Search

In this chapter we will consider the school, not so much as a site of learning and teaching but as a particular kind of social setting. As a particular kind of institution, it has brought children together and aligned them with regard to their measured and differentiated cognitive capacity. Far from producing docile subjects, modern schools facilitate children’s agency, not least inasmuch as this has constituted both an explicit philosophy of the modern school (i.e. learning is through doing) and as this provides the umbrella for a number of innovations regarding children’s agency. Moreover, as a social setting, the school has constituted a diagram through which social and cultural practices more generally are, and have been, made intelligible as a pedagology or subject to educational measure, but also importantly through which spaces of innovation and resistance have been constructed. The emergence and standardisation of a common childhood The medieval historian Didier Lett opens a chapter on the education of children between the fifth and thirteenth centuries by declaring: ‘Contrary to what Philippe Aries affirmed, people of the high Middle Ages had not forgotten the meaning of education’ (Alexandre-Bidon and Lett, 1999: 39). The male offspring of noble families would start doing menial work in the household of another noble family from the age of 11 or 12 years, and would then gradually be trained in the responsibilities of knighthood. Girls would similarly be trained in reading, riding and dancing in the service of relatives (Heywood, 2001: 157). Children from non-aristocratic families would also be sent to relatives or to other households in order to learn through informal apprenticeships or forms of service. Children were instructed in particular crafts and skills; some were adopted into the family and instructed more generally in spiritual and moral matters; others were treated harshly and used only for their labour (Heywood, 2001: 158). As Heywood notes, the education of children through apprenticeship, in which ‘each generation merely handed down what it knew from its own experience in a particular calling and region’, ‘gradually withered on the vine from the sixteenth century onwards’; such a system was suited to a ‘stable agrarian society’ but was unable to cope with a changing and growing mercantile and urban economy (Heywood, 2001: 160).

In this chapter I consider the issue of children’s rights and political participation. Of course, although we might endow ceteris paribus any persons or even things with legal rights, not everyone or thing is deemed to have the capacity for political participation. Initially, we will consider some of the philosophical and cultural history attached to the question of children as rights bearers and as political animals. We then consider how the capacity for modern rights and political participation is distributed unevenly across the globe and discuss this in the context of the universalisation of children’s rights, as enshrined, for example, in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Finally in this chapter we ground the questions of children’s rights and politics in the context of national sovereignty, modern forms of governmentality and forms of political enunciation, or expression. As Hannah Arendt declared after the Second World War, ‘only with a completely organized humanity could the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether’ (Arendt, 1962: 297). The question regarding children, though, is doubly confounded in that ordinarily the constitution of their very being (with regard to their infancy and lack of maturity) places them a priori outside of both the political and global humanity.

The arrest of Pete Townshend, lead guitarist for The Who, for downloading and possessing Internet child pornography and the publicity surrounding the case provides an initial point of discussion concerning the emergence of an ethics of the image that is not predicated on the actual evidential status of that image but on more virtual forms of observation. The discussion in this article focuses on three substantive aspects of this event - legislation in the UK and the US, expert psychological discourse, and public discussion in the UK press - in order to present a particular and situated rendering of forms of virtual observation. The context to this discussion concerns the notion that digital imaging technology presages a need for new legislation, law enforcement and social analytical frameworks for understanding and tackling the production, distribution and consumption of images of child sexual abuse.