Focusing on the period before and after the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, this volume explores how children were constructed by various actors in Ireland including the state, youth organisations, churches, charities, individual authors and publishers, and asks what possibilities were projected onto Irish youth during a period of instability and change. The history of childhood in Ireland is a new and rapidly emerging area of research; a number of recent publications, conferences and events testify to this burgeoning interest. 1 Associated areas of study such as the sociology of childhood in Ireland and childrenâs literature studies, are likewise of recent origin. 2 Though the study of childhood, both contemporary and historic, was relatively late to develop in an Irish context, the momentum at present suggests a sense of making up for lost time. One of the noteworthy features of the history of childhood is the fruitful cross-fertilisation of a variety of disciplinesâin particular literature, language studies, history, education and sociologyâthat has characterised the research output.
The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume were approached because their research explores the broad variety of ways in which the Irish child was constructed by individuals and organisations who directly addressed children and youth, and impacted on their lives through social and cultural activities like education, sport, youth groups and cultural production ranging from literature to clothing. The volume explicitly aims to capture a broad range of constructions of the child and, reflecting this, covers themes that include gender, religion, social class and the politics of identity, citizenship and nation-building. Defining the boundaries of childhood is a notoriously fraught exercise, and contributors were left to determine those boundaries in their own research. The result is a volume that covers childrenâs early years to the later teenage years across the island of Ireland. Contributors were asked to address the âindependence periodâ, generously defined here as 1910â1940, but not necessarily to cover the entire period (though some chose to do so). In this regard, the editors were keen not to imply or even presuppose the idea of a sudden break with the past when Ireland gained independence in 1922, but rather to allow any continuities, discontinuities or abrupt disruptions after independence to emerge organically from the research. In short, a considerable degree of latitude was afforded to the scholars whose work is included here in order to capture as diverse a view of childhood in early twentieth-century Ireland as was possible. The result is a singularly wide-ranging volume that gathers together examinations of schools, public libraries, literature, clothing, play spaces, youth organisations and sport.
The âConstructedâ Child
This volume is not about the âsymbolicâ child who appears as an archetype or projection of a societyâs aspirations or anxieties. Nor is it about the ârealâ historic child embedded in their varied lived experiences. Rather this book is concerned with the constructed child. The constructed child is representative rather than symbolic or real. He or she is an epitome created in the minds of adults to represent the entire of his or her peer group. As the essays in this volume reveal so clearly, the policymaker, the librarian, the Boy Scout troop leader, the clergyman, the publisher and the childrenâs author all constructed a different Irish child to represent a broader cohort. The constructed child exists; she lives and breathes and is encountered by adults in a variety of settings. However, she is simultaneously an abstraction from reality, a generalisation and often an ideal.
Much of the international scholarship on the history of childhood is concerned with the ways in which adults represented, conceptualised and constructed children and childhood. 3 More recently scholars have begun to attempt a more thorough excavation of the lives of children in order to see how they lived in the world. As Sarah-Anne Buckley and Susannah Riordan summarise, the historiography has moved from how children were represented to what children experienced at the hands of the state and other agencies, to an attempt to discover the authentic voice and experience of children. 4 In Ireland, perhaps because this historiography was relatively late in emerging, these issues are often being considered simultaneously. 5
Scholars examining the evolving constructions of the child in Europe and North America over time have highlighted two divergent concepts of children and childhood, categorised by Jenks as the Dionysian and Apollonian image of the child. 6 The Dionysian image, which resonated with and was influenced by, the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, presented the child as inherently corrupt, wilful, sensual and knowing, ontologically not much different from an adult. The child in this schema therefore required strict moral discipline to acquire virtuous habits, and his or her socialisation required authoritarian educational methods to inculcate moral precepts and reign in emotional excess. The alternative image of childhood, the Apollonian, saw the child as innately innocent and inherently good. This vision found its first clear exposition in the eighteenth century, in Lockeâs infant as tabula rasa and more pointedly in Rousseauâs groundbreaking novel about education, Emile (1762), which proposed that, given their innate innocence, children should be allowed to develop ânaturallyâ. In pedagogic terms, this meant adopting âchild-centredâ experiential forms of learning to teach basic life skills. The nineteenth-century Romantic conceptualisation of childhood as a time of blissful innocence, joy and indeed âquasi-divine understanding lost in becoming adultâ added a near-mystical aura to childhood. 7
While Jenks acknowledges that the two images could coexist within the same time period, he linked Dionysian concepts with the âold European orderâ characterised by strict (and constricting) codes of behaviour and the Apollonian concept to âthe new order of modern industrial societyâ with its increasing emphasis on individuality and individual freedom. 8 However, the trajectory of Apollonian approaches was uneven, patchy and slow. For example, child-centred pedagogies that reflected the Apollonian image of the child were only firmly embedded in educational policy and practice during the second half of the twentieth century; mass state-funded education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dominated by a disciplinary, authoritarian approach that laid an emphasis on âusefulâ knowledge and moral discipline.
Any reliance on such overarching transnational concepts of childhood tends to gloss over the variety of ways in which children were constructed, socialised, discipline, educated, cared for and loved in a given place and period. 9 The challenge for historians of childhood is to examine how such overarching theoretical constructions interacted with other political, social and ideological processes in society and with detailed examinations of how adults constructed children within particular settings. The attention paid in the historiography of childhood to themes like the evolution of the nation-state, the operations of imperialism and nationalism and examinations of gender has offered important insights into how the child was constructed. 10 The use of more âground upâ approaches providing detailed examples of how children were constructed in a specific time and place by particular actors has also informed views of how the child is constructed. The social construction of the child can therefore be approached in three ways: using broad theoretical frameworks, drawing on existing histories of themes such as nationalism, religion, class and gender, and by providing more detailed examples of how children were constructed. All three function as mutually informing areas of scholarship. The approach taken in this volume is to examine how adults constructed children in a particular milieu and in doing so it sheds light on the operations of colonialism, nationalism, gender and on broader theoretical constructs of the child in an Irish context.
Irish Exceptionalism
Scholars who engage with any aspect of the history of Ireland are often called to address the issue of Irish âexceptionalismâ, that is, to suggest whether Ireland conformed to wider trends, was a law unto itself, or some combination of the two. The history of childhood is no different in this regard, and though this volume does not take a comparative approach, many of the essays address the influence of international ideas and processes or are suggestive of the tensions between these and constructions of the child in Ireland. The development of mass state-funded education in the nineteenth century might be taken as an illustrative example of the ways in which the Irish experience both mirrored and diverged from wider trends. In the shadow of the French Revolution and confronting the dislocating effects of mass proletarianisation in the wake of the industrial revolution, European nation-states consolidating their power in the nineteenth century sought ways to protect the rights of property, maintain social hierarchies and contain the disruptive and potentially revolutionary forces of social unrest, as well as grappling with the challenge of uniting often quite heterogeneous populations divided by religion and ethnicity into a cohesive whole. The state in the nineteenth century was deeply concerned with moulding productive, compliant citizens as a matter of its own survival, and in this light, the emergence of state-funded mass education in Europe and North America has been viewed as a fundamental part of the state-building enterprise, with the aim of creating âliterate, useful and law-abiding citizensâ. 11
In Ireland, a state-funded national education system was founded in 1831, almost forty years before its equivalent in England. This reflected the deep concerns of the British political establishment that Ireland was particularly susceptible to social instability, violence and unrest as a result of a number of factors including the intensity of sectarian divisions, the threat of popular Catholic nationalism which had advanced under Daniel OâConnell and the seemingly chronic and exceptional nature of Irish poverty. To frame this another way: the union with Britain in its political, social and cultural guises required an interventionist process of assimilation if it was to succeed. The non-denominational education system operated on the assumption that Irish children, particularly the children of the Catholic poor who formed the vast majority of the population, must be converted into law-abiding, British citizens who could contribute to Irish progress. This entailed disseminating practical knowledge on everything from husbandry to housekeeping, religious and moral education focused on the inculcation of prized Victorian virtues like prudence, forethought and industry, and even elementary lessons in classical political economy to curb any radical impulses. Irish history, geography and literature were a minimal component of the curriculum and the Irish language was non-existent. 12 The colonial or quasi-colonial assimilationist impulse differentiated the Irish education system from equivalent attempts by the state to educate the masses in the rest of the UK, while even in colonial India in the late nineteenth century the British state proved itself unwilling to commit the necessary resources and left the education of the native population to Christian missionaries. 13
The level of religious control over education that evolved in Ireland was also notable. In their efforts to deliver secular mass education, European states were often forced into compromises with the various churches. In Germany, for example, the state relented to pressures and funded separate Protestant and Catholic school systems. Other states were more successful in defending secularism in education, in particular France, and it has been noted that the âbroad pattern of mass education across much of Europe was that it became secularised gradually post-Enlightenment, culminating in the almost marginalisation of religiously branded education in western Europe after the Kulturkampfâ. 14 In Ireland, the state allowed denominationalism to become the educational reality in what was theoretically a non-denominational system. Clergy of different denominations managed and oversaw the operation of schools at a local level and the system operated as a denominational system from its earliest years. 15 The Protestant and Catholic churchesâ control of the education system was consolidated in the decades after independence, a period of particularly close alliance between the Catholic Church and the state. After 1922, efforts at moulding a compliant citizenry were in effect recast as efforts to revive the Irish language as a living vernacular, cultivate a deep patriotic attachment to the nascent Irish nation and promote a strong commitment to the Catholic faith. All of the above is enough to suggest that while state-funded education conformed to general trends for mass education as an arm of state-building, it did not fit any external international template easily.
In the period under consideration in this volume, 1910â1940, those who constructed the Irish childâthe state, churches, civil society organisations, commercial interests and individualsâcontinued to draw upon and reflect the influence of outside ideas, and the essays gathered here to a significant extent confirm that the construction of Irish childhood was influenced by concerns prevalent elsewhere, without looking identical. What emerges from the volume is a sense that recognisable themesâDionysian and Apollonian images of the child, aspirations to mould lawful and loyal citizens, the desire to inculcate middle-class respectability in poorer children, concerns about the inherent threat posed by working-class youth left unattended, the role of the educatio...