ABSTRACT
The following chapter gives a historical analysis of the discursive traces of “childhood agency” in a range of educational theories. It first considers German Romanticism around 1800, then the international “progressive education” movement around the turn of the twentieth century, and finally the West German “anti-authoritarian Kinderladen movement” of the 1970s, which emerged from the protest movements of 1968. These historical periods constitute key “nodal points” in the history of childhood in Western modernity (Baader et al., 2014) – a history shaped particularly by the Romantic discourse (Cunningham, 2005). Our analysis shows that in these educational theories, children are conceived as powerful, agentive actors. This contradicts the thesis that it was only with the Childhood Studies of the 1980s that the previously dominant image of the vulnerable child was put to rest. For the schema, “strong vs. vulnerable child” is shown to have run through the modern discourse on childhood since the nineteenth century. While the various educational theories emphasise different dimensions of childhood agency, they all seek to distance themselves from a Christian conception of the “generational order”.
