the extension of citizenship to children notwithstanding. At the same time, the apparent demise of social citizenship is the story of the new right, neoliberalism and ‘third way’ social democracy, which together have transformed the substance as well as the experience of citizenship. Ideological differences notwithstanding, when examined in relation to the social state, or the state-form that generated the figure of the social citizen, then the new right, neoliberalism and the third way are shades of the same thing (recall Margaret Thatcher’s stance on the ‘nanny’ state – or the state that allegedly mollycoddles and infantilises its citizens). Gerard Delanty (2003) for example has examined how citizenship became governmentalised in the context of third-way politics from the mid-1990s, culminating in a ‘disciplinary’ citizenship. By staging a critique of liberal rights discourse, while also claiming to offer an alternative to neoliberal policies of marketisation, deregulation and privatisation (even as these same



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policies were re-branded and re-deployed), citizenship was reconfigured by appropriating ideas such as ‘opportunity’, which in practice meant a combination of personal responsibility, community (as a devolved mode of local social control), compulsory language classes and civic values courses for immigrants, and also – this one a flagship idea of the British Labour Party during Tony Blair’s leadership – an insistence on ‘respect’ as the solution to anti-social behaviour. Used in this way, the notion of respect folds back onto civility as discussed in chapter 4, and it turns the screw of Marshall’s claim that civilising oneself is a duty. As argued by Mustafa Dikeç (2018), the alleged ‘incivility’ that gets branded as ‘riots’ or ‘anti-social behaviour’ might also be interpreted as defiance in the face of growing inequality, which has a bearing on Rose’s rendering of citizenship as a moral technology of discipline. Gathered together, the perspectives and insights I have sketched above converge as the context that serves as the backdrop to the emergence of children’s citizenship, and it is this context which is explored in this chapter. As noted in chapter 4, recent policy initiatives in Ireland have incorporated children into the policy-making process, demonstrating the Irish State’s commitment to Article 12 of the UNCRC – that ‘the views of children must be taken into account in matters affecting them’ (NCO 2000a: 6). Framed by values such as ‘child-centred’ and ‘children first’, and recognising children as ‘active participants’ and ‘active contributors’, the central idea driving these initiatives is that children should be, and are now being, empowered. The errors and injuries of the past, whereby children were subject to coercive and disciplinary controls, are to be overcome by instituting practices that listen to children and include children in the design and implementation of policy. In actuality, as opposed to hypothetically or potentially, children in Ireland are now recognised as young citizens. If, as noted by Devine and Cockburn (2018), children are no longer future citizens or citizens-in-themaking, but are already citizens, then it might be suggested that the figure of the young citizen brings the future into the present. So, what type of future is prefigured by the young citizen, and how is the citizenship which is currently being bestowed on children configured? The ‘Whole Child’ and the young citizen In chapter 4 we briefly encountered the figure of the Whole Child, and in this chapter I want to stage a critical encounter with this way of framing childhood in the context of the Irish policy landscape, focusing in particular on the National Children’s Strategy launched in 2000. This laid the groundwork for a comprehensive grid of initiatives and instruments that I will return to in more detail in chapter 6. Here the focus will be how the Whole Child

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calibrates biosocial power by threading children’s rights through the eye of a conception of citizenship that exhibits certain fictional qualities.2 The NCS presents the Whole Child as ‘a coherent and inclusive view of childhood’ – it recognises children’s capacity to ‘interact with and shape the world around them’; it affords a way of identifying and meeting children’s needs; and it seeks to ‘empower families and communities’. Moreover, as a policy ‘perspective’ the Whole Child is presented as having both intuitive appeal and international legitimacy: • It ‘provides a more complete understanding of children’s lives’. • It ‘draws on the most recent research and knowledge about children’s development and the relationship between children and family, community and the wider society’. • It ‘anchors the [National Children’s] Strategy to a coherent and inclusive view of childhood’. • It is ‘implicit in how most parents think about their children’. • It is ‘endorsed as good practice underpinning legislation and policy and service developments internationally’. • It is ‘compatible with the spirit of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child’ (NCO 2000a: 24). Given the extent to which the Whole Child defers to recent research and good practice internationally, it is curious that no literature dedicated to this idea is referenced in the NCS itself. Instead the Whole Child is assembled from nine ‘interlinked dimensions of childhood development’, which are presented as being key to ensuring that all children in Ireland ‘enjoy a satisfying childhood and make a successful transition into adulthood’ (NCO 2000a: 10).3 There is nothing particularly novel in the elements from which the Whole Child is assembled, other than perhaps recognising that children are ‘active participants’. It is this agentic feature of the Whole Child that the NCS seeks to harness and direct, or at least this is my argument. When I say harness and direct I mean this in the Foucauldian sense of acting upon children’s capacity for action, partly by structuring the ways in which it is possible to act (Foucault 1982). As active participants, young citizens in Ireland are now endowed with rights and opportunities to participate in social and civic life, such as Dáil na nÓg, which is the national children’s parliament, originally conceived as a way of ‘making citizenship a real life experience for children’ (NCO 2000a: 32).4 At the same time, the accompanying developmental conception of childhood exhibits teleological reasoning with echoes of Joseph Lee’s argument from the start of the twentieth century – that ‘children do not play because they are young; they are young in order that they may play’ (Lee 1915: 5–6). First, according to the NCS, ‘childhood



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is a series of developmental stages’ (my emphasis here and below); secondly, ‘children achieve outcomes at each of these stages of development’, and thirdly ‘childhood years also provide a preparation for taking on the responsibilities of active citizenship in later life’ (NCO 2000a: 25). In this way the Whole Child lays the groundwork in figuring citizenship, and in terms of how this is configured, it proves to be the policy equivalent of a performative contradiction. The Whole Child is anchored in an agentic conception of childhood such that children are recognised as active participants in family, community and social life, while the NCS’s ‘vision’ is ‘an Ireland where children are respected as young citizens with a valued contribution to make and a voice of their own’ (2000a: 10, emphasis added). At the same time, the NCS is explicit in stating that the purpose of formal and informal supports is to empower children to ‘achieve’ the ‘outcomes’ associated with ‘rounded development’, which in turn is ‘preparation for the responsibilities of active citizenship in later life’ (2000a: 11, 25). As argued by Joanne Faulkner, we here have the paradoxical situation whereby children are simultaneously already citizens and the raw material of citizenship (2011a: 16, 50–77). To the extent that the NCS addresses this apparent paradox, it does so in a glossary of terms appended to the main document, where the entry for ‘Citizenship’ isn’t actually defined in any substantive way. Instead it reads like a disclaimer: ‘The terms citizen and citizenship are used in their non-legal sense’ (NCO 2000a: 101). I don’t think this rhetorical move is inconsequential, and I will explain why in due course. First, however, I need to say a few things about the second iteration of the NCS, which was published in 2014 as Better Outcomes Brighter Futures, and which is set to run until 2020.5 The figure of the Whole Child is not mentioned at all in the 168 pages of Better Outcomes Brighter Futures, and yet the substance of the Whole Child is apparent throughout.6 On one level, the register of holism has morphed into a more explicit governmentality, denoted as a ‘whole-of-government approach’ and a ‘whole-of-society response’, together aiming to ensure the best ‘outcomes’ for children (DCYA 2014). On a more fundamental level, this emphasis on outcomes eclipses and subsumes the Whole Child, placing the figure of the young citizen in the foreground. In terms of how the young citizen is framed, Better Outcomes Brighter Futures reads like a pledge or promise, with one of six ‘transformational goals’ defined as follows: Listening to and involving children and young people is a fundamental social inclusion process through which children and young people are empowered to become actors in the decisions that affect their lives and to be socially included, active citizens in their own right. (DCYA 2014: 31)

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Whether or not this is transformational or merely aspirational, it is encapsulated within an overriding emphasis on outcomes that bring the future into the present while also re-positioning children at the threshold of the prior to and the not yet. On closer inspection, it turns out that preparing children for the future, or, more specifically, working backwards from projected outcomes to the value of investing in childhood, is to be understood as a form of ‘capital investment’: Investment in children and young people is a social responsibility and it makes good economic sense, but it needs to be guided by a medium to long-term perspective. Investment in children and young people is akin to a capital investment from which significant returns flow. Hence the focus in this Policy Framework on an agreed and enduring set of outcomes to guide decisions and measure progress. (DCYA 2014: 3)

This privileging of projected (and socially scripted) outcomes is by no means unique to the Irish case, and is very much in step with an international trend informed by what Jan De Vos presents as a pervasive ‘neuropsychological doxa’ (2017: 33), meaning the proliferation of policy axioms distilled from neuroscience, behavioural economics and developmental psychology. With respect to Better Outcomes Brighter Futures, the core claim is that investment in ‘the very early years’ (0–3 years) yields the highest return (DYCA 2014: 15). Otherwise put, early intervention is posited as the most effective means of offsetting the future costs of crime, welfare dependency, obesity, poor mental health, and substance misuse, most especially in the case of ‘disadvantaged’ children (see Smith 2018). To put this in context, just as disruptive innovation7 has become an axiom of neoliberal enterprise culture, so intervention that succeeds in ‘disrupting the emergence of poor outcomes’ (DCYA 2014: xi–xii) is fast becoming policy doxa. Biosocial power now targets the ‘developing brain architecture’ 8 of the youngest of young citizens – infant children – because (to borrow from Faulkner) this has become the raw material of citizenship. It also marks the point at which the tensioning of children’s citizenship – between participation and protection – is most acute. I am going to set this neuropsychological doxa to one side for now and examine it later through the lens of disadvantage (chapter 7). In the remainder of this chapter I want to focus on the figure of the child as an ‘active citizen’. It could of course be argued that my earlier suggestion – that the partitioning of the young citizen from adult citizenship amounts to a performative contradiction – is misplaced; that citizenship is a learning process, and that to bestow full citizenship on children would be to burden them with



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responsibilities and unrealistic expectations that, particularly in the case of very young children, would have all sorts of negative consequences.9 One way of overcoming this apparent dilemma is Elizabeth Cohen’s concept of ‘semi-citizenship’, which she presents as a ‘middle ground’ that recognises that children are ‘citizens by certain standards and not by others’, and which means – in practice – tailoring citizenship to the ‘temporality of childhood’ (2005: 234, 236). Marc Jans takes a somewhat different approach, asking whether it is ‘meaningful to provide children with an adult-centric notion of citizenship? If not, in what way can children be seen as citizens?’ (2004: 27). Jans’s answer to this question is the idea of ‘child-size’ citizenship, which is intended to capture the playfulness of children as well as the ways in which children are meaning-makers. I would question Jans’s view that play is a universal characteristic of children/childhood, because it seems to me that this is a contingent and contestable lens through which to see and interpret what it is that children do as they interact with each other and create the worlds they experience and inhabit. Yet these ideas – semicitizenship and child-size citizenship – are intriguing, particularly when laced together, because this is like taking one step towards an envisioned future while at the same time holding on to the past. Similar to the figuring of the Whole Child as discussed above, this is to recognise children as citizens, thereby bringing the future into the present, while simultaneously relocating childhood at the threshold of the prior to and the not yet. If this is empowering children (I’m referring to the transformational goal cited above), then perhaps we need to find a way of taking up a critical perspective on empowerment itself, not just as an idea or ideal, but as a practice – as something done with and to children. In terms of how empowerment relates specifically to children’s citizenship, Jeremy Roche argues that ‘strategies will have to be thought through whereby children are empowered in a range of settings and this will require at the very outset a recognition of the relations of power at issue and positive action to address these imbalances’ (1999: 488). How might this be accomplished? Roche suggests the provision of safe spaces to talk with and listen to children, adding that this does not in itself overcome the modes of subjection and co-optation often orchestrated in the guise of consultation and participation. The test, argues Roche, ‘is whether we are able to listen properly to children and young people when they are saying things, which are “new” and unfamiliar’ (1999: 491 n. 6). I have provided some evidence in chapter 4 of how listening to children does not mean that they are heard, and I want to pursue this issue further by focusing specifically on what Roche (1999: 476) refers to as children’s positioning relative to participatory spaces and forums (see also Devine and Cockburn 2018: 146). The way that Roche

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presents this issue is worth quoting verbatim: ‘children have to start from where they are socially positioned. This means that they have to make their own space in spaces not of their making’ (1999: 479). It is this space-making process that I will examine in the next section, focusing in particular on how the power relations that Roche identifies – concerning those who fabricate the spaces where children’s participation is staged, and how children are positioned to actually participate – have been configured dialogically in Ireland. This will serve as an initial step in working towards what I will later present as biosocial empowerment. Figuring the ‘resilient’ child This section begins by briefly recapping and elaborating on a few points from chapter 4, which form the back-story to a whole series of initiatives that have followed in the wake of the National Children’s Strategy in Ireland. The UNCRC serves as a point of departure in this regard. Having ratified the UNCRC in 1992, the Irish State was required to file an Initial Report with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, and did so in 1996 (DFA 1996). Civil society groups are also permitted to submit reports to the UN Committee (known as Parallel Reports), and the Children’s Rights Alliance (mentioned in chapter 4) availed of the opportunity to submit a report titled Small Voices: Vital Rights, calling for ‘a coordinated and comprehensive approach towards implementation of the Convention’ (CRA 1997: 9). The UN Committee was in agreement, and in its concluding observations recommended that the Irish State ‘adopt a comprehensive national strategy for children, incorporating the principles and provisions of the Convention in a systematic manner in the designing of all its policies and programmes’ (CRC 1998a: 5). The following year, the Minister for State with responsibility for Children called for submissions to ‘map out a direction for the next ten years through a set of realisable goals which will address all aspects of the child and young person’ (DOH 1999). An inter-departmental group of senior officials from eight Government Departments, together with a legal adviser from the Attorney General’s Office, were to oversee the development of a national strategy. Two panels were also established to provide expert advice: an NGO service providers’ panel, and a research and information panel. Finally, a process of public consultation was initiated to incorporate the views of children (more on this below). In November 2000, the National Children’s Strategy, subtitled Our Children – Their Lives, was launched.10 Not only did this set the scene for what would later become an overarching emphasis on outcomes as discussed above; but it also laid the groundwork for what would subsequently become a core characteristic of children’s citizenship



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in the context of neoliberal enterprise culture – something that has since become part of the currency of childhood: ‘resilience’. To begin with the structure of the NCS, the supporting armature is made up of three strands: a ‘unifying vision’, an ‘engine of change’ and what was presented earlier as the Whole Child ‘perspective’. The unifying vision is ‘an Ireland where children are respected as young citizens with a valued contribution to make and a voice of their own; where all children are cherished and supported by family and the wider society; where they enjoy a fulfilling childhood and realise their potential’ (NCO 2000a: 10). As for the ‘engine’ of change, this exhibits features of its historical antecedents – referred to in chapter 2 as the anthropological machine – in being powered by ends (or ‘outcomes’ as these are now coded) which are framed as three ‘national goals’. This triumvirate of goals is threaded together by the claim that the NCS ‘seeks to listen, to think about and act more effectively for children’ (NCO 2000a: 92). In terms of listening, children are to ‘have a voice in matters which affect them and their views will be given due weight in accordance with their age and maturity’ (NCO 2000a: 30).11 The goal of thinking about, or knowing children, is to be realised by commissioning research, developing better information management systems, monitoring the impact of policy programmes, and adopting an evidence-based approach to service provision (NCO 2000a: 38). The third goal – acting effectively – is about ‘quality supports and services’, both ‘the universal and the tightly targeted’, otherwise referred to as ‘the supportive and the custodial’. Here the NCS recommends a ‘renewed emphasis on prevention and early intervention’ (NCO 2000a: 7, 44–5). I will come back to this in more detail shortly. The fourth and final element emplaces the Whole Child at the centre of the NCS. In addition to what I have already said about this way of framing childhood, here I would add that it makes an incision in the archive – a cut that breaks with the past and clears the way for a new beginning. Positioned at the centre of the NCS, the Whole Child is indeed ‘whole’, or indivisible. In relation to the triumvirate of goals however, the Whole Child is divided between services and supports which are universal – matching the needs of all children – and those focused on children with ‘additional needs’. It is here, in the relation between national goals and the division of the Whole Child, that the problem of adversity arises. The NCS is ‘not a report on the lives of children in Ireland but a means to intervene in their lives in a way that will enhance their status and improve their quality of life’ (NCO 2000a: 12, emphasis added). Strategic intervention is the name of the game, and the most general of the adversaries to be tackled – linked to all of the other ‘additional needs’ – is the negative or harmful effects

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that result from the ‘pressure to compete and succeed’ (NCO 2000a: 6). Not all children can withstand these ‘social, psychological and emotional pressures’, exacerbated by child poverty, youth homelessness, racism and discrimination, and manifesting as suicide, harmful behaviours such as smoking, alcohol and drug use, anti-social behaviour and criminal activity, teenage pregnancy and early school-leaving (NCO 2000a: 6–7, 23). There is actually little, if anything, in this constellation of adversaries that stands out as being particularly new; indeed, many can be traced to debates on delinquency and neglect during the nineteenth century. To take the issue of early school-leaving, I have already mentioned the significance of compulsory education for early theorists of citizenship such as T. H. Marshall. Education is now framed in terms of rights, inclusion and equality, but among those who championed mass education in the nineteenth century, the school was both a preventive technology and a means of governing the future. While it was inevitable that some children would escape the influence of the school (and other, more coercive forms of control were developed to deal with these recalcitrant cases), the expectation was that the majority would comply or succumb to the demands of power. Foucault (1977) used the image of the panopticon to theorise this disciplinary mode of power. But when the unidirectional gaze of panoptic power is transformed into dialogue, then we have moved to a somewhat different way of configuring power relations. The NCS listens to children as well as acting upon their capacities and circumstances, and it is here that the figure of the Whole Child connects up with Foucault’s remark that neoliberalism is a ‘game between inequalities’ (2008: 120). Addressing the ‘additional needs’ of children means ensuring that all children are incorporated into the neoliberal game of inequalities. This is how we might grasp the meaning of participation as this applies to the young citizen: each and all must be able to withstand ‘the pressure to compete and succeed’. This also offers a critical perspective on resilience. Better Outcomes Brighter Futures is explicit in using this to apportion responsibility for achieving its envisioned outcomes – ‘the State alone’, we are told, ‘cannot achieve the national outcomes set out here for children and young people. Children and young people have to achieve them for themselves.’ Notwithstanding this (by now obligatory) recognition of children’s agency, it is also acknowledged that children must be supported in achieving the prescribed outcomes, and so the state will ensure that ‘interventions are made at key times that support the building of resilience, supporting all children and young people in dealing well with what life brings them’ (DCYA 2014: 14). The figure of the resilient child is the egalitarian face of biosocial power in the context of neoliberal enterprise culture, and the danger here concerns its normativity. As Bonnie Honig (2012) points out, resilience exhibits a tendency to reinforce ‘the already abundant



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pressures on individual subjects to just be everything we need them to be, all on their own’. The big dream The fact that children were invited to participate in the public consultation that culminated in the NCS underpins one of its central claims: that it is ‘a major new development in the formulation of government policy’ (NCO 2000a: 8). With the support of the Children’s Rights Alliance and the National Youth Council, children participated in the public consultation in three ways: through a ‘targeted’ consultation in five primary and five postprimary schools; through an open invitation published in newspapers and announced on children’s television, asking children to write or email the Minister of State with responsibility for Children; and through ‘in-depth’ consultation conducted by ten organisations working with children and young people (NCO 2000c: 7; 2000d: 2; 2000a: 99). What I want to focus on here is not what the 2,488 children who participated in the consultation process had to say (I touched on this in chapter 4), but on how the NCS was communicated to children after the process of consultation had concluded.12 If, as is claimed, the NCS inaugurates a break with the past, that is, if there is in fact evidence of listening to what children have to say, then we might expect to be able to distil this from how the dialogue was recorded and publicly communicated. I noted in chapter 4 that the Report on the Public Consultation was published in two formats: one for adults and another for children (NCO 2000c, 2000d). The launch of the NCS replicated this innovation by appointing a children’s writer to produce a special children’s version of the policy document.13 It was an Inter-Departmental Group that agreed this approach, and on the basis of this decision the dialogical approach to policy was transformed into story-time. In commissioning a writer, a brief was prepared and sent out to eleven candidates. The winning proposal identified a number of possible pitfalls, particularly with respect to the stipulation that the text should be aimed at children 4–12 years of age. It was suggested that this was ‘fraught with difficulties’, and that a more suitable approach would be to write ‘a series of documents for different age groups’. It was also suggested that if the envisioned booklet adopted a ‘light-hearted tone’, then children would be able to distinguish it from school textbooks and thus ‘feel empowered’ by the NCS. Neither suggestion was approved by the Minister, but a compromise position was reached. The language used in the document would be pitched at eight-year-olds, while shorter and simpler sentences would be added to each page for younger children. A minor disagreement between author and

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authority perhaps, but this low-intensity struggle was part of what shaped the process of communication. In one of the most significant passages of the children’s version of the text, children are presented with the idea of a ‘big dream’, which is explained as follows: The Taoiseach [Prime Minister], the government, and the Dáil [Parliament] all think children are very important. In fact, they think children are so important that they have a dream for all the children of Ireland … And the government wants everyone who cares for children to share the dream … That’s a pretty big dream! They want all the children to grow up happy … Now when you have a dream as big as that, you need to have some good ideas about how you are going to make the dream come true. And so the government has come up with a plan to make things better for children. The name of this plan is The National Children’s Strategy. (NCO 2000b: 9–10)

This passage can be read as an act of translation, yet it is also more than that. As an attempt to make policy discourse accessible to children, it is also a form of persuasion. The idea of a ‘Big Dream’ may have a certain appeal in terms of communicating to children, but as I’ll demonstrate shortly, there are some very questionable claims nested within this fantasy of making dreams come true. In addition, it should be noted that the meaning of ‘plan’ and ‘strategy’ may, to some extent, be interchangeable, but they are certainly not equivalent. In the most general sense, planning is the application of means–ends rationality. Strategy, on the other hand, is the art of war, and its modus operandi spans guile, intelligence, strength and, if deemed necessary, deceit. A strategy may involve planning, but what sets it apart – certainly as operationalised by the NCS – is that it presupposes a tactical relation to adversity. Adults and children are apparently joint authors of the NCS, but they are divided by the distance between normative policy discourse and a form of communication that appeals to the imagination rather than the young citizen’s ability to reason, discriminate and judge. Policy discourse can of course be analysed as a type of narrative, but story-telling works by suspending disbelief. Coupled to this is the division of the Whole Child between universal needs and ‘additional’ needs, which is where ‘prevention and early intervention’ come into play. Straining against the NCS’s unifying vision are divisions insisted upon by the Strategy itself, which is how biosocial empowerment comes into focus. I have mentioned certain questionable claims written into the story of a Big Dream, and I’ll mention two examples. First, it was noted above that child poverty is one of the adversaries framed by the NCS. When it comes



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to communicating this to children, they are told that ‘the Government wants … to set up really good childcare for young children and to make things easier for parents who are trying to work and bring up children at the same time’ (NCO 2000b: 21). In conveying this simple message – that the solution to child poverty lies less in social supports than in the earning capacity of a child’s parent or parents – children are tutored in the axioms of neoliberalism. A second example: while the adult version is explicit in confronting ‘anti-social behaviour and criminal activity’, children are told that ‘the government wants … children who get in trouble and break the law not to have to go to jail but to be looked after in child-friendly places and helped to sort out their problems’ (NCO 2000b: 21). Here again young citizens are coached in how to understand the nature of ‘their’ problems, which are coded in a behavioural register, such that problems are to be addressed by taking ownership and practising responsible autonomy. The Big Dream is for all children ‘to have fun, learn a lot and grow up into happy adults’ (NCO 2000b: 9), but what this effectively means is that each child must learn how to respond to, cope with, or at the very least withstand, the ‘pressure to compete and succeed’ – how to be resilient in the face of pervasive adversity. Having consulted with children, and as the policy process shifted to the task of communicating to children, the preventive logic of intervention was withdrawn into the background. But why? Research into what children know about the world around them – not the imaginary worlds we might associate with ‘childhood’, but the realities of politics, war, violence, crime, sexual assault – indicates that children as young as seven are capable of understanding why preventive measures might be necessary (see Cullingford 1992; Devine 2002; O’Connor 2008: 73–5, 83–8, 99). Insofar as this dialogical approach to policy-making seems to gesture towards Rancière’s stance in defence of an ‘equality of intelligence’ (2007: 275), in fact it accomplishes the opposite. The story of a Big Dream for children occludes the extent to which the Whole Child is partitioned along the folds of universal supports and targeted interventions. Within these folds, mixing with the prescriptive cure-all known as resilience, is something that seemingly crystallises the contemporary emphasis on children’s agency, rights and citizenship: empowerment. Biosocial empowerment Nearly half a century ago, the art critic and novelist John Berger announced that ‘The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language and for what purpose’ (1972: 33). Berger was tuning into

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something far more encompassing than is initially suggested by that little word ‘art’. If we adopt a more expansive and ancient conception of aesthetics (aesthesis), then what Berger says about art extends to what can be sensed and how we make sense of what we sense – what can be seen or remains unseen; what can be heard and what counts as language as opposed to noise; what is thinkable in relation to what is seen and heard (see Rancière 2004). In this way, it could be argued that it is the arts of governing – the mentalities and forms of knowledge, and the practical techniques deployed in administering individuals and populations – that no longer exist as they once did. In an age stamped by ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ politics, as well as digital nudge technologies and troll factories used to shape and steer public sentiment, it seems that what matters now are the ‘uses’ and ‘purposes’ that Berger refers to – the ways in which symbols, images and words circulate, combine and compete for market share. Truth has become narrative, and narrative often dissolves the distinction between fiction and fact. No coincidence, then, that communicating to young citizens has become a matter of story-telling, or that this way of taking hold of life – of prefiguring the future by governing childhood in accordance with socially scripted (and prescriptive) ‘outcomes’ – is discursively coded as empowerment. And there is no denying the allure of this story, which begins and ends with the figure of the empowered child. In terms of defining exactly what empowerment is or what it means, Rosalind Eyben and Rebecca Napier-Moore (2010) have examined its ‘fuzzy’ qualities, suggesting that – whether because of or despite this fuzziness – the idea of empowerment exhibits a ‘normative resonance’. Empowerment is evocative and suggestive of emancipatory processes, of a movement away from subjection, domination and debilitating forms of dependency, and towards something better, or freer, or more just. In the field of community development for example, empowerment has been described as a ‘multidimensional social process that helps people gain control over their own lives’ (Page and Czuba 1999); for those combating poverty it encapsulates a ‘process of transferring decision-making power from influential sectors to poor communities and individuals who have traditionally been excluded from it’ (CPA 2008); and in the field of international development it is closely aligned to gender equality, an example being USAID’s ‘Female Empowerment Policy’, which envisions ‘a state in which both men and women have equal opportunity to benefit from and contribute to economic, social, cultural and political development; enjoy socially valued resources and rewards; and realise their human rights’ (USAID 2018). All three examples suggest that being empowered is somehow transformative, and that what is transformed are relations of power: from an initial hierarchy or asymmetry to a situation of shared or concerted power.



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There is however another way of getting to grips with empowerment – which brings me back to Rose’s approach to citizenship as a moral technology of discipline. Karen Baistow (1994) has examined a trend towards empowerment in the field of social work, and her analysis draws out the dual ‘regulatory’ and ‘liberatory’ implications of this for empowerment ‘candidates’. Similarly, examining programmes to combat poverty in the US, Barbara Cruikshank (1994) shows us how the ‘will to empower’ the dependent poor harnesses the positive attributes of empowerment to ‘technologies of citizenship’. In both studies, empowerment targets problem behaviours and problem populations, and it operates through the strategic objective of acting both through and upon the actions of people who are notionally ‘free’ but who are perceived to be practising the ‘wrong’ kind of freedom. And what of the will to empower children, in Ireland as discussed above but also further afield? Vikki Bell’s (1993) work on governing childhood suggests that childhood is being ‘deployed’ through programmes of empowerment, which has clear resonance with what I have presented above as ‘outcomes’ – the socially scripted ends that the figure of the empowered and resilient child is enjoined to strive towards. A caveat is warranted here, because it is important to resist any temptation to attribute this deployment of childhood to design or intention. What Cruikshank means by the ‘will to empower’ is not the will of a single actor or coalition of actors – this is not a case of a ruling class or a power elite manipulating the masses (Mills 1956), controlling a hidden agenda (Bachrach and Baratz 1962) or capitalising on a ‘false consciousness’ (Lukes 2005). Instead it is a process of formation that involves a multiplicity of actors and actions – a process that Foucault attempted to capture in his somewhat cryptic notion of ‘non-subjective intentionality’. I will bump Foucault’s figure of thought into the next chapter, which maps this multiplicity by examining the field of health. Notes 1 Examples include Alt-Right rallies in the US, Pegida demonstrations in Germany, Soldiers of Odin in Finland, Storm Alliance in Canada, True Blue Crew in Australia and the National Militia in Ukraine. 2 The Whole Child is also present in the National Play Policy as discussed in chapter 4, the National Recreation Policy (NCO 2007) and the National Set of Child Well-Being Indicators, designed to inform a reporting process on the State of the Nation’s Children (NCO 2005b). 3 The nine dimensions of childhood development are listed as follows: physical and mental wellbeing, emotional and behavioural wellbeing, intellectual capacity, spiritual and moral wellbeing, identity, self-care, family relationships, social and peer relationships, social presentation (NCO 2000a: 27).

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4 The inaugural Dáil na nÓg was held in 2010, and is now an established biennial event. Further details can be found here: www.comhairlenanog.ie/ (accessed 15 September 2019). 5 TUSLA (the national child and family agency) was also established in January 2014. Details here: www.tusla.ie/ (accessed 15 September 2019). 6 It is worth noting that the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) launched its Whole Child approach to education in 2014, the same year as Better Outcomes Brighter Futures was launched. The Whole Child approach of the ASCD is presented as ‘an effort to transition from a focus on narrowly defined academic achievement to one that promotes the long-term development and success of all children. Through this approach, ASCD supports educators, families, community members, and policymakers as they move from a vision about educating the whole child to sustainable, collaborative actions.’ To this end, the ASCD seeks to ensure that ‘each student is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged’ (see: www.ascd.org/whole-child.aspx). Although not referenced in Better Outcomes Brighter Futures, the ASCD’s ‘five Whole Child tenets’ (healthy, safe, engaged, supported and challenged) are broadly similar to the five ‘national outcomes’ codified by the policy framework in Ireland: active and healthy, achieving, safe, economically secure, connected and respected. 7 Clayton Christensen describes disruptive innovation as ‘a process by which a product or service takes root … at the bottom of the market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors’ (see: www.claytonchristensen.com/key-concepts/ (accessed 23 November 2015). 8 The phrase ‘developing brain architecture’ is quoted from Better Outcomes Brighter Futures (DCYA 2014: 15), and is examined in detail in chapter 7 of this volume. 9 This resonates with the fictional story told in Captain Fantastic, as discussed in the introduction to this volume. 10 The time-lapse between the end of the NCS in 2010 and the launch of Better Outcomes Brighter Futures in 2014 is part of a context shaped by the austerity programme instituted as a response to the financial crisis from 2008. I discuss this briefly in chapter 6. 11 The wording of this national goal is broadly similar to Article 12.1 of the UNCRC. 12 This section is based on personal communication with the Office of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs in 2010. It should also be noted that the mechanism of consulting with children and young people was also used during the lead-in to Better Outcomes Brighter Futures, with the views of 66,705 children and young people collected via short questionnaires distributed in schools and Youthreach centres (see DCYA 2014: 122). Youthreach is a Department of Education and Skills education, training and work experience programme for early school-leavers aged 15–20 (see: www.youthreach.ie/what-is-youthreach/ (accessed 17 September 2019)). 13 Two hundred thousand copies of the children’s version were printed, twice as many as its ‘adult’ counterpart, though both were also freely available online.

6 Childhood as a national asset: the medical and moral framing of ‘health’

The initial aim of this chapter is to reconstruct an apparatus that began to take shape during the nineteenth century and was consolidated during the early decades of the twentieth. Originally assembled around the figure of the ‘neglected’ child, and operating at the intersection not only of the biological and the social, but also the medical and the moral, the object of inquiry is more than it appears to be. It appears in the guise of health but on closer inspection proves to be a composite entity – part school, part hospital and part prison. The more encompassing objective of the chapter is to stage an encounter with a particular form of biosocial power that has acquired Procrustean properties. For ease of discussion, let me present this simply as Procrustean power. As argued by Sean Noah Walsh (2012), Procrustean power operates according to the logic of the ancient Greek myth, which tells the story of a sadistic smith who lured travellers into his home to rest their weary bodies on an iron bed. Once prostrate they were manacled by Procrustes, and being either too short or too tall in stature to conform to the length of his bed, Procrustes would go to work on his victims as though they were lumps of metal, using hammer and saw to stretch or reduce their bodies so that they were an exact fit. Following the same logic, Procrustean power attempts to ensure that each and all conform to a normative fiction that is made real through practices and technologies that go to work on behaviours, dispositions and circumstances that – from the standpoint of its advocates, architects and technicians – must be made to fit the fabricated reality. What is proposed in this chapter, continuing the theme of biosocial empowerment from chapter 5, is that neoliberal enterprise culture has become a Procrustean bed, with biosocial power doing the work of fashioning life – not through the coercive equivalents of saws and hammers, but by empowering and supporting children in accordance with prescribed outcomes.

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The first part of this chapter tracks the moral and medical framing of health from the beginnings of reformatory education through to a strategy of public hygiene. Originating in the problem of delinquency, the scope of these practices gradually expanded so that by the start of the twentieth century childhood as such had become a ‘national asset’, with the technique of school medical inspection – a form of biosocial quality control – tasked with producing healthy, industrious and self-disciplined subjects. The chapter subsequently moves towards the present, adding one final layer to the case material from Ireland, and more specifically by examining a policy framework called Healthy Ireland, the aim of which is to ‘reduce health inequalities’ by ‘empowering people and communities’. What this means in effect is that individuals are to take responsibility and make ‘right choices’, and as was the case in the past, childhood is identified as being key to successful implementation of this strategy. This helps to explain the extent to which children are now enmeshed in a networked constellation of instruments, agencies and techniques that measure, monitor and manage childhood. While this apparatus does not exhibit the singularity of a sovereign will, it nevertheless governs by seeking to ensure that no child is excluded from the neoliberal version of opportunity. The final section begins the work of scaling-up the analysis, moving beyond the specifics of the Irish case by reviewing the issue of childhood obesity and examining how this recalibrates the moral register of health. Childhood as a ‘national asset’ Reformatory education was a seedbed of innovation during the early decades of the nineteenth century, and among the many experiments were the Rauhe Haus reformatory in Hamburg and the Mettray agricultural colony in France (Barnes 1989: 21–4). In Britain and Ireland, the initial response to the problem of vagrant, destitute and criminal children took the form of ragged schools, but it was the first industrial feeding school, established in Aberdeen in 1841, that would signal the shape of things to come. Within a decade, a number of prominent individuals – social reformers such as Mary Carpenter – were pressing for legislation to institute a system of publicly funded reformatory and industrial schools. Initially there was no substantive difference between these schools other than in name, and in Carpenter’s writings both are subsumed under the heading ‘penal reformatory schools’. However, an emergent distinction was already evident in the way that Carpenter split the problem of delinquency into the two classes of ‘dangerous’ and ‘perishing’.1 For others this necessitated a dual strategy, so that the reformatory school would rebuild the character of children already hardened in criminal habits (hence dangerous), while the industrial school was



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envisioned as a preventive intervention, targeting the children of the perishing class exposed to the demoralising influence of ‘depraved and profligate’ parents, and thus destined to become paupers, prostitutes and criminals (Pim 1854).2 Differences aside, the objective was singular: to rescue children from what Carpenter called ‘neglect’. The next section of this chapter examines the origins of these schools, though it should be noted that I will not be discussing their now notorious histories or exploring how many of these institutions came to be managed by religious orders. Instead the focus will be on the ideas that brought them into existence, and the ways in which these ideas were made practical and technical. The following section examines the strategy of public hygiene in the same way, and it may seem as though I am sidestepping the constraints of empirical analysis, and in particular – here referring specifically to Ireland – what Ruth Barrington has described as ‘the immense influence of the Catholic Church’ in shaping the field of public health (1987: 2). My focus is not that of reconstructing a unified history of these institutions; instead the aim is to examine how instruments of biosocial power that govern through health, and which operate both at the level of individuals and population, have been assembled around the figure of the child. Reformatory education: the school as a ‘moral hospital’ The reformatory movement cohered around the view that the existing system of punishment was wholly inadequate, and reformers were armed with numbers that served as evidence to support their case. Statistical societies were proliferating at that time, and these were forums where prominent public figures – doctors, civil servants, barristers, philanthropists – presented papers to each other in what they claimed was the impartial language of ‘facts’. The science of statistics was a blend of ‘social economy’ and ‘social medicine’, that is, vital statistics and criminal statistics conversed across the boundary of physical and moral health (Joyce 2003: 26–9). In Ireland, for example, members of the Dublin Statistical Society (established in 1847) accumulated evidence on recidivism rates, which provided ammunition in arguing for the efficacy of prevention over punishment (Hancock 1860; Haughton 1850, 1857; Pim 1854; Wilson 1857). In identifying education as a solution to crime, reformers insisted that young offenders ought to be treated as children in special reformatory institutions for children (see Barnes 1989: 24–6; Miller 2013). Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight, where young convicts awaited transportation to the penal colonies, was seen to exemplify the problem because – in the words of Carpenter – it attempted ‘to fashion children into machines instead of self-acting beings, to make them obedient prisoners within certain iron limits, not men who have been

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taught how to use their liberty without abusing it’ (1851: 321–2). Punishment, whether by hanging, imprisonment or transportation, was deemed to be wasteful. To rescue, on the other hand, was to restore and refashion, so that the lives that were saved could be made useful. Hence the salience of the medical register of disease and cure: if the delinquent child was perceived as a ‘moral patient’, and if delinquency was understood to be a ‘moral disease’, then the reformatory could be convincingly portrayed as a ‘moral hospital’ or ‘moral infirmary’, which would restore those exhibiting criminal propensities to good moral health (Carpenter 1851: 15–16, 81, 366; Lentaigne 1885: 35). In this way life would not be wasted, and society could make use of those it cured. Analogous to Rousseau’s views concerning those who deviate from the general will, delinquent children would be forced to be free by placing them in a purpose-built environment that would instil ‘habits of industry, regularity and good conduct’ (Pim 1854: 17). According to Carpenter, delinquency was marked by a prematurely developed muscular strength and a will that was unrestrained by authority and reason, so that among the children of the perishing and dangerous classes, ‘the governing faculty of the mind’ became ‘subservient to the gratification of animal desires’ (1853: 296–7). At once an adult in the guise of a child and an animal in human form, the delinquent child was seen to invert the natural order of things. The anthropological machine however did not falter, and the activists driving the reformatory movement insisted that the principal cause of delinquency was social rather than inborn, the result of demoralising associations and influences, particularly as a result of parental ‘neglect’, meaning inadequate supervision and training. Taken together, this combination of symptom and cause converged in the argument that delinquency was a contagious disease, a moral plague and the source of an infection that would – if left unchecked – blight the ‘social body’ (Carpenter 1851: 344–6; also Pim 1854: 7). In this discourse of reformatory education can be seen echoes both of Rousseau’s diagnosis and his envisioned remedy: the figure of the child remained at the threshold of animal/human, nature/society, while the search for a solution to the problem of ‘Man’ in society saw the school folded into the prison and the hospital. What enabled this internally complex apparatus to cohere was the technique of moral treatment. At the end of the eighteenth century, Philippe Pinel and William Tuke had pioneered the technique in treating insanity, while several decades later in North America the principle of ‘moral management’ was organised into the architectural and administrative fabric of the penitentiary model of correctional punishment3 (Foucault 1965, 1977; Rothman 1971). By the middle of the nineteenth century, moral treatment functioned as a sort of technical-epistemic relay between medicine and law, and the strategy of



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reformatory education expanded the scope of the practice. As a hybrid of school, hospital and prison, the reformatory aimed not only to cure delinquency by reforming the character of young criminals, but also to subject the incipient delinquent to a course of treatment that mirrored the figure of the Tutor in Rousseau’s Émile. It would tackle the problem at its source by training the child in the arts of a regulated and supervised freedom, so that children would come to embody the power they were initially subjected to, thereby translating external restraint into self-control. Furthermore, though delinquency was the specific target of reformatory education, the vision was far more ambitious and shared with Rousseau the goal of rescuing society from its own excesses. Both in terms of design and strategic objective, the penal reformatory school exemplified biosocial power in that it was deployed as a social technology to refashion life that had been deformed by social circumstances. If conceptualised as a Procrustean bed, the way it positioned children is succinctly captured by David Garland when he considers the problems that this ‘penal strategy’ aimed to counteract: ‘At that instant when the destitute individual was forced to turn to crime, to seek parish relief or to beg for charity, he or she was greeted by a discourse of liberty and moral choice and was administered according to its terms’ (1985: 45). This was a mode of administration that subjected its subjects to what Nikolas Rose describes as a ‘kind of individualizing moral normativity’ (1996: 40), yet its reach was limited, because it could act only upon the actions of those children who crossed the threshold of the law and, as a result, could be forcibly removed from the space of the family. More specifically, the strategy was limited by the way it replicated the prison as an insular institution that operated through exclusion from the wider society. By the end of the nineteenth century however, a far more encompassing apparatus was taking shape, and, importantly, this did not replace the reformatory and industrial schools. Instead it incorporated them into a strategy of public hygiene that targeted the normal child so that all children would be within reach of biosocial interventions. The strategy of hygiene One of the major disagreements shaping the discourse of public health at the turn of the twentieth century concerned the meaning of prevention, which could be operationalised in the form of environmental measures such as the improvement of housing, sewerage and drinking water, but also in the form of eugenic interventions to prevent the birth of children who – according to the science – would grow into ‘degenerate’ and ‘defective’ adults. For contextual reasons examined by Greta Jones (1992), eugenics

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failed to gain any real traction in Ireland, which makes it an interesting case, because even in the absence of explicitly eugenic policies and practices, eugenics still played a part in shaping the strategy of public hygiene. At the 1911 Congress of the Royal Institute of Public Health for example, held that year in Dublin, the section devoted to Child Study and Eugenics examined ways to ‘encourage the breeding of the fit, and discourage the breeding of the unfit’ (Freeman’s Journal 1911b: 5, see also Freeman’s Journal 1911a, 1911c; Irish Independent 1911a, 1911b).4 Eugenicists and environmental hygienists sometimes met as antagonists, but the strategies were by no means mutually exclusive, and they aligned on the terrain of ‘infant life protection’. This was a field of discourse shaped initially by concerns over ‘baby farming’ and infanticide, and it was codified by a series of legal reforms that commenced in 1872 and culminated in the Children Act of 1908 (more on this below). Moreover, it also gained traction through the emerging science of childhood. As noted in chapter 2, the British Child Study Association, led by James Sully, was established in 1894 (Cunningham 1991: 198). Though the organisation’s influence had already waned by the start of the First World War, it paved the way for professionally trained psychologists to lay claim to a science of childhood and education, and part of what made this possible was the idea of racial ‘degeneration’ or, in the case of Britain, ‘national deterioration’ (see Pick 1989). This framed the relation between animal/ human, savage/civilised as a battle staged on the terrain of evolution – between the ‘fit’ and those deemed to be physically, intellectually and morally ‘defective’. We have already seen how this was influenced by Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law (whereby ontogeny is seen to recapitulate phylogeny), such that the Child Study Association experts believed that human evolution was recapitulated by the child, and that this afforded the means of scientifically ascertaining the ‘raw material or morality’. In terms of how this has a bearing on the school hygiene activists, their core concern was fully in step with Sully’s claim that the ‘wild untamed nature’ of the child could be ‘subdued’ by education – but only if the child was educable (Sully 1903: 8, 325). Hence what was required was a means of sifting and separating the educable from the rest. The technique of school medical inspection was on the ascendency at this time, establishing a practice which was also a codified procedure to be applied in identifying defective children. According to Theophilus Kelynack – a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and consultant to the National Association for the Feeble-Minded – the purpose of school medical inspection was ‘to secure the prevention of all disorder and disease in early life’ (1910: iii). By ‘all’ Kelynack meant – quite literally – everything, for the method was to leave nothing unaccounted for. To this end, the procedure entailed



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disassembling both school and scholar so that each element could be scrutinised, whether physical and mental indicators of disease and defect (eyes, ears, teeth, skin, scalp, speech, ‘mental condition’), biometric parameters (age, weight and height), biographical details (personal and family history), environmental factors (heat, air, light), or the arrangement of physical objects and equipment (size and positioning of desks, chairs, windows), with each item meticulously examined and recorded by a panoptic medical gaze (see Howarth 1910; Reid and Priestly 1910). Why was this extensive labour to be carried out? There was more than one way of answering that question, but there was also widespread agreement that the future of state and nation hinged on the ‘efficiency’ of the rising generation (Gogarty 1912; Moffat 1911; Story 1911, 1912; Thompson 1913). This notion of efficiency relates to a very specific instrument that warrants attention here: the norm. Nikolas Rose has examined the normalisation of childhood in detail, showing how the idea of developmental milestones – norms against which individual children are measured and hence also a developmental schedule that children are expected to be able to keep pace with – is essentially a fiction made possible through the interpenetration of school and clinic (1990: 140–3). Such norms were derived by measuring the minds and bodies of individual children grouped together on the basis of relatively arbitrary criteria, such as age, and by aggregating this data. But once transformed into an instrument to evaluate physical or mental functioning, then the measure of normality would no longer necessarily correspond to any particular child, which is why Rose insists that ‘normality is not an observation but a valuation’ (1990: 131). The purpose of school medical inspection was to ‘discover’ those children who ‘presented some deviation from the normal’ – those of a ‘low mental grade’ who would not benefit from ‘ordinary day schools’ – and yet practitioners could be quite candid about the lack of consensus in determining the cut-off point between the normal and the abnormal (Howarth 1910: 36–40; Moffat 1911: 32). The discovery of defect proceeds on the basis of a decision which is anchored in a fiction, which is also the performance of a moral judgement staged on the terrain of objective facts. Mischievousness, disobedience, angry outbursts and deceitfulness were counted among the symptoms and signs of abnormality, taken as evidence not simply of individual defect but also of inadequate parenting, which was seen to necessitate the extension of the technique from school to home, so that parenting could be placed under medical surveillance (Moffat 1911; Story 1911; Thompson 1913). It is here that the practice of medical inspection can be seen to supplement the penal reformatory school and connect up with the discourse of infant life protection, significantly augmenting the reach of biosocial power, which would now take the form of normalisation.

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Viewed retrospectively, the Children Act of 1908 can be seen as a milestone in a long process that, via the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child adopted by the League of Nations in 1924, culminated in the UNCRC. At the time, the Children Act (or Children’s Charter as it was known) was referred to as a ‘great charter of the helpless’ that would ‘recognise the rights of children’ and secure ‘the protection of infant life’ (Millin 1917: 304, 306; see also Lawson 1919; Millin 1912). The Act consolidated existing statutes dealing with infant life protection, including laws on neglect and cruelty (Barnes 1989: 86–7), and in many respects simply enlarged the scope of the reformatory strategy. But in creating the instrument of the Juvenile Court it also proved to be a major innovation in the way it cemented the relation between law and norm, care and control, prevention and correction. As argued by Rose (1985: 171), the Juvenile Court ‘established the linkage between familial scrutiny and moralisation on the one hand and the penal system on the other which remains until today, providing “voluntary” interventions into the lives of families and children with the coercive back-up necessary for them to operate’. The instruments and techniques of infant life protection extended well beyond the problems associated with (and attributed to) diseased, malnourished and delinquent children. Assembled through the interpenetration of school, hospital and prison, and at the intersection of the biological/social, medical/moral, pedagogical/penal, this was a technology of government that enveloped childhood as such, and the strategic objective was to govern both the quantity and the quality of life. It was in this sense that childhood was framed as a ‘national asset’ to be harnessed with a minimum of waste. This was to be accomplished by monitoring ‘the numbers of our children, their physical fitness, and their mental development’ (Crichton 1925: 303), and by ensuring that each and every child underwent a combination of treatment and training, thereby minimising ‘the manufacture of criminals and paupers’ while maximising the numbers equipped to serve the nation as healthy and efficient workers (Millin 1917: 316; see also Lawson 1919: 497; Ryan 1917). What I want to examine in the next section is how policy in Ireland today is instituting very similar objectives under the rubric of ‘reducing health inequalities’.

Healthy Ireland In chapter 5 I suggested that the Whole Child (allegedly) breaks with the past and clears the way for a new beginning. In the foreword to Better Outcomes Brighter Futures, dated March 2014, the (then) Minister for Children and Youth Affairs announced that ‘We stand at an extraordinary point in the history of childhood in Ireland. We have drawn a line in the sand between the present and times past, when children were not protected



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and cherished’ (DCYA 2014: xiii). What should we make of this symbolic line in the sand that apparently marks a break with past practices, or to be more specific: have we somehow escaped the grip of Procrustean power? I’m going to approach this question by pushing back a little further in time, to June 2011 and the announcement of a policy initiative called Your Health is Your Wealth, the launch of which saw the Minister for Health state that ‘it’s up to us as individuals to take responsibility for our life choices and it’s also up to us as a society to make our environment safer and the right choice easier to make’ (DOH 2011). Published in 2013 as Healthy Ireland, the overarching objective of this policy framework is to reduce expenditure on ‘sickness benefits’ while increasing ‘productivity and contributions to the exchequer’ (DOH 2013: 12). In terms of how this bears down on childhood, Healthy Ireland reads like the latest phase of a long iterative process: ‘The creation of healthy generations of children, who can enjoy their lives to the full and reach their full potential as they develop into adults, is critical to the country’s future’ (DOH 2013: 12). Read in isolation, this is little more than a truism. But what if we take the material discussed earlier and use the histories of the penal reformatory school and the strategy of hygiene as a reading principle? Otherwise put, what exactly is encapsulated by the notion of creating ‘healthy generations of children’, and what kind of future is being envisioned here? One thing that needs to be flagged is the speed with which the Whole of Government approach to policy has been instituted, and in a context shaped by a biting austerity programme (more on that below). Healthy Ireland was published a year before Better Outcomes Brighter Futures, and they were subsequently grafted together as ‘complementary policy frameworks’ (DCYA 2014: 13). Working in concert, this combination then moved the framing of childhood in Healthy Ireland (‘The creation of healthy generations of children … is critical to the country’s future’) further by moving into ‘alignment’ with the (then) Government’s Medium Term Strategy for Growth 2014–2020 (Government of Ireland 2013). This culminates as an intertextual assemblage that frames childhood as a natural resource: At a time when other Western countries are experiencing reducing birth rates, Ireland’s population of children and young people is growing. The Government’s Medium Term Strategy for Growth rightly recognises that ‘our increasing child and youth population is a significant resource for our country …’ and that ‘ensuring the best possible outcomes for this group is therefore an important element in our future economic planning’. (DCYA 2014: viii)

This quote-within-a-quote provides an example of how these policy frameworks derive legitimacy by deferring to each other, thereby reinforcing the

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argument that investing in childhood is the most effective way to ‘foster entrepreneurship’ 5 while also offsetting the future costs of problems such as obesity, mental illness and crime6 (DOH 2013: 11; DCYA 2014: 17; Government of Ireland 2013: 46, 51). There is nothing particularly novel in the use of numbers and economic cost–benefit analysis in making the case for investment, but what is significant is how this relates to the symbolic line in the sand mentioned above – what, if anything, changes as we cross that line? Consider this statement from Better Outcomes Brighter Futures: ‘We invest in children and young people because it is intrinsically a good thing to do. It also happens to make sense for the good of society and for the long-term benefit of the economy’ (DCYA 2014: 17). Or again, from Healthy Ireland: ‘Better health can lead to economic growth, not only through an increase in total GDP as the population increases, but also, more importantly, through long-term gains in human and physical capital that raise productivity and per capita GDP’ (DOH 2013: 11). It seems that we have not moved all that far from the conception of childhood as a national asset. Clearly the ground has shifted to the extent that biosocial power is clothed in the language of empowerment, resilience, supports and ‘better outcomes’, and yet to scratch the surface of the claim that only now do we ‘cherish’ children is to encounter a way of valuing childhood not all that different from the histories examined above. Presented as a policy innovation, Healthy Ireland attempts to facilitate a ‘shift towards a broader, more inclusive approach to governance for health’ (DOH 2013: 8). What this means in effect is that the Department of Health as well as non-state actors with a stake in the health sector are to work in partnership with ‘other areas of Government and public services concerned with social protection, children, industry, food safety, education, transport, housing, agriculture and the environment’ (DOH 2013: 8). Additionally, and unsurprisingly given the prevailing enthusiasm for holisms, the vision is presented as a ‘whole system approach’, meaning that this is an attempt to mobilise and coordinate what was discussed in chapter 5 as the Wholeof-Government and the Whole-of-Society (DOH 2013: 8, 13). Viewed historically, it could be argued that this expansive approach to health is continuous rather than discontinuous with the past, and so is the way it prioritises children, which it does. This is not, however, to suggest that nothing has changed. As the reference to human capital in the above quote indicates, we inhabit a situation where the instrumentalisation of life is intensifying, to the point where the human as such becomes a form of capital to be optimised and augmented (see Brown 2015). This might serve to remind us that biosocial power is no longer about normalising children deemed to be abnormal. The subject of enterprise is tasked with exceeding the normal by excelling relative to peers and rivals, and the Procrustean bed of neoliberal



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enterprise culture values innovation and optimisation over conformity and normalisation. Investing in childhood I have already called attention to the contextual aspects of empowerment (in chapter 5), and given that a key objective of Healthy Ireland is to reduce health inequalities by ‘empowering people and communities’ (DOH 2013: 24), I think it is important to revisit this point here. As noted by Karen Smith (2018), when the National Children’s Strategy was launched in 2000, Ireland was experiencing a period of sustained prosperity that came to a crashing halt in 2008. When the pillars supporting the Whole-of-Government approach were being assembled – among these Healthy Ireland, Better Outcomes Brighter Futures and the Medium Term Strategy for Growth – Ireland was in the midst of a sweeping austerity programme orchestrated under the guidance of the IMF and EU, and designed to protect the European banking system (see Smith 2018). The way this played out in Ireland was through reductions in public expenditure (including cutting financial support to independent statutory agencies such as the Combat Poverty Agency), increased taxation and a freeze on public sector pay and recruitment, while at the same time the banking sector received a massive injection of funds, the bulk of which was borrowed from the Troika of IMF, EU and European Central Bank – and a consequence of which is that future generations will be saddled with crippling debt.7 As argued by Smith (2018), policy in Ireland is marching in step with an EU-sponsored ‘better with less’ agenda, whereby social investment is calculated on the basis of minimal expenditure and maximum returns. This is the context that has shaped the current emphasis on empowering people and communities and investing in childhood, and it provides a clear indication of how Procrustean power now operates, that is, by seeking to ensure that no one is excluded from the neoliberal game of inequality. Before drilling deeper into the Healthy Ireland framework, I first want to take a closer look at Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism. Enterprise as a game of inequalities In his lectures on the Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault examines how neoliberal thought began to take shape during the post-war period and – more specifically – how this took the form of a body of ideas that Foucault interprets as ‘state-phobia’ (2008: 116, 187). The German ordoliberals, for example, argued against the idea that the state should steer and manage the market in order to correct or ameliorate its negative social effects (such as unemployment and poverty). Instead, the state should be placed under the supervision

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of the market. In contrast to nineteenth-century laissez faire liberalism, the ordoliberals did not perceive competition to be a ‘given of nature’. Instead, competition was conceptualised as a mechanism or machine that would have to be ‘carefully and artificially constructed’ (Foucault 2008: 118–21). Furthermore, for the machinery of competition to function correctly, there would have to be fluctuation within what Foucault refers to as a ‘game of differentiation’ (2008: 142). In other words, there must be losers as well as winners, or inequality among equals, which is why Foucault describes neoliberalism as a ‘formal game between inequalities’ (2008: 120). Neoliberalism is thus more than the policies and mechanisms through which competition is generalised – privatisation, the introduction of new markets, de-regulation, and so forth – because it also requires instruments of control to manage how the game of inequality is played. At the level of the state (which might also apply to supra-state governance, such as the European Union), Foucault presents this dimension of control as an ‘institutional framework’ (2008: 137). What I am primarily interested in here are the instruments of control nested within such frameworks – practical measures to monitor and manage the performance of the players relative to projected ‘outcomes’ (as discussed in chapter 5), ensuring that as many as possible stay in the game and play by the rules of the game (see Donzelot 2008), thereby also regulating the behavioural excesses that invariably accompany intensified competition. The fusion of competition and control is well established in Ireland, most visible perhaps in the public sector, which has undergone a lengthy process of restructuring through a combination of neoliberal reforms and the introduction of performance management systems (see Lynch et al. 2012). But this is not just about remodelling the state, and the trend is more accurately captured by Foucault’s thoughts on an ‘enterprise society’ (2008: 147). An enterprise society institutes the principles codified by the Healthy Ireland framework, that is, individual responsibility and choice, so that competition and control interface as a governmentality that governs through the subject of enterprise. As Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose point out, as the embodiment of a regulated autonomy, the subject of enterprise is ‘enjoined to bring the future into the present, and is educated in the ways of calculating the future consequences of actions as diverse as those of diet and home security’ (2008: 215). In Ireland this combination of enjoining and educating – which is the ‘how’ of ‘empowering people and communities’ envisioned by Healthy Ireland – is currently being orchestrated through a ‘life-cycle’ approach to policy, evident in the way that Healthy Ireland stipulates that ‘supporting people to enjoy a healthy and active life, starting in the womb and continuing through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and older age, is a fundamental goal of this policy Framework’ (DOH 2013: 14). At the



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same time, the long-term success of Healthy Ireland is seen to hinge on early intervention: ‘The most effective time to intervene in terms of reducing inequalities and improving health and wellbeing outcomes is before birth and in early childhood’ (DOH 2013: 14). As noted by Smith in her analysis of the ‘baby brain movement’ (2018), this claim concerning early intervention is anchored in what I referred to in chapter 5 (from De Vos 2017) as a pervasive neuropsychological doxa, and, as Smith points out, this has been most enthusiastically embraced in countries such as Ireland where ‘neoliberal rationalities of government have been most influential’ (2018: 79) . I will be examining the baby brain movement in detail in chapter 7, focusing in particular on how this doxa weaves a constellation of issues – from obesity to poverty to welfare dependency to unplanned teenage pregnancy – around the figure of the ‘disadvantaged’ child. First however I want to look at how the Healthy Ireland framework is anchored in, while also anchoring, an encompassing biosocial apparatus. The datafication of childhood Premised on a ‘whole system approach’ – also known as HiAP, or Health in All Policies (WHO 2014) – Healthy Ireland is part of a biosocial apparatus that governs two axes of life: one that extends along the life-cycle, and a second that encompasses the entirety of childhood (the figure of the Whole Child). In terms of what it looks like in practice, HiAP is a multi-stranded strategy of surveillance, services, supports and interventions that simultaneously enable and constrain in response to emerging social trends and particular situations, so that the biological and social processes that combine as child development can be monitored and managed through a full spectrum of supportive, preventive and remedial measures. In chapters 4 and 5 we saw how targeted interventions are aimed at ‘supporting’ children whose ‘resilience’ or ability to cope is overwhelmed by the relentless pressure to compete and succeed, leading to problems such as poor mental health, substance misuse, homelessness, unplanned pregnancy, early school-leaving and obesity-related illness.8 If we pull back from the specifics, then we see how this list of problems – which might be described as situational contingencies – has become the target of systematic surveillance. This was the purpose of the National Strategy for Research and Data on Children’s Lives, which ran from 2011–2016.9 Presented as a ‘strategic approach to knowledge about children’s lives’ that would serve to identify ‘the most effective ways to intervene in their lives’ (DCYA 2011: v), the data strategy was an innovation that scaled-up the technique of school medical inspection.10 It was one among a series of such initiatives targeting children, including the Health Behaviours in School-Aged

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Children study (conducted since 1998 by the Health Promotion Policy Unit at the National University of Ireland Galway); the National Longitudinal Study of Children in Ireland (which commenced in 2006); and the State of the Nation’s Children Biennial Reports (which also commenced in 2006). The translation of life into data via research is now central to the aims and means of governing childhood, and this is how the lives of those who are to compete in the neoliberal game of inequality are measured, monitored and managed (see figure 6.1). Moreover, when it comes to dealing with problem and risky behaviours, this biosocial apparatus continues the shift from exclusion to inclusion examined above with respect to the strategies of reformatory education and public hygiene. Governing through inclusion today entails ensuring – as far as this is possible – that one and all can withstand ‘the pressure to compete and succeed’. There are to be no exceptions, because this is about ensuring an equality of inequality (Foucault 2008: 142–3). In short, the neoliberal version of equality dictates that no child be excluded from the opportunity to compete in a race where one’s relative position is – apparently – a matter of taking personal responsibility and making the ‘right’ choices. The datafication of childhood collects and stores information on children’s lives which is made practical and technical in the form of supports and interventions which act through and upon the actions of children: health services, child welfare and protection, education, juvenile justice, family support, sports council, nutritional surveillance, all of which (in theory at least) combine as ‘a continuum of research and data use within policy and practice settings’ (DCYA 2011: 1). It is important to underline what is being proposed here in this idea of an apparatus, which does not exhibit the singularity of a sovereign will. It is instead an example of what Foucault had in mind when he suggested that power relations are ‘intentional’ but ‘non-subjective’. Non-subjective intentionality is a tactical and strategic game that produces this type of apparatus, and, as Foucault points out, ‘the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented [it]’ (Foucault 1998: 94–5). Otherwise put, this is orchestrated, coordinated and steered as a grid of intentions, but the many actors who participate in the governance of childhood need not be singing in chorus or pursuing identical objectives. Friction, generated by scope for disagreement, is in part what enables the apparatus to cohere, but what holds it in place are normative fictions such as the Whole Child, the resilient child, the young citizen and the empowered child which, as we have seen, are not distinct ways of figuring childhood but aspects of the same figuration – a biosocial construct born from the discourses, the forms of knowledge, the techniques that spiral back in time through the hygienist movement, the supervised playground, the strategy of preventive and

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6.1  Childhood as networked governance.

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reformatory education, to the birth of the anthropological machine. This, then, is what it means to reduce (health) inequalities in an enterprise society, echoing the supervised and regulated autonomy once envisioned by Rousseau, because in twenty-first-century Ireland, children are routinely forced to be free. What, though, of resistance, though not necessarily in the form of counter-conduct as touched on in chapter 4? It may be that there is a resistant analogue to Foucault’s idea of non-subjective intentionality, which is one way of interpreting the issue of (childhood) obesity. In staging a critical encounter with obesity discourse, the next section will also begin to broaden the scope of the preceding discussion by moving beyond the specifics of the Irish case. The obesity epidemic and human futures In 2000, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that obesity was a ‘global epidemic’ (WHO 2000) while more recently the WHO’s Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity (established in 2014) published a report claiming that ‘the prevalence of infant, childhood and adolescent obesity is rising around the world’ while ‘progress in tackling childhood obesity has been slow and inconsistent’ (CECO 2016: vi). Given that this frames an impending biopolitical crisis, the obesity issue invites comparison with the spectre of degeneration at the turn of the twentieth century. However, if the anthropological machine was once assembled at the threshold of zoē/bios, animal/human, savage/civilised, gathering momentum by attempting to isolate and master the residues of ‘wild untamed nature’ as embodied by the educable child, then it is now characterised by an impending collision with metabolic life as its limit condition. In developing this point, this section begins by sketching an outline of the problem itself, that is, as assembled at the interface of science and politics. The main reason for presenting obesity as an epidemic is epidemiological. Though not a diagnosable illness in its own right, obesity is associated with a variety of non-communicable diseases which are predicted to increase in tandem with the increasing incidence of obesity (see Gard and Wright 2005; Ross 2005). In other words, obesity – along with associated illnesses, including cancers, heart-disease and diabetes – is spreading throughout populations like an infectious disease. The most common way of measuring the extent of obesity in a given population is the Body Mass Index (BMI), which is calculated by dividing body weight by height squared (kg/m2). Critics point out that the BMI fails to distinguish adipose tissue and lean muscle, but as noted by Ian Hacking (2006), while there are more reliable ways of measuring fat, the BMI is extremely cheap and simple to use. Walk into most GP surgeries today and you will find an easy-to-read BMI chart



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on the wall, or even handier are the numerous BMI calculators available on the internet. It takes but seconds to find out where one stands on the BMI scale, and this makes it effective as an instrument in communicating the threat of obesity. As for the question of causation, there are two predominant explanations, one being the ‘energy balance equation’ and the other biological ‘vulnerability’. Comparable to the BMI in terms of its simplicity, the energy balance equation states that if energy inputs are equal to energy outputs, then body mass remains constant, and this is used to explain individual cases of obesity as well as modelling the ‘obesogenic environment’, which takes socio-cultural factors into consideration, such as the availability of nutritious versus energy-dense food, or access to infrastructure and resources that facilitate physical activity, such as parks and playgrounds. This is also where science and politics interface, not only by targeting ‘the level of physical activity’ and ‘the force of dietary habits’, but also the ‘primary appetite control in the brain’ (Foresight 2007: 86–7), which is how the notion of biological vulnerability comes into play. An example of how this is portrayed is an article by George C. Williams and Randolph M. Nesse titled ‘The dawn of Darwinian medicine’ (1991).11 The core hypothesis is that ‘human biology is designed for stone-age conditions’, which has particular implications for individuals with a ‘thrifty genotype’. This cohort is seen to be particularly vulnerable to obesity, because such people are good at storing calories but no longer ‘benefit from the episodes of famine to which they are especially adapted’ (Williams and Nesse 1991: 14; see also HCHC 2004: 26). Moreover, if one is endowed with thrifty genes then dieting is ineffective because restricting food intake triggers an ‘adaptive response’ leading to weight gain – that is, the body responds as though in a situation of food shortage. Thrifty genes might be an asset in situations of food scarcity but they become a liability in times of abundance. So how does the science play out in the policy arena? The negative implications of obesity are generally represented by the spectre of future costs, with those who sound the alarm bells predicting soaring public health bills and economic inactivity among people with obesity-related illness and disabilities. But there are other implications too, and there is arguably no clearer statement on the spectre of obesity than the words of Richard Carmona, who lectured on the topic at the University of South Carolina while serving as US Surgeon General in 2006: Where will our soldiers, sailors and airmen come from? Where will our police and firemen come from if the youngsters today are on a trajectory that says that they will be obese? … Often when I speak, the press want to talk about the tragedy of the day; they want to talk about terrorism, they want to talk

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about weapons of mass destruction, they want to talk about emerging infections. I did a press conference a couple of years ago … one reporter … said to me, Surgeon General, what’s the most pressing issue before you today? I said obesity. The room was silent, nobody knew what to ask, and I said: obesity is the terror within. It is destroying us, destroying our society, from within, and unless we do something about it, the magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9/11 or any other terrorist event that you can point out.12

Carmona’s argument resonates strongly with the framing of childhood as (human) capital investment, with the immanence of what he describes as ‘the terror within’ operating in a register that spans biological vulnerability and the obesogenic environment.13 One of the implications of this is that awareness of the threat is insufficient, because genetic inheritance may be stronger than reason or will, not just at the level of individuals but at the level of population, so that obesity necessitates a Procrustean response. As Carmona’s argument makes crystal clear, the biopolitical figuring of obesity fuses childhood to national security, thereby adding urgency to the imperative to act. From the earlier discussion on the origins of the penal reformatory school it can be noted that a core feature of childhood as a vehicle for biosocial power is the moral imperative attached to practices of rescue and protection. Within the compass of the obesity problem, the morality of intervention takes the form of a situation (which is at once a hypothetical scenario, a normatively loaded assertion and a statistical probability) whereby the current generation of children may not outlive their parents (HCHC 2004: 46; WHTF 2010: 3). This is effective as an argument, resonating with the great public health crusades against infectious diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis, and it suggests that the progress made by the science–state alliance may be going into reverse, unless we act now and act decisively. If life as quantity – the number of years one can expect to live – has ceased to expand along the generational axis, then we have a profound moral crisis on our hands. It should come as no surprise, then, that the school has (once again, as in the age of degeneration and national deterioration) become a staging ground for strategies to tackle obesity. In the UK for example, the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) was rolled out in 2007, subsequent to recommendations by the House of Commons Health Select Committee on Obesity (see PHE 2018a, 2018b). Essentially a BMI screening programme administered by what Bethan Evans (2004) calls ‘child health technicians’, the NCMP examines children at reception (ages 4–5) and again in year 6 (ages 10–11). The data gathered from this mode of surveillance serves two related purposes: it informs policy on the part of authorities in the fields of health, education and social services, and it increases public understanding of child weight



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issues by ‘engaging families with the issue of healthy weight in children’ (DOHSC 2011). This last point needs to be clarified, because in practice ‘engaging families’ entails a discretionary decision on the part of local authorities, who are authorised to send test results to parents. In this way the normative significance of BMI enters into the space of the home, both as a statement on parental responsibility and as a judgement on the (in) adequacy of parenting.14 The obesity epidemic is a battle staged at the threshold of the biological and social vectors of life, and the motivating force in the fight against obesity is a series of negatives: that obesity erodes a person’s health, sense of selfworth and self-esteem; that it places an unnecessary and preventable strain on the cost of public health; that it reduces the pool of people who can be called upon to defend the nation and play their part in public service; that it reduces productivity and undermines economic growth and competitiveness; and that ultimately it threatens not only the future of nations and states but civilisation as we know it. This is a discourse assembled around the problem of excess: excessive flesh; appetites that exceed the body’s nutritional requirements; the human organism and its habitat as a surplus of energy, and in a curious reversal of history, it seems as though the anthropological machine is stalling. However, if viewed as a resistant analogue to Foucault’s thoughts on non-subjective intentionality, then obesity might be seen to simultaneously undermine and reinvigorate the neoliberal game of equal inequality. There is something of a futureless-future at stake here, or a future that approaches in the form of catastrophe. To borrow from Roberto Esposito (2013: 86), the battle against childhood obesity is indicative of an autoimmunity crisis that threatens to incapacitate the body politic.15 Autoimmune diseases occur when the body’s immune system turns against itself, often precipitated by an external cause, and Esposito is interested in situations where something similar happens through biopolitical strategies that attempt to immunise the body politic against external threats. This can have the perverse effect of instituting protective measures that pose a bigger threat than the risk they are intended to prevent, such that the attempt to ensure immunity generates an ‘autoimmune disorder’ (Esposito 2013: 87). The obesity epidemic is somewhat different in that it is immanent to the body politic, yet the dynamic is comparable. In other words, the obesity crisis summonses the urgent need for immunosuppressive measures to ‘treat’ the problem and secure the future against the autoimmunity crisis itself. For this strategy to proceed, the Procrustean bed of neoliberal enterprise culture requires a subject, which marks out the significance of ‘disadvantaged’ childhoods. Within the frame of disadvantage, the corpulent body that becomes a burden on public finances – and thus also a drag on the performance of

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‘active citizens’ (those who can be counted on to play their part as human capital) – shades into crime, teenage pregnancy and welfare dependency (Heckman 2006; Lee et al. 2013). If, in the past, these would have been the target of remedial measures to secure social order by ‘rescuing’ or subjecting wayward and recalcitrant children to ‘moral treatment’, we now have a situation where the social costs of disadvantage are to be countered by optimising the ‘brain architecture’ of infants.

Notes 1 Directly comparable to David Stow’s ‘sinking and sunken’ classes, as discussed in chapter 3. 2 This distinction was codified by the Reformatory Schools Act 1854 and the Industrial Schools Act 1857. 3 The principle of moral treatment was also organised into the first public asylums and penitentiaries in Ireland (see Reuber 1999). 4 Following the passage of the Mental Deficiency Act 1913, eugenicists lobbied for the legislation to be extended to Ireland (Dawson 1913; Jones 1992: 87). 5 The Medium Term Strategy for Growth 2014–2020 makes this a strategic priority, along with tasking the educational system with ‘developing the intellectual capacity of children to innovate’. I discuss this in the context of entrepreneurial education in chapter 8. 6 A few examples from Healthy Ireland and Better Outcomes Brighter Futures: ‘the direct and indirect costs of overweight and obesity in 2009 were estimated at €1.13 billion’ (DOH 2013: 11); ‘it is estimated that the economic cost of mental health problems in Ireland is €11 billion per year’ (DCYA 2014: 17); ‘Targeted effective interventions can support children at risk to build their competencies, leading to better health, educational attainment and greater resilience, impacting on future outcomes, such as better mental health … and reduced youth crime’ (DCYA 2014: 29). 7 The Programme of Support, otherwise known as the ‘bailout’, was announced in November 2010. Of the agreed 85 billion euro, 67.5 billion in loans was provided through the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism, the European Financial Stabilisation Facility and the International Monetary Fund (22.5 billion euro each), along with 4.8 billion euro in bilateral loans from the UK, Sweden and Denmark. Thirty-five billion euro was earmarked to shore up the Irish banking system. For a summary see The Guardian (2010). 8 Childhood obesity is mentioned only once in the National Children’s Strategy (NCO 2000a) but is a core concern in Better Outcomes Brighter Futures (DCYA 2014) and Healthy Ireland (DOH 2013). 9 In terms of continuance, this is now the remit of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs’ Research and Evaluation Unit, See www.dcya.gov.ie/docs/ EN/Research-and-Evaluation-Introduction/4711.htm (accessed 15 September 2019).



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10 A list of National Consultations conducted with children and young people since 2004 is available on the Department of Children and Youth Affairs website: www.dcya.gov.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=%2Fdocuments%2FChildYouthParticipatio n%2FNational_Consultations.htm&mn=chiv&nID=5 (accessed 15 September 2019). 11 Beyond featuring in the critical obesity literature, the significance of this article can be discerned from a citation report generated by Thomson Reuters Web of Science, which lists 333 citations as of November 2018, with more than 10 citations annually for the previous 10 years. 12 R. H. Carmona, Johnson and Johnson Healthcare Lecture (University of South Carolina School of Law, 2006). See Killer at Large, by Steven Greenstreet (Shinebox Media Productions), available on Youtube: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=KBVm3fWPXCY (accessed 15 September 2019). 13 An example, fairly typical of how this is presented in the policy literature, is a report published by the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity in 2010: ‘[G]enes associated with obesity were present in the population prior to the current epidemic; genes only account for susceptibility to obesity and generally contribute to obesity only when other influences are at work’ (WHTF 2010: 7). 14 The NCMP began as a ‘monitoring’ programme, whereby children and parents would not be made aware of the test results, before being transformed into a ‘screening’ programme (see Evans and Colls 2009). 15 On Esposito’s writings on immunity and how this compares with (and differs from) Derrida’s approach, see Campbell (2006).

7 Disadvantaged childhoods and the neuroliberal fix

This chapter examines how the first three years movement (Thornton 2011), otherwise known as the baby brain movement (Smith 2018), has come to figure the problem of ‘disadvantage’ as a trade-off between investing in the early years and the future costs of welfare dependency, crime, obesity and unplanned pregnancy. We have encountered a context-specific version of this argument in chapter 5 – from the Better Outcomes Brighter Futures national policy framework in Ireland – which suggests that investing in the early years ‘is akin to capital investment’. Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos serves as a timely reminder that this is by no means specific to children or childhood, because we are all now enjoined to think of ourselves (and each other) as capital in human form: When we are figured as human capital in all that we do and in every venue, equality ceases to be our presumed natural relation to one another … In legislation, jurisprudence, and the popular imaginary, inequality becomes normal, even normative. (2015: 38)

It is this normativity that will be tracked through this chapter and into chapter 8, though before going any further I need to say a few words about the title of this chapter, specifically in terms of what the idea of ‘neuroliberalism’ encompasses and how this relates to neoliberal enterprise culture. At stake in this relation is the fiction of homo economicus. In his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics (2008: 270–1), Foucault examined how homo economicus appears within the space of liberalism as a paradox – and it should be noted that, for Foucault, ‘liberalism’ is not a theory or an ideology, but a practice that problematises existing ways of governing (2008: 320). Homo economicus is one of the ways that liberalism has staged its critique by calling existing practices of governing into question, yet in doing so, homo economicus itself became the object of critique, which helps to explain liberalism’s ‘polymorphism and its recurrences’ (Foucault 2008: 320). In



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one version of neoliberalism, homo economicus is portrayed as a rational individual who pursues her or his own interests, and who, from the standpoint of governing the conduct of others, should be left alone to exercise individual choice. In another version however, homo economicus appears as ‘someone manageable … someone who is eminently governable’ (Foucault 2008: 270). This second scenario, which Foucault distils from the Chicago school of economics, and more specifically from a number of articles published in the Journal of Political Economy in the early 1960s, extends the scope of economic analysis to ‘non-rational’ conduct in situations characterised by risk and uncertainty, such that the most important consideration is not whether the behaviour in question is ‘rational’, but whether it responds to the prevailing situation in a non-random way. What follows from this are possibilities concerning environmental modifications. Homo economicus can still be left alone to exercise choice and act on the basis of self-interest, but choice and action can nevertheless be steered in the direction of what are perceived to be optimal outcomes. This of course raises the question of who, exactly, gets to decide on what counts as an optimal outcome, and I will come to that momentarily. First I need to stress that the reason I mention Foucault’s remarks on homo economicus is to draw attention to the fact that the hallmark of neuroliberalism has been around for quite some time, with the paradox that Foucault draws attention to capturing what is arguably its defining feature, sometimes described as ‘libertarian paternalism’ (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). If we follow Foucault’s characterisation of liberalism as a practice, then neuroliberalism can be seen to recalibrate the neoliberal subject of choice and interests, who now appears not in the guise of homo economicus, but in the form of Homer Simpson1 (Whitehead et al. 2018: 6–7, 60). In other words, the subject of neuroliberalism is said to act on the basis of habit, heuristic shortcuts, impulse, affective conditioning and group mimicry, and thereby cannot be counted upon to exercise choices or make decisions which can be said to be optimal. Frequently cited examples concern financial planning and diet, with sub-optimal choices and decisions culminating in problems such as crippling personal debt and poor health. Hence the need for soft-paternalism, or ‘nudging’ as it has come to be known (Thaler and Sunstein 2008), which brings me back to Foucault’s remarks on environmental modifications and non-random behaviour. Nudging aims to act upon the actions of others indirectly and without prohibiting the freedom to act otherwise, typically orchestrated through a method known as ‘choice architecture’. Examples include organising organ donation schemes on an opt-out rather than opt-in basis, or steering customers in school and workplace canteens towards healthy eating options. A more concrete example – this one said to be a paradigmatic example of nudge theory in action – was

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a 2005 experiment at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, where the cost of cleaning toilets was reduced by placing the image of a housefly in the men’s urinals. By giving men and boys something to aim at, this simple environmental modification encouraged socially desirable behaviour, not through compulsion or appealing to reason, but by making the act of urinating fun (see Jones et al. 2013: 19). Informed by the behavioural sciences, the key neuroliberal insight concerns the non-rational or more-than-rational features of human behaviour as noted above, or, as Whitehead and colleagues put it (2018: 33), ‘the role of emotions, gut feelings and unconscious habits in driving human behaviour’. This is how neuroliberalism enters into a type of dispute with neoliberalism, yet the dispute is staged within the space of the paradox noted above from Foucault and, of crucial importance, the neuroliberal subject continues to inhabit a neoliberalised context. The actor may have changed to some extent, but not the stage or setting. If homo economicus is enjoined to be an entrepreneur of the self and to exercise free choice, then the subject of neuroliberalism is actively ‘nudged’ in the direction of the ‘right’ choice, but only with a view to enhancing or augmenting her freedom, hence the apparently oxymoronic notion of libertarian paternalism. In short, neuroliberal nudging aims to press the pre-conscious levers that override conscious (sub-optimal) decision-making, but of course there is also another longstanding way of engineering compliance with socially scripted ‘optimal’ outcomes, and this marks a shift from ‘choice architecture’ to the ‘brain architecture’ of children. To come back to my earlier question about who gets to decide on what counts as an optimal outcome, here we have a first approximation of what the answer looks like: the architects of choice. However, while this may be in plain sight in the case of nudges targeting adult behaviour (e.g. publicly funded nudge units),2 in the case of children, this mode of biosocial power blends into the environment itself. Otherwise put, it is the experiential and sensory qualities of the environment that apparently form and shape the architecture of the brain when it is most ‘plastic’ (more on this later), and so the crucial questions are as follows: is a given child benefiting from an ‘enriched environment’ or is that child’s environment contaminated by ‘toxic stress’, and what sorts of interventions and supports can ensure optimal outcomes? These are among the axioms that it will be necessary to examine in this chapter, and as an initial step the next section locates the problem of ‘disadvantage’ within the historical and geographical coordinates of Foucault’s remarks on homo economicus. Futures past, futures present: stories of disadvantage3 In tracking the problem of disadvantage, I am not going to look for origins or a definitive moment in time that marks the inauguration of this way of



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framing inequality. Instead, I am going to begin in the midst of things, using a text published in 1987 as a point of departure, and working backwards as well as forwards in time from this juncture. The text in question is William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, while the context is the US, together marking a political crossroads where different ways of using the concept of disadvantage enter into a discursive struggle. On one side of Wilson’s study is a report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, published in 1965 when Moynihan was working with the US Department of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson, titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. On the other side of Wilson’s study is the neuropsychological doxa, or what I will present in due course as the neuroliberal fix for disadvantaged childhoods. If disadvantage is one discursive thread that links these contexts, then so too is a constellation of issues that Moynihan presented as a ‘tangle of pathology’: teenage pregnancy, welfare dependency, joblessness, delinquency and crime (obesity is a recent addition to this list). The tangle of pathology thesis is what holds together the diagnostic and prescriptive dimensions of disadvantage, and comparable to the material I have discussed in chapter 6, the medical register of pathology – or the portrayal of inequality as a disease that blights the social body – encapsulates a moral judgement directed at behaviours (Moynihan) and outcomes (neuropsychological doxa) that are perceived to originate in specific environments. To put it bluntly, the tangle of pathology thesis is a story about disadvantaged families living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, otherwise known as slums and ghettos, and it figures the disadvantaged child as the innocent victim of adverse circumstances, destined to repeat the cycle of disadvantage unless remedial measures are taken. The story is familiar, and I have touched on versions of it in previous chapters, which is not to say that stories of disadvantage do not also have unique features. Among the familiar elements, as will be seen below, is biosocial power operating in the depoliticised guise of socialisation – the ghetto family is posited as the source, if not always the cause, of failed or inadequate socialisation, while pedagogical initiatives and preventive interventions are posited as the means of rectifying the problem. To refer back to Brown’s Undoing the Demos, what is specific to stories of dis/advantage is how this partitions a demos. I’m using the Greek demos to take distance from the way that dis/advantage divides a body of people. In other words, and to continue the analysis of citizenship in chapter 5, demos can be read as traversing people, population and the common, while at the same time suspending the normative distinction between ‘advantaged’ and ‘disadvantaged’. My proposition, derived from Jacques Rancière, is that our understanding of inequality is not necessarily furthered by partitioning a demos in this way. In other words, equality is axiomatic because we are equal, not because politics promises to make us equal by shuffling the existing distribution of places and parts (see Rancière

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2004, 2010). In staging a critical encounter with disadvantage as a way of framing inequality, I am going to present three stories that exhibit a complex temporality (hence the idea of futures past, futures present). By ‘stories’ I am also drawing attention to the contingency of this type of normative fiction. Cultural deprivation and compensatory education … I begin this first story with a few remarks on Moynihan’s influential (and controversial too as it transpired) report from 1965. In a context shaped by the Brown Supreme Court Decision declaring school segregation to be unconstitutional,4 the Civil Rights movement, and an increasingly salient and militant Black Power movement, Moynihan described a ‘crumbling family structure’ among poor African-Americans,5 evident in the growing number of ‘broken homes’, female-headed households and a ‘startling increase in welfare dependency’ (1965: 12). Moynihan also claimed that poor African-American women were having more children by comparison to middle-class families, including African-American middle-class families. This, he argued, was causally connected to a higher than average school drop-out rate, especially among young mothers, leading to diminished earning capacity and a reliance on welfare, thus ‘perpetuating the cycle of poverty and deprivation’ (1965: 26–7). Moynihan was not simply highlighting the gendered and racialised features of disadvantage in the US; he was also claiming that the erosion of the patriarchal family structure – at that time most apparent among poor African-Americans according to the evidence he had amassed – was at the heart of a ‘tangle of pathology’. This was because, unlike middle-class families, disadvantaged children were not undergoing the kind of socialisation ‘which only the family can provide’ 6 (1965: 47). In the midst of this analysis is the concept of ‘deprivation’, which extended beyond poverty understood as material needs, to encompass the unmet emotional needs of disadvantaged children, along with lack of discipline and unformed habits, manifesting as lack of aspiration and low attainment in school, and beyond the classroom, as juvenile delinquency, leading eventually to crime, joblessness, teenage pregnancy and welfare dependency. The story of deprivation as Moynihan narrated it is (or was), in the words of Sylvia Martinez and John Rury (2012: 2), indicative of a gradual ‘reconceptualization of long-standing patterns of social and educational inequity’ at that time. Otherwise put, it marks a move away from hereditarian theories of defect and delinquency, with scientifically calibrated indices of ‘cultural deprivation’ used to explain the environmental causes and social consequences of inequality. In step with the thrust of Moynihan’s analysis, much of the



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research into cultural deprivation focused on education, exploring the possibilities of ‘compensatory education’ as a means of remedying ‘maternal’ and ‘sensory deprivation’ among disadvantaged children (Beatty 2012). The most significant instrument of compensatory education was (and is) the Head Start programme, launched in 1964 as part of President Johnson’s Great Society platform, and a key plank in his War on Poverty. Without downplaying the significance of Head Start, which is both a matter of scale (it is a Federal programme) and duration (the programme was expanded in 1994 with the launch of Early Head Start, was re-authorised by Congress in 2007, and as of December 2018 continues to ‘promote school readiness of children under 5 from low-income families’ 7), there were many other, more localised experiments in compensatory education. Two in particular stand out in terms of the frequency with which they are now cited by advocates of early intervention: the Perry Preschool Study, which ran from 1962–1967 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and the Abecedarian Project, which ran from 1972–1985 in Orange County, North Carolina. The Perry Study was established by David Weikart, Director of Special Education for the Ypsilanti Public School District. With the aid of associates, Weikart recruited a sample of 123 African-American children, aged 3–4 years, described in a report by Weikart as coming from ‘culturally deprived families’ and testing as ‘educably mentally retarded’ (cited in Beatty 2012: 10). The sample was randomly assigned to a control group (65 children) and a programme group (58 children), with the latter entering into a highquality pre-school programme for three hours per day, five days per week, for the duration of the school year. Children also received ninety minutes of home visits per week.8 In the case of the Abecedarian Project, the research team (from the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute) recruited 111 infant children born between 1972 and 1977, and again, though not part of the research design, most of the children were African-American. Study participants attended a high-quality childcare centre for five years, five days a week, year round.9 Both of these experiments were targeted early interventions, and one of the reasons that both have attracted so much attention in recent years is due to findings generated by follow-up research with the original participants. The Abecedarian researchers followed the children into adulthood, assessing them at age 5, 8, 12, 15, 21, 30, and most recently at age 35, while a 2005 study reported on participants from the Perry Project at age 40.10 One important difference in the findings concerns the short- and long-term effects on IQ. The Perry Study apparently succeeded in boosting the IQ of the programme group by an average of fifteen points, but this early gain did not last. Among children participating in the Abecedarian programme, which started earlier (many of the children commenced at four months)

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and ended later, the gains in IQ lasted into adulthood. Common to both however, and this is why these experiments have become so important among advocates of early intervention and early years investment today, is that participation in these programmes has been linked to ‘successful outcomes’ later in life. More specifically, when compared with the control groups, former Perry and Abecedarian pre-schoolers scored higher on achievement tests, reached higher levels of education, earned higher incomes, and were less likely to go on welfare or be incarcerated (see Heckman 2006; Knudsen et al. 2006: 10156; Shonkoff and Phillips 2000: 351–2, 376, 407). We should not, however, lose sight of the fact that these findings existed in the future when these practices were still experimental. At that time, the objective was to raise the IQ of disadvantaged children by placing them in a ‘culturally enriching’ environment where they would learn through structured play and language games, the latter intended to rectify deficiencies in language acquisition by enhancing vocabulary and comprehension. It was the perceived relationship between measurable IQ and the emphasis of language acquisition and language competency that would see another pushback, this time not against hereditarian theories of defect and biological racism, but against cultural racism. Among the issues identified by critics of the cultural deprivation thesis was the use of ‘standard English’ in compensatory education programmes, and how this aimed to correct problems associated with ‘verbal deprivation’.11 An example, discussed by Barbara Beatty (2012: 20), is a paper published by William Labov in 1969 titled ‘The logic of non-standard English’. According to Labov, the ‘notion of “verbal deprivation” is a part of the modern mythology of educational psychology’, and he saw this as being a particularly dangerous myth, both ‘because it diverts attention from real defects of our educational system to imaginary defects of the child’, and because it ‘leads its sponsors inevitably to the hypothesis of … genetic inferiority’ among African-American children (1969: 2). Labov’s argument was based on a fine-grained analysis of language as used by children ‘who participate fully in the vernacular culture of the street’, and contrary to the cultural deprivation thesis, he showed how these children were ‘bathed in verbal stimulation from morning to night’ (1969: 3, 6, 11). As this critical stance gained momentum, it shifted the emphasis from cultural deprivation to cultural difference, thereby emphasising the positive features of African-American communal and family life (see Wilson 1987: 8–9; also Beatty 2012; Spencer 2012). Here, though, is the pinch, because even as the cultural deprivation thesis was being denounced as a more subtle form of racism, so conservative ideologues were busy appropriating the stance of difference, thereby also re-staging Moynihan’s rendering of disadvantage as a tangle of pathology that was culturally transmitted from adults to children.



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The truly disadvantaged … In setting out his stall in The Truly Disadvantaged, William Julius Wilson positions himself as a liberal and a social democrat – which serves as a reminder of how the meaning of ‘liberal’ tends to shift on either side of the Atlantic. I mention this only because it helps to explain Wilson’s starting point, which was not simply to engage critically with conservative views on disadvantage, but also with what he considered to be a more pervasive tendency to evade rather than confront the problem of ‘the ghetto underclass’. In other words, he was chiding fellow liberals because of their – in his view – reluctance to step out of the cultural difference conception of disadvantage. I will add another caveat, because this too is important to the way this was to play out, by noting that Wilson refers repeatedly to Moynihan’s analysis and prognosis from twenty-two years earlier, and he seemed to believe that much of what Moynihan had to offer had been lost in the storm of controversy that had blown up in the wake of his report (see for example Wilson 1987: 4–8, 20–1, 63–4). Without actually presenting it as such, Wilson basically conceded that certain features of the future envisioned by Moynihan had come to pass. From the vantage point of 1987, what had existed in the future for Moynihan – not as his preferred destination but a trajectory that he warned against – had become Wilson’s present. Moynihan had concluded his report by stating that ‘at this point, the tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world’ (1965: 42). This is basically what Wilson sought to explain in The Truly Disadvantaged, that is, what for Moynihan was a reversible trend – a ‘crumbling’ and ‘disintegrating’ family structure – had become the reality of ‘social dislocation’ for Wilson. What Wilson was attempting to do was bring structural factors within the analytical framing of disadvantage, and in his view this was why it was imperative to examine disadvantage through the lens of class. More specifically, Wilson argued the need to look beyond – though without ignoring or downplaying – the ‘easy explanation of racism’, thereby incorporating ‘non-racial factors such as economic class and modern economic trends’ (1987: 11, 19). As Wilson saw it, the ‘vertical integration’ that had once characterised inner-city communities had collapsed, and this was due to a ‘black middle class exodus’ from ‘ghetto neighborhoods to higher income neighborhoods’, culminating in a spatially configured socio-economic cleavage, or ‘dislocation’ as Wilson described it. In order to get to grips with this situation – both in terms of understanding it and formulating effective policy – it was crucial, argued Wilson, to acknowledge the existence of a ‘ghetto underclass’. Wilson insisted that there was, as a matter of fact, ‘a heterogeneous grouping of inner city families and individuals

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whose behavior contrasts sharply with that of mainstream America’ (1987: 7, emphasis added). We are clearly in the realm of norms in this invocation of ‘mainstream America’, which was also explicit in the heavily gendered features of Moynihan’s analysis from two decades earlier when he wrote that: There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating by one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating by another. (1965: 29)

By 1987, the operational (normative) principle distinguishing the ‘ghetto underclass’ from ‘mainstream America’ was all but welded to the word behaviour as used by Wilson above, which is also at the core of Moynihan’s gendered and racialised tangle of pathology thesis. This is what Wilson was simultaneously attempting to acknowledge and to challenge, and it has everything to do with what Moynihan had earlier presented as a ‘culture of poverty’.12 Nestled within this explanatory framework, having emerged in the field of psychiatry, was John Bowlby’s theory of ‘maternal deprivation’. By ‘nestled’ I am not trying to be elusive or vague. My point is that Bowlby’s influence is another case of doxa – knowledge that sediments in how the normative relation between parents (mothers in particular) and their child or children is perceived and apprehended. Bowlby produced a report for the World Health Organisation in 1951 titled Maternal Care and Mental Health, and he also published a summary of the report two years later, written for a lay readership, which he concluded by stating that ‘deprived children, whether in their own homes or out of them, are the source of social infection as real and serious as are carriers of diphtheria and typhoid’ (1953: 181).13 In some respects Bowlby was merely reiterating the views of reformers such as Mary Carpenter from a century earlier, using psychiatry to reinstate established views on the social costs of parental neglect. Yet we should not underestimate the significance of this move either, which has been massively augmented by the neuropsychological enterprise today, and I will return to this below. Here, I simply wish to note what it was that psychiatry added to the theme of deprivation. According to Bowlby, ‘deprived of maternal care, the child’s development is almost always retarded – physically, intellectually, and socially’, and this increases the likelihood of ‘numerous delinquencies’ later in life (1953: 18, 33). In short, the damage was done in the early years, and it occurred within the space of the family, but it was ‘governments, social agencies, and the public’ that would ultimately have to bear the cost of



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rectifying or managing the resulting ‘social infection’ (1953: 181–2). If this is one among many arguments for preventive intervention, then the question that invariably follows is what intervention should look like in practice. As the story of disadvantage-as-deprivation was consolidated, it also became a political football, with commentators from across the political spectrum seeking to take possession. Wilson was acutely aware of what was at stake in a context where public support for welfare programmes was on the wane and paternalistic approaches to the ‘ghetto underclass’ were on the ascendency. Regarding the latter, I will mention two examples of how political science was at the time informing the direction of public policy: Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1984) and Lawrence Mead’s Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (1986). Murray staged a neo-Malthusian attack on welfare programmes by using a vast compilation of statistics – very selectively as it happens – to ‘demonstrate’ that anti-poverty programmes were having the unintended effect of increasing the numbers of the poor in need of public assistance, thereby also perpetuating problems such as ‘illegitimate births’ and crime. Mead’s argument was subtler – and arguably more influential in terms of the direction welfare reform was to take, from Reagan through to Clinton – in presenting a psychosocial theory of dependency to argue for the introduction of mandatory workfare programmes. In some respects prefiguring the libertarian paternalism of neuroliberalism, Mead’s approach was essentially to infantilise the underclass in arguing for paternalistic policies, such that workfare was to function (resonating with Moynihan’s stance) as an instrument to re-socialise the dependent poor. In the face of this conservative attack on welfare, Wilson’s objective was to combat the rise of the New Right so that ‘the liberal perspective on the ghetto underclass [could] regain the influence it has lost since the 1960’s’ (1987: 18). For this to happen, Wilson maintained that it would not be enough merely to react to the views of conservative scholars and policymakers. What was required was ‘thoughtful explanations of the rise of inner-city social dislocations’, and ‘such explanations should emphasise the dynamic interplay between ghetto-specific cultural characteristics and social and economic opportunities’ (1987: 18). While he could not have foreseen the impact that neuroscience would have in shaping the meaning of disadvantage, the ‘thoughtful explanation’ that Wilson summons from the future has become our present, though the dynamic interplay that Wilson envisioned has turned the historical trajectory of disadvantage on its head. If, as will be discussed in more detail shortly, the entwined ideas of disadvantage and cultural deprivation once posed a challenge to biological accounts of inequality, then disadvantage has again been given a biological foundation

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through what Jan Macvarish describes as the ‘brain claims’ of the first three years movement – that the first three years of a child’s life are a ‘window of opportunity’ in terms of shaping the ‘brain architecture’ of the future adult, and that ‘the early years last forever’ (Macvarish 2016: 2–3). In other words, disadvantage is at the core of the neuropsychological enterprise, which also recalibrates the Procrustean features of biosocial power. I have been silent on the question of biosocial power in this chapter thus far, but it would take very little effort to show how the tangle of pathology thesis and cultural deprivation theory as discussed above operate within the frame of normalisation. With the neuropsychological enterprise however, we pass from normalisation to optimisation. The first three years … I am going to begin this story by moving back further in time – a lot further – and recalling a passage written by Jeremy Bentham at the end of the eighteenth century, when he was still optimistic that Parliament would support his vision for a national system of panopticon penitentiaries and poor houses: What would you say, if by the gradual adoption and diversified application of this single principle, you should see a new scene of things spread itself over the face of civilised society? – morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction diffused, public burdens lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock, the Gordian knot of the poor-laws not cut but untied – all by a simple idea of architecture? (Bentham [1787] 1995: 31)

Readers familiar with this quote may recognise it from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977: 207), though of course it originates in Bentham’s letters and essays on the panopticon, which is what he is referring to in his ‘simple idea of architecture’. Had it actually been built to the Bentham brothers’ specifications, the panopticon would have been a very literal manifestation of the anthropological machine, designed as it was to engineer a particular disposition among its inmates, whether paupers, prisoners, factory hands or school children. I touched on Foucault’s theory of panopticism briefly in chapter 3, noting that the supervised playgrounds of the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries were quasi-panoptic technologies, as were experiments in preventive and reformatory education as discussed in chapter 6. The reason I am citing Bentham here, however, is that his words have a curious resonance with the neuropsychological enterprise today, that is, the Eureka quality to his claim concerning ‘a simple idea of architecture’ is very much a feature of the claims currently being made in



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the name of early childhood intervention. In other words, the Gordian knot of Moynihan’s tangle of pathology is to be untied – finally, Eureka! – by acting upon the ‘brain architecture’ of babies and infants. Furthermore, and this is a recurring theme that connects Bentham’s vision to the baby brain movement, it is those among us who are perceived to be on a collision course with the workhouse or prison – or to use the current vernacular, those among us who are deemed ‘at risk’ of welfare dependency and crime and other such negative ‘outcomes’ – who are the primary focus of interventions targeting the ‘first three years’. When and how did neuropsychological brain claims migrate to the policy arena, and what exactly are the claims made in the name of early intervention? John Bruer tackles both questions in his book The Myth of the First Three Years (1999) and does so by recounting a pivotal moment in the story of the baby brain movement – a 1997 White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning.14 Bruer received an invitation in his capacity as President of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, which supports projects in the fields of mind, brain and education, and the way he narrates this event in the first person positions the reader as though s/he were seated alongside him at the conference. Bruer introduces the speakers, each in turn, starting with the First Lady Hillary Clinton, who opened the proceedings by explaining that the first three years of a child’s life are critically important because early experiences ‘can determine whether children will grow up to be peaceful or violent citizens, focused or undisciplined workers, attentive or detached parents themselves’ (in Bruer 1999: 5). Those few words encapsulate the tone and substance of what was to follow, with President Bill Clinton outlining the initiatives his administration had undertaken on behalf of families and children, followed by Dr David A. Hamburg, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and so it went, though Bruer expresses surprise – given the claims being made – that only one neuroscientist spoke at the conference. I am not going to summarise Bruer’s detailed account of the proceedings, but I do want to note the presence of movie director and producer Rob Reiner, who was at the conference as a representative of his foundation, now known as Parent’s Action, which was at that time developing a public education resource called ‘I am Your Child’.15 Echoing the First Lady’s opening remarks, Reiner appealed to his audience by explaining that If we want to have a real significant impact, not only on children’s success in school and later on in life … but also an impact on reduction in crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, child abuse, welfare, homelessness, and a variety of other social ills, we are going to have to address the first three years of life. There is no getting around it. All roads lead to Rome. (in Bruer 1999: 8)

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I will invoke Bentham once more by way of a reminder that we’ve heard this story before, which might also serve to remind us of what is at stake in this stance of normative certainty, because we’ve seen plenty of that in the past too, and it doesn’t always end well for those who are the objects of this type of moral crusade. Whatever about all roads leading to Rome, there is a compact set of relationships at work in this context – a convergence within the space of the White House conference – that sets the scene for Reiner’s speech, and this convergence has also generated a narrative that has continued to gain traction through an iterative process. In other words, the story of the ‘first three years’ has since travelled and bedded-down in other contexts. I have mentioned David Hamburg, who spoke at the White House conference as President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In 1994 the Carnegie Corporation published a report titled Starting Points, which tells the story of a ‘quiet crisis’ in America, resulting from a ‘pattern of neglect’ and ‘environmental deficiency’ relating to poverty, violence and physical abuse, with more children spending longer periods of time in ‘sub-standard care’ while both parents work, and more children being raised in single-parent families (CCNY 1994: 11, 15). Starting Points was produced by the Carnegie Task Force in Meeting the Needs of Young Children, established in 1991, which brought together thirty-one experts traversing the fields of business, science, media, education, health, child development and law. A second publication, no less influential according to Bruer, was Rima Shore’s Rethinking the Brain, published by the Families and Work Institute in 1997.16 Shore had also contributed to Starting Points as an editorial assistant, and was a consultant on a second Carnegie Corporation report published in 1996, titled Years of Promise (CCNY 1996). According to Bruer, three core claims – derived from findings in the field of developmental neurobiology – can be distilled from this small body of texts, and these claims or discursive threads were laced together as a narrative that was performed by Reiner at the White House conference, as well as anchoring the initial phase of the baby brain movement (1999: 10–12). First claim: starting shortly before or immediately after birth (depending on the species) the brain undergoes a process that Bruer describes as ‘biological exuberance’, a period when synapse formation greatly exceeds synapse elimination, or ‘pruning’ as it is sometimes described (Shore coined a catchy phrase when she described this as a ‘“use it or lose it” process’, 1997: 20). Secondly, there are critical periods in brain development which are presented as ‘windows of opportunity’. The window metaphor is effective in communicating this strand, because it creates a vivid image of a window closing, animating the message that the opportunity to ‘wire’ certain neural pathways diminishes if the rapidly developing brain is not adequately or properly stimulated during these critical periods. The



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third claim follows on from this, highlighting the importance of ‘enriched’ or complex environments for brain development, and the human brain is said to be more dependent on environmental input than other species, which underscores the dangers and risks of ‘deprivation’ (environmental, sensory, experiential). This, then, is how science and policy have been laced together around the figure of the disadvantaged child, who anchors a moral tale of the first order – a story of harm being done to children, often unintentionally, before they are even old enough to be able to call for help. This is also what necessitates biosocial interventions during the early years, targeting the brain architecture of babies and infant children with a view to engineering positive outcomes. What I want to look at next is how this story has since been refined. The political economy of persuasion I will start by presenting a more recent version of the story just sketched. The way I have constructed this is by synthesising two academic articles, one pamphlet intended to communicate the science to policy-makers, and one public lecture,17 using this small corpus as a representative sample of texts produced by leading contemporary experts from the fields of neurobiology, developmental psychology, psychiatry and economics. The story as I present it here plots the main coordinates of the argument for investing in early intervention as well as the brain claims supporting the argument. In terms of presentation, I have not indicated direct quotes but have instead placed key words and phrases in bold the first time each is used, and in a few places I have added a parenthesised comment. An additional point before proceeding is that I have endeavoured to provide a faithful account as opposed to constructing a caricature or straw figure with a view to knocking it down later. The story is presented in three parts, beginning with the pitch (what is the problem?), moving to the evidence (what do we know?) and ending with the proposed response (what should be done?). The pitch It is widely recognised that the future prosperity and security of our nation hinges on the well-being of our children (this is a frequently used starting point, and appeals to a reader who identifies with the ‘us’ invoked). In the context of globalisation, the future success of national economies will depend in part on a workforce that is not only well educated and resourceful, but also capable of adapting through the acquisition of new skills. A question for policy-makers is whether the children of today will grow into adults who are a burden or an asset. What can be done to minimise the former and maximise the latter?

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The relationship between environmental stimulation and brain architecture is crucial in cultivating cognitive and non-cognitive skills and competencies, including motivation, perseverance and tenacity. Environments that do not provide the necessary stimulation place children at much greater risk of adult failure, which takes its toll in the form of costs to individuals and to society. We know that family environments are deteriorating, with more children living in single-parent homes and more children being born to teenage mothers, with the school drop-out rate particularly high among disadvantaged children. Disadvantaged environments have been linked to adverse childhood experiences18 and poor outcomes for children, and stress is a key factor. Positive stress, or short-lived neuro-physiological events that increase heart-rate and generate mild elevations in cortisol levels, can be important and beneficial to healthy development. Toxic stress however, associated with prolonged activation of the body’s stress response systems in the absence of the buffering protection of adult support, disrupts the architecture and chemistry of the developing brain and can result in long-term susceptibility to physical illness – including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, obesity, diabetes, stroke, and also mental health problems – depression, anxiety disorders and substance abuse. Toxic stressors include recurrent child abuse or neglect, parental substance abuse and family violence. If children in their crucial formative years are not receiving adequate support and stimulation at home or in school, then the likelihood increases that they will later become dependent on welfare and/or engage in crime, as well as experiencing negative physical and mental health. To put it in stark terms, a child who falls behind in the early years may never catch up. The evidence The science tells us that the human brain is composed of billions of highly integrated sets of neural circuits that are ‘wired’ (this word is presented in quotation marks in the original texts) through the interactive influences of genetics, environment and experience. Neuroscientists have recently made considerable progress in elucidating how different types of experience affect the architecture, biochemistry and gene expression exhibited by neural circuits that mediate cognitive, emotional and social behaviour. A degree of plasticity persists in virtually all neural circuits throughout our lifetimes, yet many circuits are particularly susceptible to the influence of experience during sensitive periods. Animal research (rats and monkeys feature prominently in the literature) demonstrates the existence of these sensitive periods, typically early in life, when the systems underlying the development of social skills are plastic, with plasticity decreasing with age. The activation of neural circuits by experience can cause dramatic change in the genes that are expressed or ‘switched on’ in specific circuits. The protein products of



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these genes can have profound effects on the chemistry of neurons, or their excitability and architecture. Some genes are switched on or off, or can have their expression levels adjusted by experience, only during a limited sensitive period in a circuit’s maturation. The strong shaping influence of experience on neural circuits during their maturation results primarily from two factors. First, the molecular and cellular mechanisms that mediate neural plasticity during a sensitive period are highly active, enabling circuits to undergo substantial changes in architecture, chemistry and gene expression in response to environmental influences. After a sensitive period has passed, one or more of these critical mechanisms no longer operate or operate less effectively. Secondly, it is far easier to form a pattern of connections in a neural circuit that does not already have an established configuration. The development of neural pathways follows hierarchical rules, and specific neural circuits are most plastic during the first years of a child’s development, which is part of a dynamic process whereby genes interact with sensory experience. In other words, the acquisition and mastery of skills and competencies – cognitive, linguistic, social, and emotional – are formed in a predictable sequence whereby early experiences lay down a foundation for later attainments. The response What can be done to promote resilience among children living with adversity, and what can be done to support families coping with adversity, so as to promote better outcomes for disadvantaged children and minimise their exposure to toxic stress? Interventions must begin as early as possible, starting with antenatal care and basic medical services for pregnant women, including advice on nutrition. Postnatal care should include early and intensive support by skilled home visitors, such as nurses and social workers, trained to deliver individualised coaching to parents, as well as offering advice and assistance on how to avoid or reduce toxic stress in the family environment. An enriched pre-school environment can compensate for deficient home environments, helping to ensure positive outcomes for disadvantaged children, and reducing the cost of remediation efforts at a later stage of the life-cycle. The Perry Preschool Study and the Abecedarian Project provide reliable data on early environmental enrichment linked to positive outcomes later in life for disadvantaged children. Measures to address crime, welfare dependency and other social pathologies are expensive and far less effective than early intervention. This is not to say that we must choose between one and the other. Supports and services for teenagers and adults should continue, but they should augment early intervention targeting disadvantaged children, which is the most cost-effective form of human capital investment.

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The science supporting this story has advanced gradually, and although the brain sciences are of course much older than what Joelle Abi-Rached and Nikolas Rose (2010) refer to as ‘the neuromolecular gaze’, which is how they conceptualise the contemporary field of neuroscience, the latter is – in terms of its age as opposed to its pedigree – a fledgling field of inquiry.19 The claims made in the name of this science however have become doxic extremely quickly, and herein lies the source of extensive criticisms levelled against advocates of interventions targeting the first three years. In other words, when it comes to the question of how the scientific findings can and should be applied, whether in the form of pedagogical practices, parenting advice or more encompassing policy programmes, the prescriptive statements that have proliferated since the late 1990s are running way ahead of what the science can say with any degree of certainty. So, when John Bruer (1999) writes about ‘the myth of the first three years’, he is careful to distinguish the myth from the science, and unlike many advocates of early intervention Bruer is qualified to actually understand the science. However, and here is cause for further concern, the distance or gap between science and myth is sometimes collapsed by the experts themselves. I am going to quote from one of the articles I have used above (Knudsen et al. 2006: 10161). The article is co-authored by four experts spanning neurobiology, psychiatry and economics, two of whom are luminaries in the field of early intervention: Nobel laureate James Heckman, and Jack Shonkoff, who founded the Harvard Center on the Developing Child in 2006. I will have more to say about Shonkoff and the Harvard Center shortly, but here I want to underline the fact that I am below quoting from an article published in a science journal as opposed to being written for a lay audience, and it concludes by apparently contradicting one of its central claims. Furthermore, this apparent contradiction is all the more striking given its visual impact. The article is formatted as columns (three per page) which are wrapped around a series of figures and boxes that summarise the research as discussed by the authors. The two passages I quote below are on the same page and in the concluding section, which is text-only (no figures or boxes), roughly half way down the left and centre columns (Knudsen et al. 2006: 10161): It is important to note that the relevance of animal research to human circumstances rests not on the direct applicability of specific results to humans, but on the elucidation of underlying developmental and neurobiological principles. For example, the empirical findings of the positive effects of living in complex cages on learning capacity and brain architecture in young rats should not be equated with the relative impacts of a more or less stimulating home environment on the development of young humans.



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And immediately adjacent to this: The evidence presented in this paper indicates that the most cost-effective strategy for strengthening the future American workforce is to invest greater human and financial resources in the social and cognitive environments of children who are disadvantaged, beginning as early as possible. The greatest return derives from investing in disadvantaged children because their home environments are impoverished.

Here we see the basic tenets of the cultural deprivation thesis reinstalled within the neuropsychological framing of disadvantage, and it is this framing that needs to be unpacked. The words and phrases highlighted in bold above are part of what has become an established grammar, some of which was developed through a partnership between the Harvard Center on the Developing Child and the FrameWorks Institute, a Washington-based think-tank that studies the ‘cultural models’ informing the public’s understanding of science (Shonkoff and Bales 2011).20 Both organisations have a ‘mission’ that overlaps through the partnership – the Harvard Center’s mission is ‘to generate, translate, and apply scientific knowledge that closes the gap between what we know and what we do to improve the lives of children facing adversity’, while the FrameWorks Institute’s is to ‘frame the public discourse on social problems’.21 The partnership itself was a seven-year ‘effort’ among neuroscientists, developmental psychologists, paediatricians, economists and communications researchers seeking to ‘explain the science of early childhood development and its underlying neurobiology to key policymaking audiences’ (Shonkoff and Bales 2011: 18). The core objective was ‘knowledge synthesis, translation, and transfer from research to policy and practice’, or, in more practical terms, ‘to close the gap between what we know and what we do to advance the healthy development of young children’ (2011: 18, 19). In terms of the timing, the initiative was partly in response to critics (Bruer’s book is mentioned specifically), and was tasked with developing a consistent message that ‘remained true to the science’. The method used to accomplish this aim is called Strategic Frame Analysis, designed to identify gaps or ‘cognitive holes’ between expert thinking and lay thinking and to close these gaps through the use of ‘simplifying models’ or ‘frame elements’, which reduce complexity to a ‘simple, concrete analogy or metaphor’ (Shonkoff and Bales 2011: 20). Framing is defined as ‘the way a story is told – its selective use of particular symbols, metaphors, and messengers … and the way these cues … trigger the shared and durable cultural models that people use to make sense of the world’ (2011: 20). Fully developed frames, we are told, encompass problem definition, causal analysis, moral judgement and remedy promotion, and that is precisely what Strategic Frame

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Analysis aims for, that is, to produce a ‘core story’ that will shape public perception and guide policy. The core story of child development scripted through the seven-year partnership between the Harvard Center and FrameWorks – much of which is evident in the narrative I have presented above – encompasses three questions and three simplifying models: what develops (brain architecture), how it develops (‘serve and return’ as a way of communicating ‘contingent reciprocity’ – a relationship whereby children reach out for interaction through vocalising, facial expressions, gestures) and why development is derailed (types of stress, the ‘buffering’ effects of caring adults and the dangers of ‘toxic stress’). This is the story used to support the argument for early intervention – that ‘brain plasticity and the ability to change behaviour decreases over time. Consequently, getting it right early leads to better outcomes and is less costly … We can pay now or we will pay more later for society’s failure to promote healthy development in the earliest years of life’ (Shonkoff and Bales 2011: 23). Maybe this is inevitable, but it is nevertheless interesting that framing theory and frame analysis as used by social scientists and critical theorists has now become an instrument of persuasion. More important perhaps is what happens to the message once it is transmitted and put into circulation. Whatever about crafting a story that stays true to the science, what about how the meaning of the message is contextually shaped? It is hardly insignificant that – in presenting its mission – the Harvard Center describes its donors and supporters as ‘investors’ which are ‘critical to our mission to drive science-based innovation that achieves breakthrough outcomes for children facing adversity’.22 Among the list of ‘Major Investors $1M+ (Cumulative Giving)’ are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,23 the Bezos Family Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, all of which are major proponents of philanthropy, or to adopt a critical perspective, all of which are among the vanguard of philanthrocapitalism24 (see Fridell and Konings 2013; also Fisher 2009: 12–15). What I am going to propose in the remainder of this chapter is that this is one of the ways in which the neuroliberal fix for disadvantage crosses paths with entrepreneurial education, which is the focus of chapter 8. Philanthrocapitalism and the logic of chocolate laxative Slavoj Žižek (2008) attempts to make the paradoxes (as well as the symbolic and structural violence) at work in philanthrocapitalism tangible by giving it a different name: liberal communism. His tongue-in-cheek broadside is at once witty and deadly serious. A case in point is his example of chocolate laxative, which is apparently available in the US – a cause of constipation is marketed as a cure for constipation. The example gets to the core of the



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philanthrocapitalist logic, and here Bill Gates receives special attention when he is introduced by Žižek as ‘the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for neighbours with hundreds of millions freely given to education, and the battles against hunger and malaria’ (2008: 20). As Žižek points out however, the somewhat obvious catch is that ‘in order to give, first you have to take or, as some would put it, create’. The liberal communist creed reboots Adam Smith’s metaphor of an invisible hand, which now becomes visible through an ethical capitalism that invests in solutions to otherwise intractable problems; problems moreover that the state has failed spectacularly to address. Siding with the efficiency of the market against the failures of the state, liberal communism turns opposition to taxation into a moral stance, because if private enterprise is taxed excessively, then it undermines the very possibility of making life better for the majority and helping those most in need. Nor should we forget that the liberal communist creed has been around much longer than the philanthropic foundations just mentioned. Žižek recounts the story of ‘good old Andrew Carnegie’, whose legacy (the Carnegie Corporation of New York noted earlier) produced Starting Points in 1994, and whose President was invited to speak at the 1997 White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning. The Carnegie Corporation website presents ‘Andrew Carnegie’s story’ as a timeline from ‘humble beginnings’ to the ‘wealthiest man in the world’ (and incidentally, a graph that compares Carnegie’s peak wealth with that of Bill Gates makes the latter seem like the pauper of the billionaire’s club). Carnegie was a ‘pacifist’ we are told, devoted to the cause of ‘world peace’ and who believed that ‘the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced’.25 Žižek, however, tells the story of a man who ‘employed a private army brutally to supress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth to educational, artistic, and humanitarian causes’ (2008: 21).26 I mention this not with a view to apportioning blame to individuals, but rather to underscore the logic of practice, or, as Žižek puts it, ‘the same structure – the thing itself is the remedy against the threat it poses … In liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity’ (2008: 21, 22). A graphic version of Žižek’s argument was published in the Saturday Globe on 9 July 189227 (figure 7.1), which might well serve as a comment on the Giving Pledge initiated by Bill and Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett in 2010 – ‘The Giving Pledge is an effort to help address society’s most pressing problems by inviting the world’s wealthiest individuals and families to commit more than half of their wealth to philanthropy or charitable causes either during their lifetimes or in their will’.28 Philanthrocapitalism is like a hamster’s wheel powered by the transformation of life into capital, which brings me to the neuroliberal fix for disadvantage.

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7.1  ‘Forty-millionaire Carnegie in his great double role’. Saturday Globe, 9 July 1892.

Analogous to the notion of neural circuits becoming ‘wired’ through an iterative process of stimulation, the story that connects dis/advantage to the infant brain and socially scripted outcomes has become doxic through dissemination and reiteration. In terms of the impact this is having in the policy arena, I have provided some evidence from Ireland in chapter 6 (see Smith 2018), and others have examined the influence of the baby brain movement in the US (Nadesan 2010), the UK (Gagen 2015; Garrett 2018; Macvarish 2016; Thornton 2011; White and Wastell 2017), Australia (Millei and Joronen 2016), in the international development arena (Penn 2017), and on organisations like UNESCO, UNICEF and Save the Children International (Vandenbroeck and Olsson 2017). However, the ‘impact’ (a word that now routinely accompanies the use of metrics in evaluating research) of the neuropsychological enterprise is not necessarily captured by evidence that accords with outcomes as envisioned by the experts or as codified by policy frameworks. There are other outcomes too – other windows of opportunity that open through the idea of fabricating enriched environments to optimise the brain architecture of children. Here it is worth drilling down into the deeper meaning of architecture as used in this field of practice, which is not to deny the pragmatics of language



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and communication, or to claim that words are constrained by some type of immutable semantic essence. Rather, it is to suggest that the root meaning of arkhi- (árkhō, archein) and tektōn can help to cast the logic of practice into relief. As Hannah Arendt noted (1998: 189), the Greek verb archein conveys several related meanings: to rule, to lead and to begin. Combined with tektōn – denoting a builder, maker or artisan – the neuroliberal arkhitektōn orchestrates interventions that target the formative process that apparently conditions the developmental trajectory of children, with the infant brain figured as the solution to a whole range of policy dilemmas. Hence the imperative to direct or govern the experiences that shape the brain’s neural circuitry, thereby laying the foundation for specific cognitive and social competencies. Outside of such interventions, the (disadvantaged) child is an-archic, as in without or minus the prescribed rule. In the final chapter I will refract this an-archic framing of childhood through Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on natality, using this as a line of sight on the challenge of refiguring childhood. First however, it is important to follow the thread of the neuroliberal arkhi-tektōn. The next (penultimate) chapter takes up the question of what it is that a given child – whether advantaged or disadvantaged – can expect as she moves from the enriched environment of the ideal family or pre-school through the various tiers of education; what awaits this child and what has she been primed for? The short answer is enterprise and entrepreneurship, which is how philanthrocapitalism enters the frame. It does so at the intersection of science and policy, and operates not merely by investing in scientific research and communication strategies aimed at shaping the policy landscape as noted above, but also by operationalising the neuropsychological doxa. In short, the educational apparatus, from primary schools through to higher education, is being steered by the goal of instilling entrepreneurial intention in future workers and innovators, and it is private enterprises (non-profits and philanthropic foundations) that are the avant-garde of this mission. To return to Wendy Brown’s argument concerning the normativity of inequality, it appears that disadvantage is no longer merely the source of Moynihan’s tangle of pathology. Disadvantage is also the engine of enterprise and innovation, and thus what is required as we compete our way into the futureless-future that awaits us is more of it. Equal inequality has become a horizon of opportunity. Notes 1 Whitehead et al. are referring to a Deutsche Bank Research report published in 2010, titled Homo Economicus – or More like Homer Simpson, which examined the causes of the financial crisis of 2008. For readers not familiar with the point of reference, Homer Simpson is one of the characters in a long-running

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animated sitcom called The Simpsons. Homer is married with three children, lives in the fictional town of Springfield, and is portrayed as being overweight, apathetic towards his job, lazy, impulsive, possibly alcoholic, and prone to bouts of anger and bumbling stupidity. 2 For detailed discussion on behavioural insights teams, the use of randomised control trials in policy experiments, and state-based ‘nudge units’, see Whitehead et al. (2018), especially chapter 6; also Mannevuo (2019). 3 I borrow and adapt this ‘futures past and futures present’ approach from Churchill et al. (2018). 4 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). 5 I will be using the phrase ‘African-American’ in this chapter to refer to Americans of African descent. I’m aware that ‘racial’ labels are also implicated in racialising minority groups, and that ‘Black’ might be preferable to ‘African-American’, as the former can be used to encompass social position and political standpoint as opposed to reinforcing the notion of distinct ‘races’. On this issue I refer readers to the excellent work of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013). In the context of this chapter, ‘African-American’ belongs to a racialised and racialising nomenclature that figures prominently in the literature I am discussing, and it is important not to lose sight of how it partitions a population. 6 Moynihan is here quoting Frazer (1950). 7 The Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act (further details at the US Department of Health & Human Services: https://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/about-us/ article/head-start-timeline (accessed 15 September 2019)). Head Start Early Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center: https://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ article/head-start-programs (accessed 15 September 2019). On the Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act see: https://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/policy/ head-start-act (accessed 15 September 2019). Head Start is another example of how the figure of the Whole Child, as discussed in chapter 6 of this volume, has acquired practical form (see HSQRC 2003; Miller et al. 2016). 8 For further information, see the HighScope website: https://highscope.org/ perrypreschoolstudy (accessed 15 September 2019). 9 Details available at the Carolina Abecedarian Project: https://abc.fpg.unc.edu/ abecedarian-project (accessed 15 September 2019). 10 See websites quoted in notes 8 and 9. 11 The verbal deprivation thesis has been revived in recent years, and is now known as a ‘word gap’. In his lecture on ‘Social and emotional development in early childhood’ at the Chicago Humanities Festival in 2014, psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry rehearses the numbers associated with the word gap, with the numbers themselves derived from a study by Hart and Risley (1995): a child from a ‘professional family’ hears 2,153 words-per-hour, versus 616 words for a child from a ‘family on welfare’. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkJwFRAwDNE (accessed 15 September 2019). For a critical assessment of the methodology used to generate these numbers see Sperry et al. (2020). 12 The culture of poverty thesis originates in Oscar Lewis’s book, The Children of Sanchez (1961).



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13 Bowlby’s work, which laid the groundwork for what is now known as ‘attachment theory’, has proven to be extremely influential among contemporary advocates of early intervention (for discussion see Nadesan 2010; Thornton 2011). 14 A brief summary of the day-long conference is available here: https:// clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/New/ECDC/About.html. (Accessed 15 September 2019). 15 See www.parentsaction.org/who-we-are/. The original ‘I am your child’ video is also available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OotgVaoxE3k (both sites accessed 15 September 2019). 16 The Families and Work Institute is a non-profit that ‘takes on emerging issues before they crest’ with a view to shaping ‘the language of debates to move the discussion forward toward more effective, and data-driven solutions, and to result in action’. See: Families and Work Institute, www.familiesandwork.org/ (accessed 10 August 2019). 17 The articles are Heckman (2006) and Knudsen et al. (2006); the policy document is by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child (CDCHU 2007); and the public lecture is by Bruce D. Perry (see note 11 above). 18 This is a reference to the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Details here: www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/about_ace.html (accessed 15 September 2019). 19 According to Abi-Rached and Rose (2010), the phrase ‘neuroscience’ began to appear in scientific journals at roughly the same time as Moynihan’s report went public. 20 The partnership originated between the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, the National Forum on Early Childhood and the FrameWorks Institute. The Council and the Forum were incorporated within the Harvard Center on the Developing Child after it was established in 2006 by Jack Shonkoff (see https://developingchild.harvard.edu/about/who-we-are/history-of-the-center/ (accessed 15 December 2018)). In terms of ‘enhancing access to decision makers in the policy world’, the partnership established a working relationship with the National Conference of State Legislatures and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (Shonkoff and Bales 2011: 19). 21 See: Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University: https://developingchild .harvard.edu/about/who-we-are/history-of-the-center/ (accessed 3 September 2019); FrameWorks Institute: www.frameworksinstitute.org/mission.html (accessed 3 September 2019). 22 From: https://developingchild.harvard.edu/about/investors/ (accessed 15 December 2018). 23 As of March 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is no longer listed as an investor. 24 Gavin Fridell and Martin Konings’s argument is similar to Slavoj Žižek’s, as discussed later in this chapter: that in the ‘age of icons’, philanthrocapitalism depicts inequality ‘not as something that neoliberal capitalism has caused but as something it has not yet resolved … Today’s icons offer the promise of limitless

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change without changing the limits of existing society’ (Fridell and Konings 2013: 4, 9). 25 See: www.carnegie.org/interactives/foundersstory/#!/ (accessed 15 September 2019). 26 Žižek is referring to an episode now known as the ‘Homestead strike’, which took place in 1892 at the Carnegie Steel Company in Homestead, Pennsylvania (see Adamczyk 2018). 27 The Saturday Globe was an illustrated newspaper, with its original offices located in Utica in New York State in 1881. 28 The Giving Pledge homepage is here: https://givingpledge.org/Home.aspx (accessed 15 September 2019).

8 Casting the subject of enterprise: children as ‘architects of their futures’

As with the previous chapter, I am going to begin this chapter by jumping straight into the thick of things, that is, a pedagogical programme called BizWorld. My own (indirect) encounter with BizWorld was occasioned as a resident and parent in a rural community in the West of Ireland during the 2015/16 school year. Sixth Class children (typically 12–13 years old) attending a local primary school were given an information sheet to take home to parents/guardians (myself among them), requesting permission for pupils to participate in a workshop. Modelled on the reality TV format known widely as Dragon’s Den, children were being offered the opportunity to ‘take part in an exciting hands-on programme’ that would ‘come to life when a member of the business community acts as the Dragon in the Den with the class’. In other words, children were invited to pitch their own business ideas to an adult playing the role of a venture capital investor. Meshing Dragon’s Den with X Factor, the lure held out to children and parents/guardians alike was the possibility of competing in an annual ‘Biz Factor Enterprise of the Year competition’. To shift scale from the local to the global, BizWorld Ireland1 is a partner to the BizWorld Foundation, established in 1997 by the venture capital investor Tim Draper, with its headquarters based in Alameda, California. The Foundation’s Board of Directors comprises individuals in senior positions in major corporations including VISA and Wells Fargo, and according to its 2018 Annual Report BizWorld operates through partner organisations in more than a hundred countries across the globe, and to date has ‘reached’ 747,000 children (BizWorld 2018). The BizWorld mission is to ‘empower children to become twenty-first century thinkers by awakening their entrepreneurial spirit, inspiring them to become the architects of their futures, and giving them the confidence to transform their world’.2 One need only scratch the surface of this mission however to see that it cloaks a biosocial strategy that resonates with the neuropsychological doxa. How

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exactly does BizWorld propose to empower children? By ‘providing students with a real world context’, with its ‘exciting hands-on programme’ aiming to ‘reach young minds at a critical cognitive stage, and plant the seeds of entrepreneurship and innovation’.3 BizWorld has developed a suite of in-class ‘simulations’ whereby, as noted above, children are encouraged to think of themselves as the ‘architects of their own future’.4 They are free to improvise by using their initiative – indeed this is the whole point of the workshop – and yet the scope of possibility is bounded by the rules of the game, with children auditioning for the part of embryonic venture capital investors. It is also important to note that within the space of the simulated game of enterprise, children are coached to perceive of themselves and each other not as vulnerable minors in need of protection, but as actors – as the architects of imaginable futures. And yet their capacity to imagine and create something new is channelled into a competitive ethos that generates a distribution of winners and losers. BizWorld Ireland for example organises children into contests that enable individual children to rise above their peers, and this competitive ethos corresponds to the Foundation’s claim to be connecting the content of education to a ‘real-world context’. The competitive world of enterprise is certainly real, but not in the way that gravity is real, and here we encounter something like a self-fulfilling prophecy, with these truth-claims generating the very reality they purport only to describe. Projected into the future, the simulated game of enterprise prefigures a scenario whereby some will have the means to dispense alms to less fortunate or ‘disadvantaged’ others, while the rest are cast in the role of being dependent on the largesse of a global elite, which is why it would be a mistake to view BizWorld in isolation, or dismiss it as being of minor consequence in the larger scheme of things. BizWorld is anchored in a globalising culture of enterprise, and, as noted in chapter 7, among the defining characteristics of neoliberal enterprise culture is a dogmatic faith in commercially driven innovation as the solution to problems such as poverty, climate change and humanitarian crises (Žižek 2008: 15–24). In its US operations for example, the BizWorld ‘Impact Challenge’ offers a glimpse of what lies behind the idea of teaching young entrepreneurs to become ‘socially conscious citizens’ (see BizWorld 2016: 14–15).5 BizWorld anticipates a future where problems such as poverty are resolved not through public welfare, social rights or distributive justice, but by philanthrocapitalism and social enterprise. The Impact Challenge programme is about transforming seed-funding provided by BizWorld into profit that can be donated to worthy social causes, with successful ventures inspiring other children in other classrooms to do likewise. It is not without significance that it is the donor who is empowered by the gift – social enterprise will assist the needy but it is the ‘self-sufficient’ entrepreneurial class of innovators



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who are the BizWorld avant-garde. Stripped back to bare essentials, the strategic objective of the BizWorld Foundation is, as Tim Draper explains, about ‘spreading venture capital entrepreneurship all over the world’.6 The practical challenge is how to achieve this goal, and the solution is schoolgoing children, with the classroom setting providing a captive audience poised to be cast as actors in the pre-scripted (prescribed) theatre of entrepreneurship. To relate this to the neuropsychological figuring of childhood, entrepreneurship education organises groups of children into relations and activities that stage a very specific ‘enriched environment’, such that they rehearse their own futures as subjects of neoliberal enterprise culture. This chapter reconstructs some of BizWorld’s conditions of existence, moving from past to present, and from mainstream education to the margins – meaning programmes that target ‘disadvantaged’ children in otherwise prosperous countries, as well as ‘necessity entrepreneurship’ in impoverished regions of the globe. Before taking that genealogical step, the next section locates the BizWorld scenario within the contemporary policy landscape, and I will focus on Europe by way of examining two significant and related features of entrepreneurship education as a field of practice. First, when viewed together, the neuropsychological doxa and the truth-claims of entrepreneurship education appear to be cut from similar cloth, and yet each has been gaining traction and momentum more or less independently of the other. Where they mesh is in the field of practice, as can be gleaned from the BizWorld objective to ‘plant the seeds of entrepreneurship’ in ‘young minds at a critical cognitive stage’ of development. This leads to a second and related feature, which is an important genealogical thread and concerns the ways in which entrepreneurship education is being organised into the institutional fabric of schools, not merely as a discipline-specific subject such as business studies, but as a method that folds back onto the histories of biosocial power. Assembling the entrepreneurial ‘mindset’ An example of the European Commission’s (EC’s) drive to steer and coordinate entrepreneurship education initiatives is its 2004 Action Plan: The European Agenda for Entrepreneurship. Pre-dating the debt crisis post-2008, the Action Plan now reads as though portending the shape of things to come, or perhaps it should be read as an indication of the European Union’s commitment to an enterprise culture come what may. Warning against Europe’s lagging economic performance relative to ‘emerging Asian economies’, the Action Plan presents entrepreneurship as a ‘major driver of innovation, competitiveness and growth’, thus tasking enterprise with closing the ‘productivity gap’, which of course is a thoroughly familiar refrain. More telling is that

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it also presents entrepreneurship as ‘a vehicle for personal development’, adding that entrepreneurship ‘can harness social cohesion when the opportunity of creating one’s own business is offered to everybody, regardless of background or location’ (EC 2004: 3). In other words, entrepreneurship is here pitched as a positive-sum scenario that promises not only economic growth and prosperity, but also an egalitarian distribution of the benefits of growth by augmenting opportunity and inclusion, thereby reducing poverty and disadvantage (see also EC 2013a). Standing in the way of this promise was (and apparently still is) a reluctance on the part of Europeans to embrace risk and ‘accept a lower degree of social security’, hence the need to orchestrate cultural change in order to ‘fuel entrepreneurial mindsets’ (EC 2004: 5–6). A more recent EC Communication continues the theme of entrepreneurship-as-combustion through the notion of ‘re-igniting the entrepreneurial spirit’ (EC 2013b), again suggesting a latent energy waiting to be released. In the more concrete and practical sense what this amounts to is a biosocial strategy that has seen entrepreneurship becoming an encompassing feature of the learning experience for many children and young people, from primary through to higher education. This is the ‘red thread’ scenario as formulated by the European Economic and Social Committee7 in 2006: ‘Achieving an entrepreneurial mindset is a lifelong learning process, which needs to start at an early age and which should run like a “red thread” throughout the whole education system’ (EESC 2006: 2). What I am going to propose is that this scenario marks a point of contact between the baby brain movement (as discussed in chapter 7) and entrepreneurship education programmes. Before proceeding, it is important to note that the aim of this chapter is not to chart the policy arena in any comprehensive sense, which would be an extensive mapping exercise given the degree of variation at the level of individual states. Instead, this section sketches an initial outline of how the policy discourse of entrepreneurship education can be seen to redouble the neuropsychological figuring of childhood, particularly – though by no means exclusively – when viewed through the lens of ‘disadvantage’. As a first step, I am going to briefly reiterate the ‘core story’ developed by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child in partnership with the FrameWorks Institute (as examined in chapter 7), which can be summarised by the following three claims: that the architecture of the brain and the process of skillformation are shaped by the interactive influence of genes and experience; that the mastery of skills essential for economic and social success follows hierarchical rules (i.e. later attainments build on foundations that are laid down earlier); and that a full spectrum of competencies – cognitive and non-cognitive, linguistic, social and emotional – are interdependent and shaped by the experiences of the developing child. If the story is pared back



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even further, then what comes into focus is a biosocial narrative which is at once an account of how the formative experiences of children prefigure the adults they will become, and a summons to guide those formative experiences (and thereby also govern the future). Viewed through a genealogical lens, it might be claimed that this is an old story dressed in new garb, one that moves in the groove of the histories of child-saving, most especially the technique of reformatory education as discussed in chapter 6. This does not however mean that we should downplay the implications of this emerging apparatus of biosocial power, specifically in terms of how entrepreneurship education and the neuropsychological doxa are becoming imbricated in the lives of children and young people. One of the ways this is happening is through efforts to impart skills and competencies associated with the entrepreneurial ‘mindset’ or ‘attitude’. Comparable to what is referred to in the neuropsychological literature as non-cognitive skills and competencies (such as motivation, perseverance and tenacity according to Heckman 2006) is the claim that entrepreneurship is a ‘transversal competency’,8 which taps into the more socially sedimented discourse of lifelong learning to the extent that entrepreneurship is described as a ‘life-wide as well as lifelong’ process of ‘competence development’ (EC 2011: 2). One way of grasping what is at stake in this idea of transversal competency, at least in terms of what it claims to be, is to think of it as a form of virtuosity that equips children and young people with resilience, initiative and tenacity, enabling them to adapt and respond to situations characterised by risk and uncertainty (EC 2012: 3; 2013b: 6; 2015a: 9, 29). As will be seen in more detail later in this chapter, the theme of risk and uncertainty looms large among providers of entrepreneurship education, and it encompasses a normative grammar of childhood that exhibits a type of mobility. We have already seen how the figure of the ‘resilient’ child emerges in the form of children’s citizenship and rights (chapter 5), health promotion (chapter 6) and as an antidote to toxic stress (chapter 7). Resilience also figures in the context of entrepreneurship education as one manifestation of the transversal competency that enables children to be ‘architects of their own lives’ (EC 2018: 3). As a blend of cognitive and non-cognitive skills and competencies, the entrepreneurial attitude is yet another way of figuring the empowered child who, beyond being equipped with the resilience required to cope with adversity and uncertainty, is also prepared to embrace risk as an opportunity. Moreover, precisely because the entrepreneurial mindset is in part a non-cognitive or embodied competence, so it apparently cannot be taught or imparted solely as a ‘business-related topic’ (EC 2011: 13). Instead it must be incorporated into the material and ideational fabric of the learning environment as a ‘method’, thereby acquired through experience, and without children necessarily being aware

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that they are becoming entrepreneurial (see EC 2011: 3; EC 2015a: 56). It is on this basis that entrepreneurship education might be seen to shade into neuroliberal nudge techniques, specifically in terms of staging environmental modifications, or, as Foucault once put it in an essay on governmentality, by structuring ‘the possible field of action of others’ (1982: 221). An example of the method in action is the refashioning of creativity classes and activities in primary schools. If creativity was once associated with the arts – activities and processes that use imagination, line, colour, form, drama, music, verse and story to describe, express and communicate – then creativity has now become the handmaiden of innovation, which is the ‘fuel’ that allegedly ‘ignites’ enterprise. A selection of case studies used to assess the ‘impact’ of entrepreneurial education was published by the European Commission in 2015, and the two-volume report has some interesting things to say about creativity. Titled Entrepreneurship Education: A Road to Success (EC 2015a, 2015b), the report covers ninety-one national and transnational projects from twenty-three countries, encompassing all EU member states plus fifteen non-EU countries (EC 2015a: 7). Included in this study are Junior Achievement Worldwide (JA) and the Network for Entrepreneurship Education, both of which have partner organisations in Europe, and I will be examining each in turn later in this chapter. On ‘creativity classes in primary education’ specifically, Entrepreneurship Education explains that the objective is to promote entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviour ‘in a broad sense’, which extends to initiative, independence, innovation, ambition and drive, self-efficacy, proactivity, sense of empowerment and determination to meet objectives (EC 2015a: 59). As for the rationale underpinning this annexing of creativity classes to entrepreneurship education as a method, the report notes that: Including primary school pupils in entrepreneurship education may seem ‘farfetched’, but – provided that appropriate methods are used – it has been very successful. Evidence shows that at primary school level, methods are more important than content … Entrepreneurship as a method (especially in primary school) strengthens pupils’ non-cognitive entrepreneurial competences, such as creativity, generating new ideas, and how to translate ideas into actions. It does not necessarily aim at increasing pupils’ desire to become an entrepreneur, but aims to equip pupils with the creativity and proactivity they need to manage uncertainty and change. (EC 2015a: 29)

The prescriptive thrust of this method, sometimes called ‘the whole school approach’, serves as a way of re-modelling education, such that the learning environment comes to ‘embody the characteristics of entrepreneurialism’ – engendering experimentation, risk-taking and the opportunity to fail as



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well as succeed (EC 2011: 2–7). Otherwise put, among advocates and practitioners, the entrepreneurial attitude/mindset should be built into the whole experience of learning from primary education onwards, as opposed to being compartmentalised as a specialised subject (EC 2011: 3, also EC 2012: 3). The longer-term objective that stems from this vision as it stretches into the future is captured by the idea of an enterprise culture (EC 2013b) – a way of being-in-the-world embodied in habits of thought, feeling and action that provides one and all with the same opportunity to succeed and fail, whether through social or economic enterprise. I will return to this point in more detail in due course, but it is worth noting from the outset that this is the prescribed solution to inequality in the context of an enterprise culture. The remainder of this chapter focuses on how entrepreneurship education and the neuropsychological enterprise have become imbricated through pedagogical practices that fill out the meaning of ‘enriched environments’ and ‘early experiences’ as discussed in chapter 7. I begin with JA, which takes us back to Progressive Era America, and to a milieu that also spawned the playground movement discussed in chapter 3. JA affords a genealogical point of entry into the conditions of possibility for the contemporary BizWorld technique of in-class simulations. In the subsequent section, I turn to the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), which marks a somewhat different historical trajectory in that it targets ‘disadvantaged’ children and young people, which leads to the more globally salient theme of ‘necessity entrepreneurship’. Junior Achievement Worldwide As ‘the world’s largest provider of entrepreneurship education programmes’ 9 (EC 2015b: 22), JA was founded in 1919 through the Boys and Girls Bureau Committee of the Eastern States Agricultural and Industrial Exposition, in Springfield, Massachusetts.10 As the initiative of Theodore Vail, President of AT&T, and Horace Moses, President of the Strathmore Paper Company, the original objective was to establish out-of-school clubs where children aged 8–12 would learn the basics of business, though as with other Progressive Era initiatives such as the Playground Association of America (see chapter 3), the JA clubs were also aimed at capturing the leisure time available to children and thereby diverting them away from what were deemed to be ‘immoral’ forms of entertainment (see Sukarieh and Tannock 2009: 772). Recruiting young ‘Achievers’ (as they are known) through existing youth organisations, including Scouts and Guides, YMCAs, settlement houses and playground associations, the JA club served as a vehicle to ‘learn by doing’, with Achievers conceiving of a business idea and bringing it to life by raising

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money for tools and raw materials, designing, making and selling product, and reinvesting the profits in the company. JA companies could also compete for prizes and acclaim at the annual National Association of Junior Achievement Companies conference. From twenty-six clubs in six states in 1925, by the end of the 1950s, some 3,000 JA clubs had been established in 139 cities throughout the US. Moreover, with a view to expansion, in 1929 the JA Board decided to extend the age profile to 16–21-year-olds (Francomano et al. 1988: 9–10, 52). During the early decades, the future of JA was threatened by the Great Depression and Second World War, with plans to expand the organisation jeopardised by the difficulty these circumstances presented in terms of recruiting and retaining Achievers. In the context of the Great Depression, the hardships caused by soaring unemployment actually proved to be a boon for JA, with the organisation seizing the opportunity – born from necessity on the part of struggling families – to recruit children and youths desperate to find ways of earning extra cash (Francomano et al. 1988: 17–18). Shortages of consumer goods during the Second World War also afforded opportunities for the JA micro-business model, though the most decisive step that would prove to be the shape of things to come was made before the end of the war: JA entered into partnership with schools. Initially, this was envisioned as a recruiting pitch made during school assemblies – a means of reaching an audience and attracting new members. To facilitate access, JA invited school officials to join the organisation’s local boards so they could provide input on programme techniques, procedures and learning materials (Francomano et al. 1988: 45). By the time JA moved into the classroom (the mid-1970s), the organisation had several decades of experience of working with educators, though it should also be noted that one of the catalysts that prompted this move was (once again) declining membership, this time due in part to the tumultuous political climate that characterised the 1960s. Joe Francomano – who rose through the ranks of JA, from young Achiever to Executive Vice-President – recalls radical left organisations denouncing JA as a tool to brainwash young Americans, and he cites Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as a case in point: ‘You’re taught in JA to get yours, and get it by climbing – climbing on the backs of everyone below you! JA is an effort to get kids into the rat race of competing against everyone else and trying to get to the top. Ever stop to think how many places there are at the top?’ (in Francomano et al. 1988: 9–10, 13). I will come back to this argument below, because it speaks not only to our contemporary enterprise culture, but also to the JA brand as it operates today. First however, it is important to get a sense of how as well as why JA took the decisive step of plugging its programmes into the school curriculum. I have mentioned the tactic of inviting educators to serve on JA boards and committees as



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advisers. In 1981, Peter J. Harder was hired as JA’s National Director of Curriculum, and he was attuned to the fact that: If the educators want a program, they will interpret state and local regulations to allow the program into the curriculum. If they don’t, they will find a regulation that effectively bans it. State regulations are drawn loosely enough so that local systems won’t feel stifled in creativity to meet local needs. Power to make decisions about curriculum is greater lower in the hierarchical levels. (In Francamano et al. 1988: 97)

To harness this discretionary power, JA established a National Education Advisory Council, which gave prominent educators a seat at the table in shaping the content of JA programmes, some of whom also served on JA’s Curriculum Development Committee. The first in-class programme, called ‘Project Business’, established a template since replicated by other NGOs, including BizWorld and the NFTE (of which more shortly): JA would plug into existing curricular programmes such as social studies, engaging students through simulations, role-playing and games organised around the objective of launching a company. Project Business was aimed at junior high school children (12–14-year-olds), and on the heels of the programme’s success JA launched a second in-class programme aimed at fifth and sixth graders (10–12-year-olds) called ‘Business Basics’ (Francomano et al. 1988: 69–72). It is from these experiments that the current suite of JA programmes has evolved. In their analysis of the content of JA’s in-class programmes, Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock (2009) review the critical literature on the commercialisation of schools and the corporatisation of education. They argue against the tendency to equate these trends with product placement in schools and the branding of pedagogical programmes, citing examples such as Coke Days, Pepsi contracts, Pizza Hut reading programmes and lessons on the environment sponsored by BP and Proctor & Gamble. The more significant issue, they claim, concerns the subtler influence of organisations like JA. By operating from within the curriculum, JA is able to access what is essentially a captive audience in the classroom setting. The curricular materials used in JA programmes have been developed outside of the organisation itself – by the Social Science Education Consortium11 with a grant from the National Science Foundation,12 and tested in the field with high school teachers (Sukarieh and Tannock 2009: 778). Acknowledging that these materials push students to debate opposing viewpoints, to weigh up the evidence, question prevailing assumptions and engage with issues such as the pros and cons of raising the minimum wage or the difference between relative and absolute poverty, Sukarieh and Tannock nevertheless cast a critical eye on the scope as well as the substance of inquiry – at how

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the process of learning is steered, filtered and framed by a mission that has remained more or less unchanged since the organisation was founded: to teach and train children and young people to embrace the ‘free enterprise system’, and to work in partnership with business with a view to ‘investing in the future of our private enterprise democracy’ (Francomano et al. 1988: 52, 101). In other words, JA is in the business of staging specific types of experience and promoting a particular value system that prefigures a neoliberal and philanthrocapitalist future that children are encouraged to picture for themselves, as though they are its authors or ‘architects’. The current CEO of JA Worldwide, Asheesh Advani, offers a portrait of this normative fiction in his foreword to JA’s centennial book titled The Entrepreneurial Attitude (Farrell 2018: vii–viii): As I look to the future, I view JA alumni – which now number over 100 million – as a global force for good, with ambitions beyond their own financial reward. Many start businesses that serve a social need, solving a vexing problem, or otherwise improve the world around them. Others donate time and money to their communities. Still others give back to the next generation of young people by volunteering and mentoring … As JA celebrates 100 years of educating and advocating for young people in every part of the globe, we recognize the opportunity ahead. Today’s youth will have over twenty jobs, on average, over the course of their careers, some involving multiple career changes, as technology and automation increase. Changing jobs and changing careers – whether from mining to coding or from accounting to robotics – requires adaptability, resilience, and a willingness to believe in one’s own abilities. That’s what JA teaches.

What is left unsaid here is captured by the JA logo13 – a staircase enclosed within a triangle – which brings me back to the argument articulated by Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s.14 If this pyramid structure is intended to symbolise the virtues of entrepreneurship, it might also be read as depicting the cut and thrust of neoliberal enterprise culture – a contest to climb higher than rivals knowing that failure resides at the bottom. Otherwise put, to be at or near the top of the pyramid, at or near the top of the staircase, is to have the advantage. But of course this is a relative and relational position, made possible by the much larger population who shoulder the burdens of being disadvantaged, which is where the NFTE enters the frame. Bringing the entrepreneurial mindset to disadvantaged children As noted above, the success of JA is partly down to the partnership forged between the organisation and schools, though it is also important not to



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lose sight of the fact that JA survived the challenges of the Great Depression because children from struggling families were able to earn money through JA clubs, and this helped to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. This is what Steve Mariotti and Daniel Rabuzzi call ‘necessity entrepreneurship’, which is how entrepreneurship education connects to the issue of disadvantage. In 1987, the same year that William Julius Wilson published his The Truly Disadvantaged (see chapter 7), and the same year that JA passed the milestone of reaching one million children in a single year, Mariotti established the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (now the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, or NFTE – pronounced ‘Nifty’), an experiment that altered the trajectory of the JA model by aligning it to the problem of disadvantage. Now retired from NFTE, Mariotti’s story is a tale of grit and noble cause, recalling Hollywood movies such as Blackboard Jungle (1955, starring Glenn Ford), To Sir, With Love (1967, Sidney Poitier), Dangerous Minds (1995, Michelle Pfeiffer) and Freedom Writers (2007, Hillary Swank), all stories of underachieving ‘troubled teens’ and dedicated teachers using innovative methods to gain the respect and unlock the potential of their students. The page on the NFTE website dedicated to Mariotti tells his story as follows: Steve Mariotti changed career paths in 1982 when he decided to move from the corporate sector and become a special education teacher in the New York City school system. Mr. Mariotti’s first assignment was in the East New York section of Brooklyn, and his last was in the Fort Apache section of the South Bronx. While teaching in this hard-hitting environment for six and one half years, Mr. Mariotti gained insight into how to successfully motivate his tough students – teaching them how to run a business. His perceptions and learnings inspired him to create a program to bring entrepreneurial education to lowincome youth. In 1987 the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, was formed.15

As for the ideas and values built into the programme, a 2009 essay on ‘Entrepreneurship education for youth’, co-written with Daniel Rabuzzi (also from NFTE), provides a portrait of the organisation’s ethos. Written for the World Economic Forum, and published as a report titled Educating the Next Wave of Entrepreneurs: Unlocking Entrepreneurial Capabilities to Meet the Global Challenges of the 21st Century, Mariotti and Rabuzzi pose a number of interesting questions: Why do so many young people, regardless of socioeconomic background, turn their back on public education (a question that connects to the NEET issue as touched on in chapter 4)? Why are public education systems failing so many of the children and young people they are designed to serve? And finally (this one is a direct quote, because the

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word in italics marks another connection to the neuropsychological figuring of childhood), ‘what can be done to re-engage our youth and help them learn in ways that will optimize both their individual lives and increase the general welfare?’ (2009: 28, emphasis added). In answering these questions, Mariotti and Rabuzzi preach a liberal creed that reaches back to John Locke. In response to the first two questions we have this: Many young people disengage because they see no connection between the required academic curriculum and what they observe or wish to discover about the workplace. Many students want to learn about earning a living, making money and creating wealth. What is typically not taught is the concept of ownership – specifically the individual’s right to own his or her future, to own his or her time, to own property – which means independence.

As for responding to the third question, here we encounter the claim that young people have a ‘natural entrepreneurial impulse’, alongside the argument that the aim of education should be to ‘liberate the innate creative abilities of youth’. Again, this is anchored in Lockean liberalism: Young people around the world have a right to entrepreneurship education. Every individual has the right to be exposed to ownership concepts, to the possibility of ownership, and to the habits of thought that lead to wealth creation. These rights are grounded in the individual’s entitlement to the ownership of one’s person, labour, time, and ideas. At the core of our argument is the concept of self-realization within the context of, and as it contributes to, the common good. Entrepreneurship is a means for young people to build value for others, to help create and engage in communities, and to enhance social well-being. (2009: 28)

One alleged obstacle to this vision of individual property rights existing in harmony with the common good, which also stands in the way of ‘liberating’ children’s innate entrepreneurial impulse, is a culturally embedded aversion to entrepreneurship (and, as indicated earlier in this chapter, the European Commission is in agreement). Overcoming this aversion is partly what NFTE is all about, which brings us full circle to the normative fictions generated by the anthropological machine as discussed in chapter 2. The mission of ‘liberating’ the ‘innate’ entrepreneurial acumen of children skips a beat when we pause to reflect on the ways in which the experiences apparently shaping the neural circuitry of children are being organised into all levels of the educational apparatus, scripted by public–private alliances bent on cultivating an ‘entrepreneurial mindset’ in children, and thereby laying the foundation for an ‘entrepreneurial culture’. In other words, what is framed as innate and natural is posited as presupposed (Žižek



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1989: 244), and this is orchestrated by figuring the ‘innate’ and ‘natural’ qualities of childhood before making these posited attributes into a practical and technical task to be engineered through biosocial power. What sustains this normative fiction is the material reality underpinning what Mariotti and Rabuzzi (2009: 25) refer to as ‘necessity entrepreneurship’, which is born from poverty, debt and situations where social supports – such as public welfare – are being reconfigured so that they become instruments of compulsion. So, what does this register of necessity tell us? At the intersection of entrepreneurship education and the neuropsychological figuring of childhood, necessity entrepreneurship is a (human) resource to be tapped in orchestrating the cultural change that will enable national and regional economies to compete into the future. In other words, material inequality is required to generate and sustain an enterprise culture. This is not to suggest that what is envisioned is a master–slave scenario (or a hierarchical social structure of haves and have-nots), because that would be a recipe for stagnation. What is apparently needed is what Foucault identified as a feature of an ‘enterprise society’ (2008: 147). The relationship between advantage and disadvantage must be dynamic – an ongoing race without a finishing line. We need to be attentive to how this apparatus is taking shape, because it is not exactly born from popular support for the entrepreneurial mission, or indeed popular belief in the entrepreneurial creed. What drives the imperative to compete in the game of enterprise are the conditions of existence for necessity entrepreneurship, a theme that connects to the work of another enterprise guru: Charles Leadbeater. Here again we find that poverty and precarity, not prosperity and security, are what fuel innovation, while necessity is the engine of enterprise. Hence it is no accident that the really groundbreaking initiatives – the kind of innovations which are ‘disruptive’ and thereby inaugurate paradigm changes – are emerging at the ‘margins’, among the most ‘disadvantaged’ people on the planet. Innovation at the margins A former journalist with the Financial Times, Charles Leadbeater now freelances as a ‘leading authority on innovation’,16 and has written extensively on innovation in the field of education, which is what I will be focusing on in this section, specifically in terms of how Leadbeater’s views dovetail with the notion of necessity entrepreneurship. In other words, Leadbeater is primarily interested in innovation at the margins of mainstream education, meaning the most disadvantaged places and populations, whether in the global North or South. ‘Harsh conditions often breed radical innovation’ explains Leadbeater, and he borrows from Clayton Christensen’s17 work on

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disruptive innovation in arguing that this is exactly what is required to overcome the inertia and deficiencies of existing models of mass-education (2012: 116; also Leadbeater and Wong 2010: iv, 2–4). The structure of the argument moves from problem to solution, though I will move in the opposite direction, starting with the posited solution, which amounts to this: we need to ‘learn from the extremes’ (Leadbeater and Wong 2010) – from the favelas, public housing projects, slums and shanty towns where ‘innovators starved of resources have no option but to discard traditional, relatively high-cost models’ (Leadbeater 2012: 116). From Paraguay, Leadbeater introduces his readers to an initiative called the San Francisco Agriculture School that in some respects resembles BizWorld, JA Worldwide and NFTE, except that the practice in Paraguay discards the role-playing approach of business simulation. Instead, education is enterprise, and enterprise is education.18 Incentivised by earning money, Leadbeater explains that these children are learning to ‘claw their way out of poverty … under their own steam’ (2012: 86). As a depiction of necessity entrepreneurship, the image evoked here could hardly be starker. Another example of how innovation at the margins ‘reconnects learning to work’ is (or was) a programme in Turkey launched by the Koç Foundation in 2006, which entailed a 15 million USD investment and a partnership arrangement between the Ministry of Education and twenty companies from the Koç Group. Over the course of seven years, the programme reached 8,000 students in 264 schools, most of whom were from low-income families. The objective was to ‘raise the quality of vocational education and increase the employability’ of participating students, who were selected on the basis of ‘need and the potential to succeed’.19 In practice what this meant was that in exchange for a small scholarship, an assigned mentor from the Koç Group of companies and the possibility of an internship, students would – as Leadbeater puts it – ‘behave like a potential Koç employee’ (2012: 89). Again, the role-playing technique of simulation here gives way to a scenario whereby ‘as if ’ becomes ‘in fact’, because these children effectively were Koç interns. One final example as discussed by Leadbeater is the Pathways to Education initiative in Canada, which supports children and young people resident at the Regent Park housing project in Toronto. The reason I mention this example is not to engage critically with the practice itself, but rather to take note of how Leadbeater frames this practice in a way that shades into the neuropsychological doxa. Echoing the Frameworks Institute’s ‘pay now or pay later’ theme, Leadbeater cites a Boston Consulting Group study that ‘suggests a dollar invested in Pathways yields a 24-fold return across a lifetime, in terms of higher incomes, taxes and lower public spending’ (2012: 97). In his 2010 report on education in the UK, Leadbeater rehearses a similar argument by emphasising the ‘social costs’ of the NEET issue:



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future unemployment, teenage pregnancy, and poor physical and mental health (2010: 51). To the extent that these practices are filtered through Leadbeater’s analysis, they each share something with Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock’s (2009) analysis of the JA curriculum. In other words, the world according to Leadbeater is assembled from the same playbook used in entrepreneurial education programmes. We rarely hear from the practitioners or participants themselves, and insofar as we do, their thoughts, values and actions are narrated through a lexicon that presents practice as product, needs as markets, people as consumers and problems as costs. Moreover, all of this experimental endeavour apparently hinges on the largesse of philanthrocapitalism, with Leadbeater acknowledging that most of the practices he documents were made possible by ‘independent funding, often from foundations’, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation (2012: 152). Herein lies the twist referred to at the end of chapter 7, and I will use it as a bridge to the problem that innovation is tasked with addressing. According to Leadbeater, the lesson from the margins is that education must return to its roots in order to adapt to the demands of the knowledge economy, thereby replicating the many and varied experiments from which mass compulsory education originated. I have mentioned some of these experiments in previous chapters, among them the infant training systems of Wilderspin and Stow in nineteenth-century Britain. Other examples would include the monitorial schools of Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell, also in Britain, or the schools of Johann Pestalozzi and Emanuel von Fellenberg in Switzerland, but these are among the best-known examples, and what Leadbeater is referring to extends to lesser-known practices that come under the general headings of ragged schools and Sunday schools. The state-run and/or state-managed systems of mass education born from these experiments were of their time, so claims Leadbeater, but they have now outlived their usefulness, because they are weighed down by a bureaucratic apparatus that supports and sustains standardised curricula, formulaic models of teacher-training and regulations that govern student assessment in such a way that exam performance takes precedence at the expense of learning, all of which functions as an obstacle to change and to successful outcomes for children (2012: 138–9; also Leadbeater and Wong 2010: 6–7, 19, 27). In short, mass-education is a historical accretion, at best ill-equipped to prepare children for what awaits them in the future, and at worst implicated in sustaining poverty and inequality by acting as a brake on innovative solutions to the problems people confront in their everyday lives (on this point see Leadbeater 2010: 11–14). To be relevant and effective, schools need to embrace a ‘new mission’, and here Leadbeater is fully in step with

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JA – ‘the new mission of schools should be to prepare children to work in jobs that do not exist, to solve problems that are not yet apparent, using technologies that are still to be invented’ (2012: 87). Without suggesting that Leadbeater’s critique of mainstream education is off the mark, what interests me is the relation that almost appears within his framing of education, but which is obscured by the image of innovative children clawing their way out of poverty under their own steam. Insofar as solutions to persistent and pervasive problems like poverty are emerging at the margins of mainstream education, then it is also the case that poverty is what powers innovation and enterprise. Contra Leadbeater, the lesson from the margins might well be that there is no escaping the relation encapsulated by the JA logo, at least not if we embrace an enterprise culture. The game of enterprise and innovation is a contest that generates winners and losers, and there cannot be one without the other, which brings me back to the ‘socially conscious citizen’ as figured by BizWorld – an entrepreneurial class of innovators who are also the avant garde of philanthrocapitalism. Enterprise and innovation are powered not simply by disadvantage, but by the relation of disadvantage to advantage. This is how the game of enterprise is sustained – it is an ongoing contest, and contestants compete by striving to catch up, keep up and get ahead. In short, there must always be some at the bottom if there are to be others on top. Natality and freedom Entrepreneurship education exhibits a trace of the old penal reformatory school as discussed in chapter 6, in that it attempts to discipline, harness and direct the biosocial process known as childhood. There is, however, another way of apprehending this process, and it offers the possibility of thinking childhood beyond children, and thereby also rethinking biosocial power. I am referring to Hannah Arendt’s work on ‘natality’, which is not so much a concept as a phenomenological rendering of the human condition that spans birth, action and human plurality. As she succinctly puts it in her essay ‘What is freedom?’ (2006a: 169), we are all beginnings and we are also all beginners. We appear in the world at birth as a new beginning, which is crucial to grasping Arendt’s commitment to plurality as opposed to thinking through abstractions such as ‘Man’, and we each embody the capacity to begin something or set something new in motion. Crucially, the creative thrust of natality, or the capacity to imagine and enact other ways of being-in-the-world, is certainly not the instrumentalised rendering of creativity that we find in the field of entrepreneurship education. It is also important to note that natality is a relation that exceeds individual will and intention (and the NFTE’s emphasis on property and ownership). It may



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well be that some-one sets something new and unforeseen in motion, but whatever eventuates from that inaugurating act is dependent on how others respond or reciprocate. In other words, when we begin something we act within a ‘web of relations’ (Arendt 1998: 184), whereby others may fail to respond or indeed refuse to reciprocate, in which case nothing at all might follow from the initial act. But if others do decide to carry the initiative forward, then most likely that process of acting in concert will also transform it into something that could not be envisioned by any single author or ‘architect’ (to borrow from the BizWorld playbook). This is what is at stake in the context of neoliberal enterprise culture, and it is very much out in the open in the activities of organisations such as BizWorld, NFTE and Junior Achievement. Entrepreneurship education attempts to corral natality so that a particular vision of the future is actualised in the present. It is also important to take note of how this game of entrepreneurship turns on the vulnerability/agency axis as this relates to childhood. In the BizWorld scenario as discussed in the introduction to this chapter, children are not captives within an enclosed institution (the model of the penal reformatory school) but instead are free to enact scenarios they themselves have called into existence. However, by playing a part that has been scripted by others, they participate in a game of enclosure and foreclosure – bounding the world that arises between them by foregoing on the boundless possibilities of natality. Whether or not participants see through the pretence of ‘simulation’, the game itself is to be played as though this constrained and conditioned freedom is in fact the untrammelled freedom to begin something new and unpredictable. Let me try to punctuate this point: the freedom performed through the Dragons Den-type simulation is structured by a choice that invites a decision on the part of those who participate in the game of enterprise, and it is staged as though it were not also a type of blackmail. In other words, the subject of enterprise is invited to envision the future, and to picture how she or he will be positioned within that envisioned future, which is also to take up a position within the binary game of dis/advantage: ‘How do you see yourself in the future? Are you the architect of your own life, or do you see yourself as being dependent on the agency and initiative of others?’ What would it take to refuse this scenario – to refuse the blackmail of such a choice, as though this is all a matter of individual volition? This is the question I will take up in the final chapter with the help of Hannah Arendt. Notes 1 Established in 2011. 2 BizWorld.org. Inspiring children to become architects of their futures. At: www.bizworld.org/ (accessed 10 September 2019).

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3 BizWorld.org. Draper University official launch! At: www.bizworld.org/EventsNEW/40/Draper-University-Official-LaunchI (accessed 10 September 2019). 4 Draper conceived the idea of an in-class business ‘simulation’ in 1992 (see: ‘An introduction to the BizWorld Foundation’ on YouTube: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JTsRdo1Mj1A (accessed 15 September 2019)). 5 Bizzworld.org. Impact Challenge. At: www.bizworld.org/Impact-Challenge (accessed 19 August 2019). 6 Here quoting Tim Draper from ‘Tim Draper – BizzWorld Foundation’, available on YouTube at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gA_S__KEMY (accessed 15 September 2019). 7 With 350 members representing employers (Group 1), workers (Group II) and an extensive body of interest groups gathered under the heading of ‘diversity Europe’ (Group III), the European Economic and Social Committee is perceived by its supporters to be a vehicle for participatory democracy and civil society dialogue in the EU. See www.eesc.europa.eu/en/ (accessed 15 September 2019). 8 Transversal competence is also sometimes presented as being interchangeable with transversal ‘skills’ (see for example EC 2011: 13; 2012: 3), or in the case of UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education, as ‘twenty-first century skills’ (UNESCO 2013). 9 Membership of JA Worldwide extends to more than a hundred countries grouped under regional headings: JA Africa, INJAZ Al-Arab, JA Americas, JA Asia-Pacific, JA Europe and JA USA. According to the organisation’s Annual Report, JA Worldwide delivered over 150 million student contact hours in 2017, amounting to more than 10 million ‘student experiences’ in just over 84,000 schools (JA 2017). 10 Now the Eastern States Exposition. See: http://esethebige.blogspot.com/p/ eastern-states-exposition.html (accessed 15 September 2019). 11 The SSEC is a non-profit corporation, established in 1962, and dedicated to strengthening the social science content of social studies education. Details here: www.soc-sci-ed-consortium.org/index.html (accessed 15 September 2019). 12 The NSF is an independent federal agency with an annual budget of 7.5 billion USD (for 2017). The NSF was established by Congress in 1950 ‘to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defence’. See: www.nsf.gov/about/ (accessed 15 September 2019). 13 Adopted in 1959 as the organisation’s fourth official logo, the current green and white version was originally a golden staircase within a solid green triangle (Francomano et al. 1988: 67). 14 SDS was rebooted in 2006. See www.newsds.org/ (accessed 15 September 2019). 15 See: www.nfte.com/about-our-founder/; see also Mariotti’s personal website: www.stevemariotti.com/about (both sites accessed 15 September 2019). 16 From Leadbeater’s personal website: http://charlesleadbeater.net/about-me/ (accessed 15 September 2019). 17 See Clayton Christensen. Disruptive innovation. At: www.claytonchristensen.com/ key-concepts/ (accessed 15 September 2019).



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18 Leadbeater would have all schools operate in this way: ‘All schools should be the base for a productive, social enterprise of some kind – such as a recycling centre – so that children associate learning with work, get pleasure from working productively together and contributing to a business’ (2010: 5). 19 See ‘Turkey’s Koç Foundation provides global model for vocational education’. Synergos Global Philanthropists Circle. Online: www.synergos.org/news-andinsights/2015/turkeys-koc-foundation-provides-global-model-vocationaleducation (accessed 15 September 2019).

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Action … corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world … if we had a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a ‘who’ as though it were a ‘what’. (Arendt 1998: 9–11)

In her introduction to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1998: xvii), Margaret Canovan remarks that the book’s ‘most heartening message is its reminder of natality and the miracle of beginning’. In contrast to Arendt’s former teacher Martin Heidegger, for whom authentic being-in-the-world requires facing into our inescapable mortality – our being-towards-death, – Arendt’s political theory is anchored in natality as the affirmation of life. Before examining the somewhat elusive idea of natality itself (as many Arendtian scholars have pointed out, Arendt never examined her own use of it in depth or detail), it is important to clarify what Arendt means by ‘the human condition’, which brings me back to her use of the words ‘nature’ and ‘essence’ in the epigraph above, which I also discussed briefly in chapter 1. Arendt is emphatic on this point: ‘the human condition is not the same as human nature’ (1998: 9–10). What she means is that there is no essence that would allow us to flatten human plurality into a singularity that answers to the whatness of ‘Man’. Against the notion of a human nature or essence, Arendt asks us to think about how we are conditioned by a world of our own making, or to rephrase that: history lives in how we think, speak and act. Moreover, although we are ‘conditioned beings’ in that the ideas, things, practices and relations that have become conditions of our individual and collective existence have a history, it remains the case that ‘the conditions of human existence … can never “explain” what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us



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absolutely’ (1998: 11). Though life and death, natality and mortality, amount to ‘the most general condition of human existence’ (1998: 8), what matters for Arendt is active life, or action-as-beginning, and it is this that forges the connection between natality and politics. Natality is actualised in spaces where actors appear before each other through words and deeds, or what Arendt calls ‘the space of appearances’. This is her way of saying that politics is staged in spaces of mutual exposition where it is possible to begin something, to set something new and unpredictable in motion, though once this process begins it is no longer a matter of individual will or intention. To take the initiative is to put natality into play, but whatever emerges from such initiative arises between people who co-exist in a conditioned/conditioning web of relationships. ‘Wherever people come together’ says Arendt, they generate a space ‘that simultaneously gathers them into it and separates them from one another’ (2005: 106). It is this space of the in-between – a relational space – that provides the setting or scene for natality. Natality is generated between people acting within a context that places the standing conditions in question, such that it becomes necessary, or at least possible, to think differently, to act otherwise – to respond to the situation, thereby setting something new in motion. A crucially important feature of natality – evident in the word itself – is that it traces the source of political action to birth, such that ‘the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting’ (Arendt 1998: 9). In every such case, the appearance of a new-born child precipitates the question: who are you? (1998: 178–9). Arendt is here emphasising plurality – that each person is unique and also uniquely capable of acting in a way which, as noted above, exceeds her conditioning. Spanning birth and action, natality encapsulates the adult/ child relation, yet there is a curious lacuna in how Arendt presents this in The Human Condition. If we track natality to the ‘scene of birth’ (see Cavarero 2014) and consider the question which – for Arendt – is precipitated by the appearance of the new-born child (Who are you?), then what should we make of her suggestion that this question is answered through what one does and what one says in the presence of others? As Arendt puts it, ‘the disclosure of “who” in contradistinction to “what” somebody is – his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide – is implicit in everything somebody says and does’ (1998: 179). Although ‘action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth’ (1998: 178), it is the ‘second birth’ of action that is Arendt’s primary concern, such that the figure of the new-born child appears only to vanish almost immediately, replaced by an expressive who endowed suddenly with the attributes of adult life (1998: 176–7). Otherwise put, it is as though the scene of birth

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merely serves to prefigure the political realm of action. So, what exactly happens between the place of birth and the time of action? Arendt addresses this question in an essay on ‘The crisis in education’, published four years before The Human Condition. ‘What concerns us all’ she explains, ‘is the relation between grown-ups and children in general or, putting it in even more general and exact terms, our attitude toward the fact of natality’ (2006b: 193). Natality is presented as a delicate balancing act, because on the one hand ‘the child requires special protection and care so that nothing destructive may happen to him from the world’, while on the other hand the world ‘needs protection to keep it from being overrun and destroyed by the onslaught of the new that bursts upon it with each new generation’ (2006b: 182). It is here that Arendt fills out the lacuna mentioned above. Children ‘are not finished but in a state of becoming’ she says, and it is the responsibility of those with (temporary) authority over children to ensure that education is orientated to ‘the task of renewing a common world’ which is home to adults and children alike, though this must be done ‘without striking from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us’ (2006b: 174, 182–3, 193). Here is a version of what I presented in chapter 1 as the touchstone of childhood, and we have encountered variations of this story from Rousseau through J. S. Mill and T. H. Marshall to Philip Pettit. This is why – and I return to this below – it becomes necessary to read Arendt against Arendt. To follow the thread of these remarks by Arendt is to connect natality to the question of ‘becoming’ which, as noted in chapter 1, traverses not only the relation between adult ‘human beings’ and child ‘human becomings’ (Qvortrup 1994), but also a more fugitive ‘becoming without end’ (Lee 2001: 85). On one side is a mode of becoming that perceives children as incomplete adults, while on the other side is something very different, and Arendt gestures towards both. Walter Omar Kohan examines what I have just referred to as fugitive becoming under the heading of ‘alternative concepts of childhood’ (2011: 341–4). One such alternative is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ‘becoming-child’ (1987: 272–91), which has nothing to do with a stage in the life-cycle and nor is it measurable in chronological time. Instead, in Kohan’s words, becoming-child is a ‘space of transformation’ marked by flux, intensity, affects and experiences that cannot be anticipated or planned (2011: 342). Becoming-child exceeds the linearity of historical time while also taking flight from social conditioning, which might be seen to radicalise Arendt’s thoughts on natality. However, it is important to underscore that this is neither a prescriptive formula nor a tried and tested method. Instead becoming-child operates at the threshold of imaginary projection and experimental practice.



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That there is even a perceived need to invoke or summon this fugitive/ radical mode of becoming says something important about natality in the context of mass society, which Arendt depicts as ‘the rise of the social’ and ‘the loss of human experience’ (1998: 321). Mass society is a society of labourers, though as we’ve seen in chapter 8 this is now figured as a society of entrepreneurs and innovators. Regardless, to labour (or to labour under the burden of necessity entrepreneurship), as opposed to experiencing the freedom to act is, as Arendt sees it, merely ‘to fulfil a necessary function in the life process of society’ (2006b: 38–49, 184). Without suggesting an exact homology, there is a striking similarity between Arendt’s analysis of mass society, whereby the bureaucratic administration of life becomes ‘rule by nobody’ (1970: 38), and what Michel Foucault examined through the lens of biopolitics/biopower – supervising and administering life with a view to optimising, augmenting and regulating life processes and populations (Foucault 1998: 139–41).1 Which leads me back to biosocial power. What I have attempted to do in this book by working through the lens of biosocial power is examine how childhood became a targeted zone within the larger biopolitical arena, a zone characterised by attempts to act upon life in its ‘unfinished’ form, thereby transforming what is into what ought to be (see Kohan 2011: 340). Moreover, biosocial power continues to prefigure the future by constituting the subject who is to inhabit the future envisioned by its architects and technicians. In drawing Arendt and Foucault together in this way, I am not suggesting some type of seamless theoretical synthesis. Instead, I want to avail of the productive tension between natality and biopolitics. I will return to the question of becoming-child/acting otherwise below by drawing on the idea of an ‘affirmative biopolitics’. First however I want to reflect on how natality, which could be described as life exceeding its social conditioning, might trouble the whatness of childhood. Disciplining natality In chapter 1 I hinted at a situation whereby a child refuses to answer to the whatness of childhood, insisting instead on being addressed as a who. The child in question is not a hypothetical example but a boy who appeared before a judge in France in 1840. Originally reported in the Gazette des Tribunaux, Michel Foucault examined the case in his Discipline and Punish (1977: 290–1), where he introduces the boy as ‘a child of thirteen, without home or family, charged with vagabondage’. I am going to reproduce the exchange between the boy (referred to in the Gazette only as Béasse, presumably his surname) and the judge in full, noting that Foucault interprets the

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boy’s ‘insolence’ – meaning the way he reformulates the offences he stands accused of – as ‘the affirmation of a living force’. In the context of this episode, ‘natality’ could well stand in for Foucault’s turn of phrase: Judge: One must sleep at home. Béasse: Have I got a home? Judge: You live in perpetual vagabondage. Béasse: I work to earn my living. Judge: What is your station in life? Béasse: My station, to begin with, I’m thirty-six at least; I don’t work for anybody. I’ve worked for myself for a long time now. I have my day station and my night station. In the day, for instance, I hand out leaflets free of charge to all the passers-by; I run after the stagecoaches when they arrive and carry luggage for the passengers; I turn cartwheels on the avenue at Neuilly; at night there are the shows; I open coach doors, I sell pass-out tickets; I’ve plenty to do. Judge: It would be better for you to be put in a good house as an apprentice and learn a trade. Béasse: Oh, a good house, an apprenticeship, it’s too much trouble. And anyway, the bourgeois … always grumbling, no freedom. Judge: Does not your father wish to reclaim you? Béasse: Haven’t got no father. Judge: And your mother? Béasse: No mother neither, no parents, no friends, free and independent. Gazette des Tribunaux: Hearing his sentence of two years in a reformatory, Béasse pulled an ugly face, then, recovering his good humour, remarked: ‘Two years, that’s never more than twenty-four months. Let’s be off, then’. (Foucault 1977: 290–1) What should we make of Béasse’s claim that he is ‘thirty-six at least’? Foucault doesn’t help us here, but surely this is at odds with his description of the boy. Perhaps this a boy who – as with the Cash siblings in the movie Captain Fantastic – refuses to be infantilised, who insists on a maturity and liberty he claims for himself through his experience of life. Or, to draw from Kohan once more, perhaps Béasse is becoming-child by exceeding the bounds of childhood? In any case, the exchange is framed by a deeply unequal power relationship between a judge who represents the coercive power of the law and a boy without property or station, yet who exhibits the courage to address the law not as a what (a vagrant) but as a who, narrating the truth of his life as he sees it, and performing this truth before a public assembled in the court.



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This episode sets the scene for the emergence of interventions intended to ‘rescue’ children from ‘neglect’. Children such as young Béasse were perceived to be en route to a life of crime and/or dependency on public assistance, and thus destined to become a burden on society. As noted in chapter 6, parental neglect was foremost among the alleged causes of problems perceived to necessitate preventive and reformatory education, with the demoralising influence of the home and the street to be counteracted by rescuing children and placing them in enclosed institutions such as the Mettray penal colony in France – a reformatory institution for male delinquents opened the same year as Béasse was sentenced, and, as Foucault describes it, a curious blend of regiment, hospital, workshop, school and prison; a synthesis of inspection, training and punishment overseen by ‘technicians of behaviour, engineers of conduct’ (1977: 293). We have already seen (chapter 6) how, in the decades following Béasse’s appearance in court, reformatory education was gradually supplemented by other experiments such as societies for infant life protection and the prevention of cruelty to children, school medical inspections and juvenile courts. Taken together, these initiatives converged as a child-centric conception of vulnerability that constrained the agency of children while also defining the whatness of childhood. The series of infant life protection Acts in Britain for example, which paved the way for the Children’s Act of 1908 (or Children’s Charter as it was widely known), afford a concrete example of how the strategy of child-saving culminated in a discourse of ‘protection’ that muted the voice of the child within the emergent field of juvenile justice. Among the features of the juvenile courts as they came into existence in France, Britain and many American cities – more or less concurrently – was the absence of the public who provided Béasse with his audience. Henri Rollet, France’s first ‘juvenile judge’ made this precise point in 1922 when he wrote that the removal of the public ‘has excellent results, for the child tends to glory in the interest he arouses and takes pride in seeing his name in the newspapers’ (quoted in Donzelot 1979: 100–1). To come back to Foucault’s assessment of Béasse’s sassy performance as the ‘affirmation of a living force’. Staged before a public audience, Béasse acted in the Arendtian sense by transforming the court – albeit momentarily – into a space where he appeared before others not merely as a unique who, but also as the embodiment of a life lived as endless beginning. Béasse exceeded what he was permitted to be in the eyes of the law, or at least its representative – the judge who made a ruling intended to bring the chaos of beginnings to a halt, by transforming the who into a what: an apprentice with a trade, a station, a home, a fixed place in the order of things. This is what is at stake in the framing of childhood as a ‘national asset’ (see chapter 6) and as ‘capital investment’ (chapter 5), because such an

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obscenely instrumentalising (yet also mundanely practical) idea presupposes that the unpredictable and generative quality of natality can and ought to be disciplined, such that the whatness of childhood becomes raw material to be shaped and formed by the architects and technicians of the future. If that future was once figured as a scenario whereby natality had been tamed – a scene that pictures the child as prefiguring a future where the masses willingly conform to a socially scripted life, content to comply with the demands of biosocial power – then what is imagined now is a child that exceeds the norm by embodying the imperative to innovate. In other words, in the context of an enterprise culture, we have passed from normalisation to optimisation – to a scenario pictured by the Junior Achievement Worldwide logo (see chapter 8). In staging a series of encounters with biosocial power, the chapters in this book have been continually shuttling between past and present. To pull one strand from this transversal genealogy is to connect the idea of ‘child life as a national asset’ (Millin 1917) to the claim that ‘investment in children and young people is akin to a capital investment from which significant returns flow’ (DCYA 2014: 3). One of the things that links these contexts is the invocation of children’s rights as an imperative to act. Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that rights discourse is an insidious vehicle for a pernicious biosocial power. Rather, I am interested in the tension that exists within the space of rights discourse – between liberty rights and rights to protection, which maps onto the agency/vulnerability axis of childhood as currently figured in the fields of childhood studies and policy discourse. In other words, children are vulnerable, dependent and potentially defenceless, and children ‘are active in the construction and determination of their own social lives, the lives of those around them and the societies in which they live’ (James and Prout 1997: 7). Setting aside the important fact that this duality is by no means unique to children, and might also characterise (from Arendt) the human condition, there are no guarantees that the current emphasis on the agency/rights of children instantiates a radical break with the past. As the case of Béasse demonstrates, attempts to corral natality may target agency as well as vulnerability, which is why it is important to adopt a critical attitude to the present. Recalling Béasse’s appearance in court can assist us in this regard, though this is only the first step in staging immanent critique, because at stake is what Foucault described as a ‘historical ontology of ourselves’ (1984: 45). In other words, how do we adopt a critical attitude to what we are presently saying, thinking and doing? As I have attempted to demonstrate in the preceding chapters, one way of doing this is to approach the present via the past, thereby confronting the question of who we are while also



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attempting to take critical distance from whatever it is that we are in the process of becoming. It hardly needs to be stated that this process of questioning the present folds back onto the social or subject position of enunciation – it is a questioning that envelops and cuts through the adult/ child relation. In the context of what I have presented as neoliberal enterprise culture, the contemporary agents of biosocial power are – to borrow from Claire Blencowe – ‘casting agents’ who are ‘engaged in the production of a performance’ (2010: 127). To the extent that adults (myself included) participate in socially scripted practices that condition natality as embodied by children, then we are such casting agents, but it must also be noted that this is a process of self-conditioning too. Both Arendt and Foucault remind us that we (and by we, I mean adults and children) are free to act otherwise, yet there may be a cost to this. Béasse’s public performance cost him his liberty, while today natality is conditioned by rewards and sanctions attached to performances which are monitored, measured and ranked by casting agents in a whole variety of ways – commencing in school (such as the technique of ‘simulation’ in the context of entrepreneurship education programmes) and continuing into adult working life (measured and managed performance in the workplace). The point I am trying to make here is that biosocial power is not just about childhood, or indeed children. As Arendt pointed out more than half a century ago, our attitude to the fact of natality concerns us all. A ‘positive’ biopolitics? Might a natality-enhancing biopolitics somehow exist; a life-affirming biopolitics that doesn’t use children as raw material to prefigure what are – the bottom line – contingent and contestable visions of the future? Miguel Vatter (2006) thinks that such a ‘positive’ biopolitics is possible, and he formulates his argument through an original reading of Arendt’s work on natality. At the risk of simplifying, Vatter’s argument boils down to this: if biological life is the object or target of biopolitics and biopower – power that seeks to regulate and optimise life in accordance with strategic political ends – then biological life is also capable of becoming the subject of resistance (2006: 145). I will come back to this shortly, because the argument as just presented is incomplete (I still need to consider how Vatter works natality into it). First however I want to pick up on an insight which may not be immediately apparent: biopolitics and biopower are not isomorphic. Maurizio Lazzarato makes this point when he argues that ‘biopower is always born of something other than itself ’ (2002: 103). In contrast to Vatter, who, as noted already, builds his argument through a close reading of natality in Arendt, Lazzarato derives this insight from Foucault. Very different textual sources, yet Vatter and Lazzarato nevertheless converge on a biopolitical

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conception of resistance which is more than merely saying ‘no’ to power. Instead resistance is framed as a creative mode of agency capable of transforming the situation and generating something new. What is this ‘otherness’ that Lazzarato gestures towards? I will let Foucault answer that question himself, and the answer is perhaps surprising in the context of the present discussion: power (1997: 164, 291–2). Or perhaps the answer is not so surprising after all, particularly if we recall – from Arendt – that power is not only about relations of domination and subjection. Power is also created through concerted action (Arendt 1970: 44–52). The thread that connects action to power to resistance leads ultimately to natality, but, as noted earlier, this must be understood as a relation that simultaneously gathers together and separates, which in turn presupposes a context. This is Foucault’s argument too, when he insists that power should be understood as a field of mobile and reversible relations, and such relations are not fixed and immutable precisely because where there is power there is also the freedom to disrupt the operations and effects of power (1997: 292). This freedom to act otherwise – to subvert existing power relations – is, as Arendt might say, the freedom to begin something. And yet, when all is said and done, there remains the persistent problem of how relations of power are configured and how natality is conditioned and constrained. Here again we meet the whatness of childhood. To return to Vatter’s thesis – Vatter suggests that ‘biological life needs to be reconceived as containing a caesura, a discontinuity within itself ’ (Vatter 2006: 145). Natality is this caesura, or to put it in Arendtian terms, the life we embody is conditioned, but this does not condition us absolutely. It is this caesura, or this fracturing within life – life as conditioned and life that exceeds its conditioning – that makes possible a positive biopolitics conceived as a ‘creative force’ capable of generating ‘new forms of life’ (Foucault 1997: 164). This, I think, is the crux of the problem, and it captures what is at stake in refiguring childhood. Viewed historically, the intensely prefigurative forms of biopolitics and biopower – those biosocial technologies and practices that take childhood as target and living substrate – aim to govern the future by conditioning the capacity to begin something new, thus suturing Vatter’s caesura before natality becomes a disruptive force. This is why it becomes necessary to read Arendt against the grain of her own argument as presented in ‘The crisis in education’. It could be argued, convincingly I think, that philosophical, pedagogical and scientific discourses of childhood – from Rousseau and J. S. Mill, through Pestalozzi and Froebel, to G. Stanley Hall and Arnold Gesell, to the neuropsychological figuring of childhood, and not forgetting contemporary advocates of entrepreneurship education as discussed in chapter 8 – meet on the ground of this insight concerning a ‘caesura of life within life’ (Vatter 2006: 145). The kind of becoming



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portended by natality, which harbours the potential to disturb existing social arrangements, can also be harnessed to imagined futures which are projected through childhood. Taken one step further, if natality can be tamed and trained, then it holds the key to prefiguring human futures. Neither is this of mere historical significance, because even when the whatness of childhood is flipped, so that vulnerability gives way to agency, childhood may still be harnessed as an asset which is leveraged in laying claim to the future. And surely this is what contemporary neoliberal enterprise culture is all about: corralling the radically generative and creative potential of natality? I am aware that this chapter is bordering on philosophical abstraction,2 which risks undermining the approach adopted thus far. Hence, by way of concluding, I will attempt to ground the discussion by considering the question of what this might look like in the form of policy and practice, such as children’s rights as discussed above. In other words, is there a way of configuring children’s rights without reinstating the logic of the arkhi – a relation between those who rule or lead and those who follow? It is after all the logic of the arkhi that makes it possible for the architects and technicians of biosocial power to project socially scripted outcomes through the figure of the ‘empowered’ and ‘resilient’ child. But perhaps answers to this question are to be found not in the guise of policy, but in the cut and thrust of politics. At the time of writing there is arguably no clearer example of what is at stake in the distinction between policy and politics3 than the radical stance of climate activist Greta Thunberg. Thunberg has proven to be highly effective in disturbing the extant ‘distribution of the sensible’,4 thereby also calling the separation of adult and children’s worlds into question. Of equal importance is that Thunberg compels us to rethink the biopolitical so that it encompasses non-human as well as human life, resonating with Timothy Campbell’s observation that ‘the opening of an affirmative biopolitics takes place when we recognise that harming one part of life or one life harms all lives’ 5 (2006: 16). Moreover, the name ‘Greta Thunberg’ exceeds the liberal myth of the sovereign individual, because despite efforts to individualise what she has come to represent – for example by singling out her Asperger’s syndrome – she is part of an expanding network of bodies and actions that (thus far) refuses to be contained by the disciplinary logic of policy and police, specifically the stultifying diplomacy of inter-governmental talks that achieve little more than tinkering with the status quo. Others actively generating this network include Takota Iron Eyes of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, Vanessa Nakate from Kampala, Joel Enrique Peña Panichine of the Mapuche indigenous people, Licypriya Kangujam from Manipur in India, Arshak Makichyan from Armenia and Jean Hinchliffe in Sydney, all of whom – as is also the case with Greta Thunberg – exhibit the audacity and courage of young Béasse. In short, the name ‘Greta Thunberg’ is part

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of a biosocial process that gives corporeal form to natality and becomingchild as discussed above, and this is currently being enacted on the terrain of politics in the radical sense of an-archic politics, as in without-arkhi. I must acknowledge that there is an anticipation attached to what I have just written, something like hope arising through an emergent possibility that can be sensed. However, to make sense of that anticipation by forcing it into the shape of a concrete expectation or explication would be to stray into the realm of prescriptive analysis or argument. This I will not do, because it would be but a first step in formulating yet another normative fiction. Instead, in bringing this series of encounters with biosocial power to a close, I will end by rephrasing a question posed earlier: is there a way of living with and through natality that avoids transforming beginnings into ends, thereby pressing natality into the service of socially scripted destinations? By way of a response, I will finish with a few lines from Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler, both of whom speak with eloquence to such questions. In a passage that might be read in memory of Béasse’s audacious performance, as well as anticipating the radical potential of Greta Thunberg and her peers, Cavarero writes that ‘the uniqueness of the existent has no need for a form that plans or contains it. Rooted in the unmasterable flux of a constitutive exposition, she is saved from the bad habit of prefiguring herself, and from the vice of prefiguring the lives of others’ (2000: 144). Butler might be read as gesturing not only to natality, but also to becomingchild when she writes that ‘the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know’ (2006: 49). To thread these thoughts together is to figure an idea that might be made practical as an affirmative biopolitics: natality names a beginning that prefigures nothing other than the possibility of beginning anew, and it is powered by something that has no age limit: our common capacity to imagine the (im)possible. Notes 1 On the place of biopolitics in the writings of Foucault and Arendt see Blencowe (2010), and for a superb analysis of power, subjectivity and agency in the work of Arendt and Foucault, and how this might serve to bring them into a productive dialogue without losing sight of the important differences in their respective approaches to power, see Allyn (2002). 2 I owe this point to the anonymous reviewer for MUP who read the original manuscript. 3 Here I refer readers back to the discussion on Rancière’s way of thinking the relation between police and politics at the end of chapter 2. 4 As with note 3 above, this is discussed at the end of chapter 2. 5 In the article I have taken this quote from, Campbell presents an overview of Esposito’s work on immunity and biopolitics for a special issue of Diacritics.

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Index

Abecedarian Project 113–14, 123 action (in Arendt) 5 adolescence 20, 42 Advani, A. 142 adverse childhood experiences (ACE) 131n.18 African-American 112–14, 130n.5 Agamben, G. 1–2, 7, 10–11, 16, 19–22 agency of children 6, 9, 61, 80, 83, 149, 157–8 ages and stages approach to human development 64, 75 animal research 124 anteriority 16–19, 25, 42 anthropogenesis 19 anthropological machine 11–23 passim, 25, 27n.5, 28, 79, 90, 102, 105, 118, 144 anthropomorphous animality 16 anti-social behaviour 65, 73, 83 anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) 28 archein, meaning of 129 Arendt, H. 1, 5–8, 26, 32, 72, 129, 148–9, 152–5, 158–60 arkhi 161–2 attachment theory 113n.13 attainment gap 47–8 austerity measures 87, 95 autoimmunity crisis 105 baby brain movement 99, 108, 120, 128, 136 Baistow, K. 85

Barrington, R. 89 Bauman, Z. 1–2, 10, 29, 53–61 Béasse, Gazette des Tribunaux (1840) 155–62 Beatty, B. 114 becoming-child 154–6, 162 Bell, A. 33, 147 Bell, V. 85 Bentham, J. 35, 118–20 Berger, J. 83–4 Better Outcomes Brighter Futures (national policy framework for Ireland) (2014) 75–6, 80, 94–6, 108 Bezos Family Foundation 126 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 126–7, 147 biogenetic law 20, 31, 92 biopolitics 8–11, 22, 155 positive 159–62 biopower 1, 10, 155, 159–60 bios 2, 10, 15, 18, 23, 28, 39 BizWorld 133–5, 148–9 Blair, T. 73 Blencowe, C. 159 body mass index (BMI) 102–5 Boston Consulting Group 146 Bottomore, T. 70 Bowlby, J. 116 Brabazon, Lord R. 41 brain architecture 76, 106, 110, 118–29 passim Brexit 72



Index 181

Brown, W. 108, 111, 129 Brown case in the US Supreme Court 112 Bruer, J. 119–20, 124–5 Buffet, W. 127 Butler, J. 162

civilising process 29–33, 45 civility 54, 73 class divisions 115 Clinton, B. 117, 119 Clinton, H. 119 Cockburn, T. 71, 73 Cohen, E. 77 Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity (CECO) 102 Connolly, W. 4 Crawford, A. 61 Crichton, B. 94 crime 34–7 Cruikshank, B. 85 culture of poverty 48, 116, 130n.12 Curtis, H. S. 42 Czuba, C. E. 84

Cameron, D. 47–8, 63 Campbell, T. 161 Canovan, M. 152 Captain Fantastic (film) 2–5, 156 Carmona, R. 103–4 Carnegie, A. 127 Carnegie Corporation of New York 119–20, 127–8 Carpenter, M. 88–9, 116 Cash family 2–4, 156 Catholic Church 89 Cavallo, D. 44 Cavarero, A. 162 Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF 126 child-centric conceptions and policies 51–2, 156 Child Study movement 26, 28 Child Study Association, British 23, 92 childhood concepts of 5, 9, 12 cultivation of 34 as a figure of thought 29 investing in 97–102 as networked governance 88, 100–1 as a zero-point in de-civilising processes 29–33 Childhood (journal) 1 childhood studies 1, 6, 9, 12, 158 Children Act (1908) 92, 94 Children’s Rights Alliance 62, 78, 81 choice architecture 109–10 Christensen, C. 145–6 citizenship active 75–6 as moral technology 69, 73, 85 children’s 7–8, 69–73, 76–7, 137 conceptions of 71 extension of 71–2 civil rights and civil rights movement 70, 112

Darwin, C. 14, 40 datafication of childhood 99–102 David, P. 51 Debois, E. 20 de-civilising processes 28–32, 53 degeneration, fears of 20, 41–2, 102 Delanty, G. 72 Deleuze, G. 8, 154 delinquency 88–91 juvenile 1, 112 neglect and 39, 80, 89–94, 116 moral treatment and 90 social causes of 90 dependency 112, 117 deprivation 112–18, 121, 125 cultural 112–14, 117–18, 125 maternal 116 verbal 114 despotism 17–19 developmental stages childhood and 5, 64, 74–5, 93 De Vos, J. 76 Dewey, J. 38 Dikeç, M. 66n.1, 73 disadvantage 8, 76, 105, 108–18, 121–2, 125 cycle of 111 disciplinary enclosures 1 Discourse the (Rousseau) 11–13, 16

182 Index disruptive innovation 76, 86n.7, 146 Donzelot, J. 12 double slide 58–9 doxa 2, 25, 40, 76, 99, 116 Dragon’s Den 133, 149 Draper, T. 133, 135 Duggan, M. 47 early school-leaving 80 early-years intervention 99, 113–26 education 50–1, 80 compensatory 113–14 experimental mode of 38 right to 69–70 social duty 70 see also infant education; reformatory education Elias, N. 1, 7, 28–33, 38–9, 45, 53–4, 60, 70 Émile 12–15, 38–9, 91 empowerment 7–8, 66, 71–7, 83–5, 97, 133–4, 137 biosocial 78, 83–5 energy balance equation 103 enterprise culture 6, 9, 65–6, 76–9, 87, 97–8, 135, 139–42, 145, 148–9, 159–61 entrepreneurial mindset 137–9, 142–4 entrepreneurship aversion to 144 education in 8, 134–8, 143, 145, 148–9, 159–60 environmentalism 22 equality of inequality 53, 100, 105 Esposito, R. 105, 162n.5 eugenics 91–2 European Central Bank 97 European Commission (EC) 135–8, 144 European Court of Human Rights 51 European Economic and Social Committee 136 European Union (EU) 97–8 Evans, B. 104 evolution, theory of 20, 40 Eyben, R. 84

Faulkner, J. 1, 12, 16, 19, 26, 75–6 Fellenberg, E. von 33, 147 figurational sociology 28, 30, 47 first three years movement 8, 118–21, 124 Foucault, M. 1, 10, 13, 19, 22, 33, 35, 53–4, 60–1, 74, 80, 85, 97–102, 105, 108–10, 118, 138, 145, 155–60 FrameWorks Institute 125–6, 136, 146 framing 2, 125–6 Francomano, J. 140–2 Froebel, F. 33–4, 160 Galton, F. 40 Garland, D. 91 Gates, B. 127 Gesell, A. 21, 160 Giving Pledge, the 127 governing childhood 6 governing the future 6, 18, 28, 64, 80 governmentality 7, 54, 75, 98, 138 Great Depression 140, 143 Groos, K. 41 Guattari, F. 8, 154 Gulick, L. 41–6 habitus 32–3, 39 Haeckel, E. 20–1, 31, 92 Hall, G. S. 7, 19–22, 41–2, 56, 160 Hamburg, D. A. 119–20 Harder, P. J. 141 Harvard Center on the Developing Child 124–6, 136 Head Start programme 113 Health in All Policies (2014) 99 Healthy Ireland (policy framework) 88, 94–9 Heckman, J. 124, 137 Heidegger, M. 152 heredity 39–40 Hinchcliffe, J. 161 homo economicus 108–10 Homestead strike 132n.26 Honig, B. 80 Honig, M. S. 12 Howell, O. 61



Index 183

human capital 96, 104–6, 108 human condition (Arendt) 5, 148, 152–4, 158 human nature 13, 40 inclusive playspace 65–6 individualised sociality 60 industrial schools 88–9 inequality 26, 32, 47, 73, 97–100, 109–12, 117, 129, 139, 145, 147 infant education 34–5 innocence of children 4, 10, 16, 20 insanity, moral treatment of 90 intelligence quotient (IQ) 113–14 inter-governmental talks 161 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 97 Ireland 47–66, 73–83, 87–99 Better Outcomes Brighter Futures 75–6, 80, 94–7 children as a “national asset” 88–9, 94, 96, 158 children as “capital investment” 76, 104, 108, 157 consultation with and active participation by children 62–3, 73–5 Department of Children and Youth Affairs (DCYA) 76 National Children’s Strategy (NCS) (2000) 50, 62, 73–5, 78–82, 97 National Play Policy (NPP) (2004) 7, 48, 50–2, 58, 61–6 National Playing Fields Association 57–8 National Strategy for Research and Data on Children’s Lives 99 James, A. 6, 158 James, W. 41 Jans, M. 77 Johnson, L. B. 113 Jones, G. 91–2 Junior Achievement (JA) Worldwide 8, 138–43, 147–9, 158 juvenile courts 94, 157

Kangujam, L. 161 Kay (later Kay-Shuttleworth), J. 33 Kelynack, T. 92–3 Knudsen, E. L. 124 Koç Foundation 146 Kohan, W. O. 154, 156 Labov, W. 114 Lamarck, J. B. 40 Lancaster, J. 33, 147 Lazzarato, M. 159–60 Leadbeater, C. 145–8 Lee, J. 42–6, 74 Lee, N. 6, 154 liberal communism 126–7 liberalism 108–9, 117, 144 libertarian paternalism 109–10 liberty, theory of 16 liberty rights 2 life-cycle approach to policy 98 liquid modernity (Bauman) 53, 57, 60 Lismore 49 listening to children 77, 80 Locke, J. 27n.3, 144 MacArthur Foundation 147 Macvarish, J. 118 Makichyan, A. 161 Man, figure of 2, 5–6, 11–16, 26, 32, 40, 90, 148, 152 as distinct from animal 13–17, 20 Mariotti, S. 143–5 Marshall, T. H. 69–73, 80, 154 Martinez, S. 112 mass society 155 Mead, L. 117 Mennell, S. 30–1 Metropolitan Parks, Boulevards and Playgrounds Association 41 Mill, J. S. 7, 11, 16–26, 31, 40, 42, 70, 154, 160 Miller, P. 61, 98 Millin, S. S. 94 modernity 32 Moses, H. 139 Moynihan, D. P. 110–19, 129 Murray, C. 117

184 Index Nakate, V. 161 nanny state 72 Napier-Moore, R. 84 natality 148, 152–5, 158–62 National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) 104 natural selection 40 necessity entrepreneurship 143–6 neoliberal figuring of childhood 61–5 neoliberalism 53, 83, 87–8, 97–100, 109 see also enterprise culture Nesse, R. M. 103 Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) 139–44, 149 neuroliberalism 7–8, 108, 110, 117 neuroscience 117–19, 122–4 neuropsychological doxa 76, 111, 129, 133–7, 146 New Lanark 33–4 New Public Management 65 non-domination 23–6 non-interference, principle of 17, 19 normalisation and normativity 21–2, 93, 96, 108 normative fiction 2, 8, 15–16, 22, 26, 31, 46, 54, 87, 100, 112, 142, 144–5, 162 not in education, employment or training (NEET) young people 48, 66n.3, 143, 146–7 nudge theory 109–10, 138 obesity 8, 88, 102–5 ordoliberals, Germany 97–8 Owen, R. 33–4 Page, N. 84 panopticism 35, 80, 118 panopticon 46n.3 Paraguay 146 Parallel Reports 78 Parkhurst prison 89 Pathways to Education 146 patriarchy 4, 112 peer-groups and peer-pressure 44–5 Peña Panichine, J. E. 161

performance management 98 Perry, B. D. 130n.11 Perry Preschool Project 113–14, 123 Pestalozzi, J. 33–4, 147, 160 Pettit, P. 7, 11, 24–6, 154 philanthropy and philanthrocapitalism 126, 129, 142, 147–8 Pim, W. H. 90 Pinel, P. 90 play definition of 51–2 instinct for 42 as a mode of training 42 nature of 46 objectives and benefits of 52 right to play 48–53, 62 rough and tumble play 57–8 play-centres, commercial 7, 29, 53–60 Playground Association of America (PAA) 41–2 Playground Society 40–1 playgrounds 7, 28–9, 33–45, 49–50, 54–65, 69, 118 as biosocial technology 29 supervision of 36, 60 playgroups 139 plurality of childhoods 9 Poland 50 poverty 82–3, 112, 148 culture of 116 power, biosocial 1, 6–19, 22–6, 28, 32, 39, 49, 63–6, 71, 75, 80, 87, 93, 96, 110–11, 118, 137, 148, 155, 158–62, and the anthropological machine 12–16 as civil engineering 39–46 power, social 12, 89 power over children 34 power relations 4, 13, 71, 77–8, 80, 100, 156, 160 prefiguring the future 8, 11, 64, 66, 73, 84, 137, 153–4, 162 prevention of social problems 63 process sociology 28 see also figurational sociology Procrustean power 8, 87, 97



Index 185

protection of the vulnerable 17 Prout, A. 6, 158 psychology, application of 64 public health and public hygiene 89–92, 100 Public Space Protection Order (PSPO) 67n.12 Punch (magazine) 41 Quetelet, A. 21 Rabuzzi, D. 143–5 racism 114–15 ragged schools 88, 147 Rancière, J. 1, 25–6, 70, 83, 111 Ready, Steady, Play! 66 Reagan, R. 117 recapitulation, theory of 20 reformatory education 88–91, 100, 137, 148–9, 156 Reiner, R. 119–20 resilience 8, 78–85, 123, 137 resistance, conception of 159–60 rights of children 5, 9, 48–52, 62, 69–70, 74, 158, 161 ring games 42 Roche, J. 69, 77–8 Rollet, H. 157 Rose, N. 16, 22–3, 61, 69, 72–3, 85, 91–4, 98 rotary swings 35–8 Rousseau, J. J. 7, 11–21, 24–6, 31, 34, 38–9, 46, 52, 70, 90–1, 102, 154, 160 Rury, J. 112 sandboxes 43, 45 school medical inspection 88, 92–3, 99 science of childhood 19–24, 92 Second World War 140 see-saws 36, 50, 60 self-improvement 13, 17 self-mastery 38–9 semi-citizenship 77 shame, sense of 37–8 Shonkoff, J. 124 Shore, R. 120

skateboarding 61, 63 slides in playgrounds 58–60 Smith, A. 127 Smith, K. 97, 99 social contract theory 14–16, 19 Social Science Education Consortium 141 social state, the 53 social welfare 2, 71, 117 socialisation 1, 31, 111–12 state of nature 3, 11–15, 18–19, 22, 31, 39 stateless persons 72 statistical societies 89 story-telling in philosophy 16 in policy discourse 81–4, 111 in science 22, 118–26 in social science 32, 69, 71 Stow, D. 34–9, 44, 63, 147 strategic frame analysis 125 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 140, 142 Sukarieh, M. 141, 147 Sully, J. 7, 19–23, 92 Sunday schools 147 sympathy of numbers 36–8, 45 Takota Iron Eyes 161 tangle of pathology 111–19, 129 Tannock, S. 141, 147 team membership 44–5 Thatcher, M. 72 third-way politics 72 Thorgeirsdóttir, H. 24 Thunberg, G. 161–2 toxic stress 110, 122–3, 126, 137 transversal competence 137, 150n.8 Trump, D. 72 Tuke, W. 90 Turkey 146 Turner, B. 70 underclass theory 115–17 United Kingdom Children’s Play Policy Forum (CPPF) 64

186 Index National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) 104 United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child 52, 62, 78 Convention on the Rights of the Child 5, 7, 23–4, 48–51, 56–7, 61–2, 66, 73, 78 Declaration of the Rights of the Child 50, 94 USAID 84 Vail, T. 139 Vatter, M. 9, 159–60 verbal deprivation 114, 130n.11 Wallace, A. 40 Walsh, S. N. 87 Weikart, D. 113 welfare rights 2 whatness of childhood 155–61

Whitehead, M. 110 Whole Child perspective 8, 65, 73–5, 79–83, 94, 99 whole of government approach to policy 95–9 whole school approach 138 Wilderspin, S. 34–9, 44, 63, 147 Williams, G. C. 103 Wilson, W. J. 110, 115, 117, 143 Wong, A. 146 word gap 130n.11 workfare programmes 117 World Health Organisation (WHO) 102 Yale Psycho-Clinic 21 Your Health is Your Wealth (2011) 95 Žižek, S. 126–7 zoē 2, 15, 18–19, 23, 28, 31, 39 Zolkos, M. 1