ABSTRACT
Many children and young people, with their imaginative energy and willingness to take great risks, have been active utopians (Ferreira and Kleinert 2015; Hayward 2012; Popović and Miller 2015). Young people often lead the protests through which much utopian thought and action begin, from Soweto (1976, against Afrikaans being the main language in schools), to the US civil rights movement (1960s, against apartheid in student canteens), to the chain of uprisings in the 2013 Middle Eastern ‘Arab Spring’. Yet utopian writers tend to sideline children, banishing them into communal care centres. The aim has been either to rear children as model citizens away from the subversive family, for example Plato (2007), or to abolish the stifling family and allow adults, and occasionally children, to enjoy utopian freedoms, for example Firestone (1970) in her scarily emotionless libertarianism.
