Balances between civilising processes and offensives: Adult-child relations in Irish primary schools from the mid-nineteenth century

Abstract

This paper examines arguments about balances between civilising processes and offensives using the history of Irish primary-level education as an empirical case. Drawing largely on teaching manuals and primary school curricula from the mid-nineteenth century up to the end of the twentieth century, this paper traces the changing conceptual and social distance between childhood and adulthood in Ireland. If we focus too much on civilising offensives rather than processes, we lose much of the explanatory power of figurational sociology. Transformations become depicted as the outcomes of intentional plans, rather than compromises or unintended consequences of dependencies between people. In Ireland, children became increasingly enmeshed in both unplanned civilising processes and deliberate civilising offensives framed by pedagogues and experts. However, these recurring attempts at civilising young children occurred in broader, ordered, but largely unintentional social processes developing over generations. While both ‘children’ and ‘adults’ were initially addressed in quite similar terms, their identities and subjectivities gradually diverged, such that the division between these social categories became clearer. This has been anon-linear set of processes primarily due to the successive escalation and partial resolution of social conflicts in different forms.