Kevin Myers

Marking time: some methodological and historical perspectives on the ‘crisis of childhood’

Historical amnesia besets the consensus that Britain faces an unprecedented ‘crisis of childhood’, and of child well-being. Drawing on evidence about changing uses of instruments and measures of well-being over time, this article explores and critiques claims about historical change and trends over time that are central to the imagined crisis of childhood in both diagnostic and therapeutic terms. It argues that diagnostic labels about the state of children’s well-being arising from changing methodologies and measures, and the therapeutic and pedagogical models they create, cannot be isolated from social conditions. This means that claims about a crisis of childhood, and the kinds of interventions that follow, require critical debate and cautious application. In the current climate of crisis, however, such reflection and debate are notable only by their absence.

Normalising Childhood: Policies and Interventions Concerning Special Children in the United States and Europe (1900-1960)

Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking: “Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them.

Contesting certification: mental deficiency, families and the state in interwar England

This article is an attempt to shed some further light on the people and the processes involved in the identification of mental deficiency in children and young people.∗∗ In order to do this, it turns away from the themes that have been most prominent in the historiography to date: elite and professional ideas, parliamentary and public debates and the formulation of policy. Instead, the paper is concerned with a single instance of diagnosis of imbecility in an 11-year-old schoolboy in a rural village in the English county of Hertfordshire. As far as is possible it reconstructs this diagnosis and charts and explains a remarkable and successful challenge to it in the High Court. In doing so, it draws on a variety of documentary records – educational, legal and medical – as well as the testimony of some of the surviving members of the family concerned. In employing these sources particular attention is paid to the actions of the people involved in diagnosis, and it seeks to explain and understand those actions with explanatory tools taken from cultural history.

Exploring supplementary education: margins, theories and methods

Existing knowledge of supplementary education, that is education organised and run by political, faith or ethnic groups outside of formal schooling, is patchy. This article is an exploration of the histories of supplementary education in the twentieth century. It is organised into three sections. The article begins by reviewing some existing literature and argues that supplementary education has been a topic of marginal concern for social historians, sociologists and historians of education. This marginal status has often been reflected in the way in which a dominant account of the history of supplementary education has entered the research literature despite a rather selective evidential base. The second section of the article deploys an expansive definition of education, and presents some new historical evidence concerning African Caribbean and Irish supplementary education. A final arguments section reflects on the significance of supplementary education and suggests some topics for a future research agenda.

Immigrants and ethnic minorities in the history of education

The experience of immigrants and ethnic minorities in post‐war Europe represents a significant silence in the history of education in Europe. Published research in the field on this theme is negligible in quantity, and is largely restricted to brief and narrative descriptions of policy changes that are organised around concepts of assimilation, cultural pluralism or integration. A review of the British case suggests that these kinds of accounts stymie our understanding of the importance of education for immigrants and their children. A more productive approach may be to pay greater attention to the lives of immigrant groups in post‐war Europe and, in particular, to reconstruct those diverse forms of educational agency that were deployed in the construction and negotiation of new identities. It is argued that this approach will require both new empirical research and a sustained and critical engagement with the ideas and practices of postcolonial scholarship.

The Ambiguities of aid and Agency

ABSTRACT This article explores media representations of refugee children in 1930s Britain, and assesses their significance on the reception and settlement of children. Emphasizing the innocence, vulnerability and close national associations between the Basques and the British, it is argued that these media representations conditioned a humanitarian response to the children. As a result, a broad spectrum of religious, political and welfare agencies temporarily provided aid and support for the children. However, the most sustained aid for the children came from those groups who demonstrated a critical and informed response to media representations.

Progressivism, Control and Correction: Local Education Authorities and Educational Policy in Twentieth‐century England

Through an analysis of both education policy and knowledge creation, this article explores the historical dimensions of two key features of the ‘new information age’. In the field of education, it documents the development of a progressive education policy in late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Birmingham, UK. This policy extended access to schooling, attempted to ameliorate the effects of poverty and ill health and made important innovations in school curricula, architecture and administration. These were real and important achievements, but they were also in many respects ambiguous ones. These ambiguities can be read in the vast set of educational records that the innovators were both responsible for and dependent on. For the knowledge created and stored as a result of educational progressivism was also used as a means of surveillance and as a method for monitoring and disciplining urban populations. Based on a critical reading of Foucault, the article presents evidence that helps illuminate processes of knowledge creation, storage and exchange.

Engaging with History after Macpherson

The Race Relations Amendment Act (2000) identifies a key role for education, and more specifically history, in promoting ‘race equality’ in Britain. In this article Ian Grosvenor and Kevin Myers consider the extent of young peoples current engagement with the history of ‘diversity, change and immigration’ which underpins the commitment to ‘race equality’. Finding that in many of Britains schools and universities a singular and exclusionary version of history continues to dominate the curriculum, they go on to consider the reasons for the neglect of multiculturalism. The authors identify the development of an aggressive national identity that depends on the past for its legitimacy and argue that this sense of the past is an important obstacle to future progress.

The hidden history of refugee schooling in Britain: the case of the Belgians, 1914-18.

The historical silence on refugee schooling The twentieth century has been called the century of the refugee. The sheer size, scope and persistence of refugee movements have been a de® ning feature of the last hundred years because at no other time in history have people so regularly been forced to ̄ ee their homes in search of safety. The unprecedented scale of refugees across the world has attracted the attention of scholars in a range of disciplines: in international law, population and demographic studies and political science and history for example. However, in the history of education, the de® ning feature of the twentieth century can hardly be traced at all. For those who are interested in how refugees settle, teach and learn in a new country, the (British) history of education will reveal nothing of interest. Despite the fact that education has long been seen as a critical experience for refugees, historians of education have resolutely ignored the presence of refugees in Britain. In existing history of education texts it is almost impossible to ® nd even an index reference or a footnote that might indicate the presence of refugees in any educational setting. With the notable exception of some recently published articles, the educational spaces created for and by refugees, and their experiences in these spaces, remain hidden from history. To some extent the historical silence on refugee schooling can be explained by reference to a research tradition that has mainly concentrated on `big themes’ at the expense of a more socially inspired history of education. So whilst, for example, the development of state schooling, the curriculum and the policy process are prominent and easily recognizable themes in the history of education, the lived experiences of teachers and pupils in the classroom remain rather more obscure. Harold Silver argues that one result of the existing emphasis on a number of well-established

The Imperial Welfare State? Decolonisation, Education and Professional Interventions on Immigrant Children in Birmingham, 1948-1971.

Abstract This article approaches debates about how the history of the post-1945 English welfare state might be written. It argues that professionals’ interventions on immigrant children can serve as a prism for understanding the crafting of the modern English welfare state. In this sense the article engages with the narrative concerning the resilience of a post-war British history that sees 1945 as a moment of profound rupture symbolised by the demise of Empire, the development of a universal welfare state, and the coming of mass immigration that brought with it social problems whose management presaged a distinctive British multiculturalism. Due to its influential impact on the development of immigrant education policies in England and because of its extensive education archive the article uses the Birmingham Local Education Authority (LEA) as an empirical and historical case. The significant British Nationality Act of 1948 and the Immigration Act of 1971 serve as demarcations of the period treated. The article concludes that the immigrant child and the child’s background were consistently presented as educational problems and as the cause of both poor academic attainment and a more intangible unwillingness to assimilate. In this lens the crafting of the post-war English welfare state was a continuation of an imperial project shoring up imperial boundaries within as the former colonised appeared on English soil.