In January 2016, a 10-year-old boy, probably like many other children his age in primary schools across the United Kingdom, and no doubt in other countries as well, was providing an account of life at home. The point of the exercise was for the children to practise their writing skills and to put into effect the phonetic method of spelling that they had been taught. In describing his house, the 10-year-old, who happened to be Muslim, labelled his home a āterror-ist houseā, which using the phonetic technique is not a bad attempt in spelling the word āterraceā. Rather than this being seen just as a product of the spelling approach adopted in the education system, and simply corrected by the teacher with a wry grin, this boy and his family became the subject of a counter-terrorist investigation (BBC, 20/1/16).
This example has obvious features that make it particularly notable, but it reflects a process that forms part of every childās every day, one in which a constructed understanding of morality is used to inform an image of the child that, as a consequence, leads to certain adult-defined practices that shape the childās experience. It is in relation to this backdrop that children interact with the social world, creating meanings that inform their behaviours. It reflects a multi-tiered moral dimension that forms part of both our understanding of childhoods and of the individual child. It is the desire to bring these together that forms the focus for this book which presents a framework for exploring this moral dimension and recognising its relevance in childrenās lives.
1.1 The Moral Status of Childhood
Children, Morality and Society (Frankel 2012) was written to promote discussion and in order to raise the profile of an area of thinking that had for too long been under-acknowledged (Mayall 2002). Its aim was simply to contribute to a dialogue that placed children within discourses of morality. At the time it was a conscious decision to focus on childrenās agency and to consider this as the starting point. There was no intention to be ādismissiveā (Robb 2014) of the wider moral framework, rather it was a decision of priorities.Perhaps the moral status of childhood provides the most dramatic instance of misfit between the adult structuring of childhood and young peopleās own knowledge and experience. Young people find that adults routinely reject or ignore their moral competence, yet they do engage with moral issuesā¦A further twist to this tangle is that adults also expect young people to take moral responsibility both at home and at school [and also increasingly within the wider social and virtual spaces that make up the neighbourhood]. This adult neglect and indeed conceptual misunderstanding accounts for one of the strongest findingsā¦that children find their participation rights are not respected. This misfit between experience and societal concepts has to be explained. (Mayall 2002: 138)
This work reflects the next step. To fully understand the way in which children demonstrate their engagement with morality it is important that this is seen within a wider theoretical framework. These ideas had yet to fully mature in that original work. However, here I hope to put that thinking into a far stronger context that will not only promote dialogue but will actively support the researcher in asking more questions and discovering more answers. Are these the updated views of an earlier piece of writing? No. They are to be seen as an addition to what has already been set out, strengthening those arguments by establishing a more defined model for engagement. The aim of this work, therefore, is to flesh out an enlarged conceptual framework that will not only support this consideration of children and morality, but can also aid the way in which we consider the processes that make up agentic action. As will be suggested, these processes must not be seen outside of the social web in which interaction takes place. It is, therefore, a fundamental concern of this work to make sense of the relationship between structure and agency, and how that helps to further our ability as adults to understand children and to engage with them more effectively.
But why morality? Morality remains a significant stronghold of thought from which adults are able to manage childrenās position in society. Drawing from notions of the minority group (see Mayall 2002), this work recognises the extent to which morality has acted as a choker through which society has sought to keep control of children. The result has been a misrepresentation of children at all levels of society, with implications for all aspects of their everyday lives. The following quote, although marking an extreme case, has significant resonance. It comes from an interview in which the child murderer, Mary Bell, reflects, some 30 years later, on her trial as an 11-year-old.
It was the thinking provoked by this case that encouraged me to write Children, Morality and Society. Despite this account being a reflection on an incident that happened some time ago, it continues to mirror many of the dominant discourses that form around children and morality. It is the way in which it draws out the child as a āspecimenā that is most compelling, a theme that continues to sum up childrenās relationships within moral discourses. This book, therefore, sets out to establish a foundation on which a challenge to these dominant ways of thinking can be based by recognising the extent to which āmoralityā must be seen as a more overt feature of the way in which we view the social world.āIn the court while they were talking and talking, I remember thinking of what I would say when it was my turn. Iād tell them I want my dog. I wanted him with me when they sent me to be hanged. Thatās what I thought would happen: Iād be sent to the gallows and they might just as well have said that right away because it was just as meaningless as life imprisonment or ā¦wellā¦death. None of it meant a damned thing, not a thingā¦āBut you were frightened just the same?āI think probably more of the whole thing, the kind of hushed atmosphere, the reaction from the adultsā¦adultsā¦ā She repeated her words as always in moments of stress, losing all structure, rhythm and pattern of speech āā¦adults, you know, literally avoiding meā¦looking at me likeā¦likeā¦like a specimenā. (Sereney 1998: 125)
1.2 This Book
The original aim of this book was simply to try and look at children and morality as a social construction. However, as the process of writing moved on, it became clear that the constructed nature of this model was only part of the story, one that could only be fully understood if an examination of structure sat alongside the way in which the individual comes to relate to it. This, therefore, ties the work directly into examining the relationship between structure and agency. From this base, this work proposes that childhood studies has much to offer in providing a foundation through which we can challenge the dominant attitudes that have shaped so much of our thinking in relation to children and morality in the past. In order to mount this campaign this book focuses on five key steps,
- 1.A theoretical foundation
- 2.Establishing a framework
- 3.Framing a contextual backdrop
- 4.Recognising agency in action
- 5.Repositioning children within structure
I have used the term āstepā to identify these sections because I want to avoid confusion with the term āpartā, which might be seen as a more appropriate phrase. āPartā will be used solely to refer to the three different āpartsā of the framework that will pull together the ideas in this book.
1.2.1 Step 1: Chapter 2 : A Theoretical Foundation
Chapter 2 presents the case for a framework to aid the way in which we are able to analyse structure and agency, and by doing this reflect on a moral dimension that forms part of both. Morality is presented as nothing new to sociological thought in relation to children, rather as a focus for thinking that has lost its emphasis. In doing so, the traditional notion of socialisation is challenged, and it is suggested that if we are interested in understanding the transmission of social order then this should be seen in a far more dynamic way. This brings together structure and agency and the active nature of the relationship between the two because it suggests that the researcher needs to move away from the unidirectional focus on causality (the individual being defined as a product of both their biology and environment) to a bidirectional recognition of the interrelationship that exists between the social agent and the structure in which they find themselves. Drawing from the ideas of Adrian James (2010) that āwoveā together an approach to structure and agency, this chapter illustrates the relevance of recognising the potential this union offers for challenging the way children have, for too long, been positioned in relation to morality.
1.2.2 Step 2: Chapters 3 and 4: Establishing a Framework
Here the framework is introduced. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the structural and agentic aspects of the framework, respectively. In both chapters a presentation of the theory precedes a consideration of what it means in terms of offering a practical framework that can be used to understand the way in which children negotiate their everyday lives. What is significant about this framework is that it is not a tool that is simply for those who are interested in āmoralityā. Rather, the framework suggests that, whatever our engagement with children, a moral dimension cannot be ignored, because it is simply a part of both the structural way in which childrenās lives are ordered and an intrinsic element of how they, as social agents, make meanings in the context of the interactional settings in which they find themselves. Through the framework one can start to consider the nature of the contextual backdrop, how it is influenced, how it comes to be shaped and the extent to which it establishes (moral) images of the child that inform practices. It is a direct engagement with this contextual backdrop that sees the child demonstrating their agency. The processes of agency that inform this are explored in Chap. 4, with a consideration of those aspects of self that the individual brings to interaction, and the extent to which these impact on individual meaning making.
1.2.3 Step 3: Chapters, 5, 6 and 7: Framing a Contextual Backdrop
Engaging with the framework initially means focusing on a filter that allows constructed images of the child to be made visible and then to be examined. Each chapter in this section seeks to explore the relevance of these filters as part of a consideration of home, school and the neighbourhood. The filters are reason, virtue and social harmony, and are introduced in Chap. 3. Here they are shown to offer a means of deconstructing social thought in relation to children through a partial historical investigation. Recognising the application of these filters within history shows just how settled society is on positioning children in relation to morality. These chapters show change through time, but they also reflect on similarities that continue to be identifiable, with relevance for how we engage with children today.
In this way it is possible to start to understand the fabric out of which contemporary moral images of the child come to be constructed. As a result of establishing analysis based on the framework, these chapters reflect on how a search for a moral image can illuminate further the nature of adult and child roles and relationships within key settings and the intrinsic place of a moral perception of the child in framing the very processes by which the practices of childhood (for example, in school) are carried out.
1.2.4 Step 4: Chapter 8: Recognising Agency in Action
This section provides a contrast to the images of the child considered in the previous section. Through seeking to illustrate the second part of the framework, this chapter demonstrates not only the differences from the constructed images above but also the practical way in which children engage with morality within their everyday lives. Those differences are illustrated using examples from Children, Morality and Society (Frankel 2012) in combination with a continued use of the filters from the last section. Also, through a focus on childrenās voices, it is possible to highlight the active and dynamic way in which children are continually engaging with everyday morality as they seek to navigate the social world around them. As such it demonstrates the central place of moral assessment as a feature of their agency. The discussions around emotions, the processes of learning and collaboration are examined through the lens of home, school an...