If Imagine: People

“What if, for a moment, we imagine that these kids are people?
”:
A collaborative inquiry into reimagining children and schooling
Ty Scaletta
Department of Curriculum & Teaching, Teachers College

REIMAGINING MIDDLE SCHOOLERS AS PERSONS
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“Look here,” he said, pointing to the text of a pocket size U.S. Constitution I had given him. “It says
here, ‘all persons born in the United States are citizens.’ And it says, ‘nor shall any state deprive any
person of life, liberty, or property.’ Ain’t I a person? Ain’t this my life? Ain’t I got rights?”
Tony had never read the 1851 speech delivered by the African American abolitionist Sojourner Truth
marked with the refrain, ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ His cry, like hers, arose from the heart of his own
experience of frustration and injustice in a system that treated him not as a person who
could feel pain and loss and desperation, but as an object.
- Woodhouse (2010, p. 3), recalling the words of a thirteen-year-old boy
As I submit this project, I would like to thank:

● My Mom, without whose love and hard work I couldn’t have done any of this.
● My brothers, who I know are always there alongside me.
● My co-explorers at Alcott, whose ideas fueled this study and who remind me every
day why I’m here and in this profession.
● All of the incredible scholars and educators and students whose research and thought
I borrowed for my project and my practice.
● Peter, for your friendship and patience.
● Will, who (as is so often the case) was exactly right.
● Britt, you egomaniac.
● Keith Sklar, for the title (and the ideas).
● My therapist.
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A Provocation
“What if schooling were not about ‘reducing the field of attention to prove a point’? What if
schooling involved ‘thinking [that] enlarges, even invents, the competencies of all the players…such
that the domain of ways of being and knowing dilates, expands, adds both ontological and
epistemological possibilities, proposes and enacts what was not there before’? Such schooling
would upend many of the structures into which we have settled down and become comfortable.”
(Franklin-Phipps & Rath, 2018, p. 270; quoting Haraway, 2016)
Midway through my first year as a teacher, I found myself in a faculty meeting about our
middle schoolers’ ‘unacceptable behavior’ during recess time. It was February in Chicago, and
the freezing weather had kept us from using the playground, so we’d been having our
students spend their supervised recess inside in the library or in an empty conference room.
Trouble was, we kept getting complaints from adults around the building that the kids were
being ‘too loud’, that they were ‘wandering the halls’ outside their approved spaces, and that
they were just generally acting ‘disorderly’ and ‘disobedient’. I nodded along, in our meeting,
as my more experienced colleagues proposed new rules and punishments that would
improve our students’ behavior and, importantly, keep us from getting any more complaints.
Maybe we should have them all line up after lunch; then, we could herd them to the right places
and close the doors. Maybe we should take attendance in each recess space and punish any kids
who are tardy or absent. Certainly, at least, we need firmer expectations for recess behavior and
clearer consequences for not meeting them.
Near the end of the discussion, an art teacher–let’s call him Keith–raised his hand to
speak. Keith had interjected once already, earlier, to softly suggest that he could keep the art
room open during recess to provide a space for students who might like to draw or create
something. This second time, though, he entered the fray seeming markedly more frustrated
with the tone and direction of our conversation. I don’t recall exactly everything Keith said,
but I do remember that he began with a exasperated sigh and a question:
“What if, for a moment, we imagine that these kids are people?”1
The question carried no special weight at the moment; our discussion carried on as if Keith
had never asked it. And years later, I can’t find anyone else who was there to corroborate my
story. (Even Keith himself says now that while he believes he said it, he doesn’t even
remember the meeting.) As it turned out, I ended up being the one to bundle all of my other
colleagues’ ideas into a list of rules and punishments that was sent out to students–and, in
return, I was praised by my colleagues and administrators for ‘taking the initiative’ to address
this ‘urgent’ issue. None of our solutions helped, of course. In the end, the arrival of Spring’s
warmer temperatures solved our recess ‘problem’.
1
This is a text-style Keith frequently uses in communications. “TEXT”, he reminds us, “like all visual images, has
shape, density, rhythm, weight, and myriad… transmitters of embedded subjectivities, social and institutional
norms and power relationships with the reader” (personal comm., April 18, 2022). In displaying his question, one
meant to provoke and disrupt, I felt that mimicking his “aesthetic visual stutter” might catalyze for the reader
“aspects of self awareness during their… questioning, feeling, interpreting, and understanding”.
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Keith’s question, though, remains for me a powerful provocation for school adults
(Lesko, 2021), both upending our settled assumptions and expanding our field of attention
with difficult questions. What if schools did imagine children as persons? What would that
look like, sound like, and feel like (for kids and for adults)? How might it require changes to the
ways we currently teach, the rules we enforce, and the ways we talk to and about our
students? And, perhaps most provocatively, what does it say about schools–and about
us–that (re)conceptualizing children as persons requires such radical imagination?
Working alongside middle schoolers as a teacher, I’m continually reminded of their
incredible emotional, social, intellectual, and moral capabilities. However, I also see how
these same children are wounded and ground down by school structures, practices, and
discourses which punish them for all they, as kids, supposedly can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t do. So
much of what happens in schools seems “almost designed” to dehumanize students (Kohn,
2011)–that is, to strip them of their positive human qualities and draw narrow focus to their
perceived weaknesses and failures. I recognize that this is not the intention of individual
teachers, many of whom would say they always seek to find the good in their students.
However, as I’ll lay out, even our best intentions largely fail to confront an evident structural
problem: our society fails to recognize and affirm children as full persons entitled to equal
moral status and dignity. This prejudice, like so many others, is reified and reinforced in
schools, where students’ dehumanization is baked into practices and policies so
well-entrenched that they often go unexamined and unquestioned. Until and unless we
examine and question them, unless we fundamentally reimagine schooling, all our individual
attempts at improvement and reform will fail at truly honoring children’s status as persons.
In response, I sought to explore how children experience schooling, currently, and to
consider how schools, curriculum, and instruction might be reconstructed around a
reimagination of children as persons. This article begins by establishing a rationale and a
framework for focusing on children’s personhood, specifically. In the second section, I argue
for understanding children as a marginalized group, not only because of their mistreatment
by adults (historical and present) but how they are imagined in our dominant discourse. Then,
I explain–and problematize–how I carried out research alongside my middle school students
as “co-explorers” (Biswas, 2020, p. 69) to identify parts of their school experiences that they
felt were (de)humanizing. I describe this collaborative inquiry as a process of ‘muddling
through’, trying to elicit and amplify students’ voices while navigating my position as
adult-researcher. In the last two sections, I provide a summary of our findings, placing
children’s analyses in conversation with prior research and theory from adult scholars, and I
consider how I and other school adults might act to better affirm our students’ personhood.
In this last section, I conclude by exploring the possibilities of a pedagogy focused on “a
childist reworking of moral thinking and practices” (Wall, 2010a, p. 10).
Like Biswas (2020), through the “meandering trajectories” (p. 1) of this research I
turned toward the theoretical concept of childism as defined by philosopher-educator John
Wall (2010a, 2012, 2019). Childism “is the effort to reimagine and practice child-inclusive
social processes and structures”, and it aims to reposition children “as scholarly and
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democratic subjects, in sofaras this is possible” (Biswas, 2020, p. 1; Wall, 2012, 2019). In this
article, I apply a childist lens to draw a sharper focus to our moral obligation to support and
empower children in a culture which commonly views them as objects or non-persons to be
surveilled, punished, and manipulated by adults. And further, I draw from childist concepts of
moral responsibility and moral creativity (Wall, 2010a) as a way to imagine new possibilities
for schooling, some of which require a radical reconstruction of adults’ norms and
expectations. While this article is by no means a comprehensive account of childist theory, I
hope it will add to a growing body of research illustrating the potential for childism as a
framework for educational research (e.g., Biswas, 2020, 2021; Biswas & Mattheis, 2022). At
the very least, I hope that it will serve as a provocation for broader and more humane
imagination about children and schooling, just as Keith’s question did for me.
Drawing focus to children’s personhood

“When the researcher asked… ‘Why are you important?’ an eight year old replied, ‘Because I’m a
human being’” (Saunders & Goddard, 2007, p. 39)
Reimagining schools around children’s status as persons, specifically, demands some

introduction and explanation. There are, after all, narrower and more practical terms similar
to personhood which are better established in educational literature, namely autonomy and
agency. I feel that both of these concepts, however, have been thoroughly muddied and
weakened by their use in initiatives to give traditional schooling a progressive veneer
(Petrovic & Rolstad, 2017; Holt, 1976). Further, while I agree that persons can often be
characterized by agency and autonomy, I don’t believe either term captures the moral
contours of the dehumanization that children commonly face in schools. A person can be an
autonomous agent, to be sure, but they also have a sense of dignity and respect. They seek
fulfilling relationships with other persons, they participate meaningfully in communities, and
they dream and imagine better futures for themselves and others. I believe our discussion
requires a concept (namely personhood) which allows us to consider and explore all of these
different dimensions of children’s being.
The turn toward personhood stems from a review of existing literature where
researchers asked children for their feelings about corporal punishment (e.g., Walton &
Saunders, 2020), which reveals that “children’s humanity [emphasis added] is an aspect of
themselves that they feel they have in common with adults” (Saunders & Goddard, 2007, p.
39), and that children associate being a person with dignity and respect. Consider, for
example, the middle schooler in Saunders & Goddard’s research who argued that his parents
shouldn’t be able to hit him for much longer because, in his words, “I think I’m becoming a bit
of a person, not a child anymore” (p. 39). These findings from corporal punishment research
suggest that when children are subjected to dehumanizing treatment, they experience (often
in ways that are difficult to describe) affects which erode not simply their sense of autonomy
and agency but their sense of themselves as persons. And in this article, I use personhood to
2
Childism, as a term, has also been used in several other ways, including to refer to children’s oppression by
adults (Pierce & Allen, 1975; Young-Bruehl, 2012). As such, Wall’s concept is sometimes referred to by
researchers (e.g., Moore, 2018) as “positive childism”.
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capture these larger moral impacts in the context of schools and to inform new visions for
schooling that affirms children’s humanity–their status as persons and their equal moral
standing to adults.
Reimagining students as persons, I hope, will help us to elucidate how they are
currently positioned in and impacted by schooling, as well as to consider what we should do,
in schools, in response to our students’ personhood. Some scholars (e.g., Higgs & Gilleard,
2016), have suggested that the multitude of cultural and philosophical frameworks for
personhood can make it a “relatively unhelpful” concept for evaluating and informing
professional practice (p. 773). And so, in this section, I will draw from Wall (2010a) to sketch
the outlines of a childist definition for what makes a ‘person’–and what is owed to
persons–for the purposes of this article. This specific framework aims to address how, both
historically and in the present, discussions of what makes a ‘human’ or a ‘person’ nearly
always “silently assume adulthood as [their] model” (p. 7). Children are expected to conform
to individualistic, adult-centered expectations for what a person ought to be, or they risk
being excluded from consideration for personhood altogether. By contrast, applying a childist
lens to personhood, as Wall does, requires us to systematically rethink how we define a
‘person’ in response to children, with childhood at the center (p. 1). In doing so, we observe how
children expose new understandings of personhood that only they can clearly reveal (p. 3).
And, importantly, we can better understand how we might approach children as persons in
both schooling and educational research.
What makes a ‘person’?
Traditionally, white Western philosophical definitions for ‘persons’ have assumed an adult,
rational subject whose humanity is defined by their independence and autonomy (Wall,
2010a, p. 168). In these schemes, persons are characterized by “a sense of self, of [their] own
life” as well as an ability and desire to “evaluate and make choices about it” (Taylor, 1985, p. 6).
Personhood is determined by one’s ability to act on one’s own behalf in society, by one’s
agency to act as the author of their own actions (Wall, 2010a, p. 37). Wall argues that these
adult-centered concepts of personhood are flawed from the very beginning by virtue of their
reliance on agency: “humanity is not reducible to agency… human beings are also, and at the
very same time, passive shaped by societies and one another” (p. 91). In Wall’s view, a
person’s agency is inextricable from their vulnerability, “their openness and relationality to
others or upon the world”. A human being is a “being-in-the-world” (p. 36), and can never
simply act upon others or upon the world. Rather, “to live in relations to others and societies
is … to make oneself vulnerable or open to being shaped by them” (p. 39).
These realities, Wall observes, are perhaps most obvious for children, who we easily
recognize as vulnerable to, dependent on, and existing in relation to other persons (namely
their families). However, we are all, adults and children alike, vulnerable to and dependent
upon others to survive but also to give our lives meaning. None of us are the completely
rational and autonomous actors demanded by white Western conceptions of personhood.
This conflict opens us a new avenue, Wall argues, for a childist definition for humanity. Rather
than trying to squeeze children into adult-centered notions of personhood (p. 88), we can
reimagine personhood in response to children (p. 35). Personhood, in light of childhood,
“involves neither pure agency nor pure vulnerability, but, more fundamentally, the
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experience of creative tension between the two” (p. 40). Children and adults, both, shape
their worlds and are inevitably shaped by them. As Wall writes, “young and old are the
coauthors of the play of life that they find themselves already born into” (p. 57). And this
affirms, rather than denying, the enormous plurality of human meanings, cultures, and
experiences:
“We are like bees rather than like ants or spiders. We are neither workers for a world
already ordered nor spinners of worlds purely from within. Rather, we are circulators
among the diverse fields of experience that enrich life together. There is no pure
freedom or historicity, only the endless creation of meaningful worlds” (p. 57-58).
The purpose of this definition is not to erase the differences between adults and
children, nor to pretend as if all children and adults are the same kind of person. Adults are
generally able to exert more agency than children, and children are generally more
vulnerable than adults. Personhood in Wall’s view, however, conjures agency and
vulnerability as existing in “a lively tension (p. 40), not as opposites but intertwined and
essential components of humanity. It reminds us, also, that no person–child or adult–can be
reduced to simply their agency or their vulnerability. Children, even very young ones, are
“agents with voice” (p. 37). They create their own worlds, impact others’, nurture the people
they care about, create media, commit acts of violence (p. 46), and engage in philosophical
thinking, all “with as much complexity and diversity as adults” (p. 37). And adults are
undeniably vulnerable–to money, to culture, to power and systems of belief (p. 40). In fact,
as Wall argues, they may even be more at the whim of others (and their societies) because of
“increased accretions of language, culture, experiences, and responsibilities”.
The point is not to say that children are the same as adults; rather, expanding our
notion of personhood in response to children aims to construct a more difference-inclusive
imagination of what a ‘person’ can be. It broadens our scope, rather than narrowing it,
allowing us to extend personhood–and what is owed to persons–to a greater range of
humans, including adults but especially children. As Stockton (2009) observes, kids are often
quite different from adults–made “queer” (or strange) because they are “precisely who
[adults] are not and, in fact, never were” (p. 5). They have unique goals, interests, and
vulnerabilities relative to adults. They often need more (or more obvious) help to get by.
Historically, these differences have been used to rationalize a “child/human binary” (Rollo,
2016, 2018) which excludes children from personhood and legitimates their subjugation by
(idealized, supposedly rational and autonomous) adults. When we instead reimagine
personhood around children’s differences from adults, we reveal that persons–children and
adults alike–”are not so much rationally autonomous individuals as responsively
interdependent others” (Wall, 2010a, p. 126). Children’s relative vulnerability and relatedness
to others does not disprove their humanity; it reveals to us clearly that they are persons of
equal moral standing who are entitled to all that is owed to adult persons.
How should we respond to children as persons?
Just as centering children expands our notion of personhood, it also complicates our
understanding of what it means to treat oneself and others with humanity (Wall, 2010a, p. 1).
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Normally, we think of ‘what we owe other persons’ in terms of individual rights–freedoms,
entitlements, and expressions of agency due to all persons (p. 113). But here, too, we run into
problems trying to squeeze children’s differences into our adult-centered ethics. Do we owe
children the same rights as adults? How would they use those rights? How would those rights affect
adults’ ability to protect them from harm? Rather than reconciling our existing ethics with
childhood, however, we might reconstruct our ethical understanding of what persons should
do–and what is owed to persons–in response to childhood. Children’s experiences, Wall
(2010a) writes, can become “new lenses for interpreting what it means to exist, to live good
lives, and to form just communities–for the sake of children and adults both” (p. 1).
Hanson & Peleg (2020) write, “the short answer to… whether children are entitled to
moral rights… should be, ‘yes’. If a longer answer is required, one might reply, ‘yes, of course’”
(p. 18). However, as they note, there are decades of debates between philosophers and legal
scholars about what specific individual rights should be granted to children, and they almost
universally “try to modify existing [adult] moral theories and position children against them”.
Wall, by contrast, argues for constructing a childist ethical theory in response to children, one
that eschews our current focus on individual rights. “This is not because children do not also
possess reason and independence” to exercise rights, Wall writes, but rather because “in a
social context defined chiefly by individual freedoms, children will generally have less
experience in the world with which to exercise them in relation to others” (p. 87). So long as
rights are assigned according to these individualistic criteria, Wall argues, “those who are
relatively less independent in life”, namely children, “will tend to be assumed, however
benignly, to be second-class moral citizens” (p. 89). By grounding human dignity in rational
autonomy (p. 87), a narrow emphasis on rights conjures persons as essentially independent,
which, as Wall observes, is not even true for adults (p. 113). Adult-centered frameworks for
individual rights were never intended to apply to children, and they are neither inclusive of
nor responsive to children’s experiences (p. 117). As a result, “merely extending them from
adults to children” will not affirm children’s equal moral standing as persons (p. 88).
Wall argues that affirming one’s personhood in response to
children requires us to go beyond simply allotting them individual
rights and autonomy. Our moral obligation to persons is not simply
to leave them alone, as children most effectively illustrate. Rather,
Wall argues, we are called to “de-center” ourselves in response to
one another, to “shift [our] center of gravity to include others insofar
as they are not reducible to [our] narrative alone” (p. 88). This does
not mean that we become purely passive, or that we negate
ourselves (p. 92); instead, we incorporate others as moral centers,
adjusting our orbits so as to revolve not just around ourselves but
also others “in their irreducible otherness” (p. 93).
Our ultimate goal, then, is to “gainas many centers of meaning as there are others in
the world”, allowing others and their differences to disrupt us and guide us toward changes
both within and outside ourselves (p. 95). Rather than seeking “maximum autonomous
freedom” for ourselves and others, then, we should seek “maximum social decentering” (p.
105). The closest ethical term we have to this radical de-centering, Wall observes, is love:
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“Self-decentering in response to others ultimately places into question all that the self
actually knows and does… Love… can involve a self-transforming response to
others–and to oneself as another other… In response to children, in particular, but also
in response to any other, humanity is finally called upon to love by reimagining its
own sense of humanity” (p. 106-107).
Ultimately, what we most fundamentally owe one another is their right “to be responded to
as an other creator of society” (p. 131). This obligation, as Wall observes, often leads us to
protect and promote others’ individual rights–”to be protected from having one’s otherness
marginalized and destroyed”, “to be provided social resources… for making one’s own creative
social contribution”, and “to participate in society… to bring one’s own distinctive contribution
into the creativity of the whole” (p. 131). It may also, as children illustrate, move us to restrict
others’ agency when their ability to act as a social creator might be harmed. For example, we
are likely to prevent children from exercising certain rights (to smoke, to wed, to join the
military) where we see clear risk to their well-being (p. 132). However, we should do so only
after considering, as a society of adults and children, whether extending a particular right
would be “more [vs.] less responsive to otherness” (p. 133).
How we best affirm others’ (and especially children’s) ability to act as social creators
will always be a matter of tension “within social contexts that are always too narrow” (p. 133).
Childism offers us a framework, though, for not only how we should make those decisions
but the larger goal we should be oriented towards. The rights we decide that we owe to
others are “markers of social responsibility to otherness” (p. 126). They are reflections of our
obligation to allow ourselves to be disrupted by others, to have our narrative orbits stretched
by their difference (p. 93). Children illustrate this obligation clearly; as Wall writes, they
“disrupt by their very being… in the moral sense of demanding changes in the world” (p. 90).
And if we are to define personhood–and what we owe to persons–in response to children,
we are moved to do so with the goal of opening ourselves up to “greater disruption by
otherness”, remaking ourselves and our societies “in ways that are more rather than less
responsive to others’ obscured voices and experiences” (p. 104).
‘Feeling around’ personhood in this project
As I’ve laid out, a childist concept of personhood has the potential to expand our imagination
of our students. It calls on us to respond to our students’ “irreducible otherness” (p. 94), to all
the dimensions of their being, including those which are overlooked even as we seek to
promote student autonomy and agency. And, further, it highlights our ethical obligation to
reshape our own actions and the structures in which we operate in response to children’s
humanity and their difference from us as adults. However, for all the words I’ve spent in this
section to formalize what makes a person and what we owe to them, personhood remains an
abstract concept. Over the course of this project, I found that people’s experience of
personhood is at once “sticky” (Ahmed, 2010) and persistently slippery in ways that defy easy
description, grounded in affects (i.e., bodily sensations) which require interpretive approaches
beyond the normal modes of academic or classroom discourse (Dernikos et al., 2020). And,
in writing this article, I confronted the problem of how to interpret complex, emotional
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experiences of schooling–from children and adults–to understand what is affirming to
students’ personhood and what is not.
There are, undoubtedly, at least as many different experiences of personhood as
there are persons. It’s difficult to talk generally about what it looks like to affirm an abstract
being’s personhood without flattening out the human differences that we sought to include
in our redefinition of who counts as a person. In order to manage a coherent, genuine
discussion of schooling’s impact of children’s experience of personhood, my student
co-explorers and I had to establish a consensus understanding of what characterized a
‘person’ to us, as a group–what rights, needs, and interests–and how it feels, looks, and
sounds to have those taken away from us. In that conversation, concepts proximal to
personhood emerged (respect, for example) which allowed more students to relate to and
participate in our discussion. This was reflected in our analysis, too; students described events
during which they felt (or didn’t feel) ‘respected as persons’. Likewise, as I surveyed existing
scholarship on school and students’ personhood, I had to weigh whether and how to include
findings from studies on how schooling relates to proximal academic concepts like
autonomy, agency, and self-determination. Though these are incomplete parallels to
personhood, as I’ve argued, I erred on the side of including relevant, robust findings which
effectively supported or troubled patterns from our study.
But, the trouble goes beyond simply the vagueness of the word ‘personhood’,
extending to the difficulty we–and especially children–might have in describing the affects
we experience as ‘persons’. Nearly every child I spoke with related, in some way, to the
experience of being treated like ‘less’ than a person, but few described their experiences strictly
in terms of personhood. Many were moved to tell stories of times they felt humiliated, for
example, or disrespected, robbed of the human dignity to which a person is entitled. And
during those moments, I found that children drew from all kinds of figurations–words,
expressions, bodily contortions, plaintive pauses, even tears–to communicate feelings that
had evidently ‘stuck’ closely with them through time and space. Many employed figurative
language, too, to convey their experiences and how they felt about them. Some children
recalled being “treated like animals”, for example, or “paraded around like trophies”. Others
complemented their written work with drawings of frowning faces or robots to capture
feelings that they couldn’t–or simply didn’t–convey in words.
Reflecting back, now, I’m reminded of observations from scholars about the
difficulties we often have listening to children. Wall (2010a), for example, observes the
limitation of a purely discursive response to children:
“Children can in fact participate in social discourse. The problem is that, as a group,
they have less experience than adults in doing so… Under a schema of discursive
procedures, no matter how fair or inclusive, children will always be systematically
marginalized” (p. 93).
Biswas (2020) similarly argues that our narrow focus on the spoken work, in research and
analysis, “reinforces the epistemologically authoritative position of the adults” and minimizes
children’s perspectives. And others (e.g., Silin, 2014) highlight how, in our normal modes of
listening, “children from minoritized communities are less likely to be heard–or are easily
misheard”– by adult researchers (Templeton, 2021 p. 4; Dumas & Nelson).
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In this project, I tried to observe how children represented themselves–through
multiple modes of communication–rather than simply measuring children’s words and
behaviors against theory (Templeton, p. 4; Silin, 2014). And though I couldn’t always describe
the tenor and weight of what others shared with me, I attempted in my transcription,
description, and analysis to depict not only their contributions but the affective intensities of
our work (Boldt, 2020, p. 239). This process of feeling around was imprecise, no doubt.
However, in response to personhood’s stickiness and slipperiness–as well as the way that it
stretches to include the unique experiences of each individual person–it felt necessary to
open up the aperture on my inquiry to get a fuller (if messier) picture of how schooling does
(and can) affect children’s sense of themselves as persons.
Children’s current positioning as marginalized persons

“Children are subjugated through and by virtue of their bodies by traditional Western patriarchal
power–a subjugation comparable to that of women, ethnic minorities, racial minorities, and/or the
economically oppressed” (Murris et al., p. 7; quoting Kennedy, 2006, p. 2)
As Clark & Wilkie (2007) remind us, “being a person does not guarantee one [recognition of
one’s] personhood” (p. 5). Whether or not someone is considered a person–and given all that
is owed to persons–is socially determined. Nyamnjoh et al. (2020), drawing from studies of
African societies, define two major ways that people are defined as persons in different
cultures. Some cultures see personhood as innate, conveying a belief in the personhood of all
humans from birth (and often beforehand), regardless of ability or utility for society’s aims (p.
4-5). Other cultures, however, view personhood as bestowed, permitting those with societal
power to define who is given the title of ‘person’ and the rights associated with that
designation. Often, such definitions exclude those who are marginalized in a society: queer
people, people with disabilities, racial and ethnic minorities, and children (p. 3). This ‘othered’
status often comes with significant consequences–those who are not defined as ‘persons’ are
much more likely to be abused or neglected, their rights denied and their interests largely
ignored or overran by those of the dominant culture (p. 9). And while this dehumanization is
conveyed powerfully through incarceration, assault, and humiliation, it’s also contained in a
culture’s discourse. Scholars have highlighted, for example, how marginalization is often
rationalized by comparing those in the marginalized group to property or to animals (e.g.,
Nyamnjoh et al., 2020; Rollo, 2016, 2018; Goff et al., 2014).3
I believe it is dehumanizing, in itself, to subject children’s (or anyone’s) personhood to
scholarly scrutiny. However, I believe that it’s instructive, here, to acknowledge the power and
prevalence in the U.S. of arguments against bestowing personhood to children based on
their differences (framed as deficiencies) relative to adults. Children (especially young ones),
3
Scholars have also observed how systems of oppression are legitimated by equating adults in the oppressed
group with children. Huot (2013), for example, observes how adult women are often called “girls” and “babies” in
popular discourse, their rights and bodily autonomy restricted by their child-like status. Similarly, Rollo (2016,
2018) recounts the history of Black and Indigenous peoples’ subjugation by white Americans who viewed them
as “child races” (p. 315), “criminally deviant” and/or incapable due to their perceived lack of maturity relative to
adult white men. Stockton (2009), too, observes that queer people’s subjugation is justified by their perceived
failure to mature to full ‘adult’ status, which is characterized by cisheteronormative expectations.
11
the argument goes, if left to their own devices “would tend to cause avoidable suffering
either to themselves, or to others, or to both” (Schapiro, 2003, p. 581), and thus should not
meet the ‘bar’ for personhood. Rather, they should be thought of as ‘near’ or ‘on the way’ to
personhood, as ‘not-quite-persons’ or ‘persons-to-be’. One might object that the standards
for personhood are unequally applied–good judgment and independence are certainly not
considered prerequisites for the legal personhood of adults, who often cause avoidable
suffering to themselves and others (Godwin, 2020). We might also point out that “children” is
not a uniform class4, and problematize how adolescents’ increased capacity for
decision-making is erased in the dominant child/human binary (Kohn, 2011). Most
importantly, however, I believe we should be troubled by the (pervasive) implication that
some people are, by virtue of their incapability to be autonomous agents, not full persons.
This has troubling connotations, generally, and it recalls harrowing instances from our history
and present where marginalized peoples’ supposed incapacities have been used to legitimate
their oppression, abuse, and even murder at the hands of white men whose personhood has
never been at question.
Despite these objections, the idea that children are not ‘full’ persons (setting aside
what it means to be a ‘full’ person) is dominant in our national discourse, as I’ll lay out.
American culture bestows personhood narrowly based on one’s normative growth and
development over time (Lesko, 2013; Stockton, 2009), conformity to dominant expectations
for how persons should act (Godwin, 2020; Stockton, 2009), and perceived ability to make
decisions which don’t interfere with the dominant legal, moral, and financial interests of
American society (Godwin, 2020). This definition marginalizes–or outright excludes–
everyone who is not “a white rational male adult” (Murris et al., p. 8). And indeed, those in our
society who fall outside this narrow idea of a ‘person’–women, people of color, queer people,
people with disabilities, and endless more–suffer oppression, abuse, and violence that is
rationalized by perceptions that they are not fully, entirely human. For the purposes of this
article, I want to draw focus to how our culture’s understanding of personhood “perpetuates
[the] harmful marginalization” of children, in particular (Murris et al, p. 8). To do so, however,
we must first acknowledge that children are a heterogeneous class, and that kids often “suffer
under intersecting power structures” by virtue of their race, class, gender, ability, and other
positionalities (Adami & Dineen, p. 359-360). It is undeniable that life is “more challenging
for poor children, for girls, for poor girls, and for children belonging to ethnic or cultural
minorities… than it is for a white, middle-class boy” (Hanson & Peleg, p. 22). These
overlapping axes of oppression demand that as we work to affirm children’s personhood, we
must “look at… intersections with women’s rights, minority rights, religious rights, and other
rights that intersect” (De Grave, 2015, p. 55).
While children are far from homogenous, as Wall (2010a) observes, “they do form a
distinctive social group” (p. 3). And, as I’ll argue, across identifiers children are systematically
disadvantaged relative to adults. This may be a provocative claim for some who feel that they
4
This same criticism may be levied against my use of the word ‘children’ in this article to include both young
children and adolescents. There are good reasons to address adolescents specifically, as Lesko (2013) and Lesko,
Simmons, & Uva (2020) have. However, in this article I place them with the difference-inclusive label ‘children’
in part because I felt that neither of the single terms ‘child’ or ‘adolescent’ (if the two terms are to be mutually
exclusive) were particularly useful labels for my middle-school co-explorers.
12
(and everyone else, presumably) already recognize children as full persons, or those who feel
like our society is already reasonably (if not particularly) ‘child-friendly’ (Mintz, 2004). It is,
after all, a fairly popular claim in our culture that the U.S. is overly conciliatory towards
children, even verging on ‘child-obsessed’ (Kohn, 2014). As a result, one might reasonably
wonder whether the issue of reimagining children as persons is an urgent or even necessary
one. Is there really such a problem with how kids are viewed and treated? And if there is, is it really
linked to our understanding of them as persons? In light of these objections, to understand how
and why we should proceed with reimagining children as persons, we must first assess the
experience of childhood in our current socio-political context.
Our society fails to provide for, protect, and invite participation from children
Many scholars reference the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) as a
foundational document for modern understandings and discussions of children’s welfare
(Hanson & Peleg, 2020). As Wall (2010a) observes, the CRC reshapes the idea of children’s
rights in response to childhood, demanding not only children’s protection but a “deepening
recognition of children’s social vulnerability” as well as guarantee of their right “to shape their
public worlds actively for themselves” (p. 123). The CRC enumerates children’s rights in three
key areas: provision, or access to resources; protection, shelter from abuse and neglect; and
participation, ability to contribute meaningfully to their society’s decision-making (UNICEF,
1989). Though, as I’ve previously discussed, a narrow focus on rights is not a sufficient ethical
response to children, childist scholars generally agree that the CRC provides useful standards
for assessing children’s marginalization (Wall, 2010a; Young-Bruehl, 2012; Saunders &
Goddard, 2007). In this section, I will draw from existing theory and empirical research, along
with current events, to make the case that our culture is, in reality, “deeply ambivalent” about
children as a social class (Mintz, p. 1) and often even hostile to their participation in society.
And consequently, children in our society experience rampant violence, neglect, and
discrimination in and outside of school resulting from their diminished social status.
Provision
The U.S. consistently ranks low amongst developed nations on measurements of

provision–namely child health and well-being (Young-Bruehl, 2012). One recent study in the
Lancet placed the U.S. 39th in the world according to a “child flourishing index” calculated
based on factors like child survival rates, maternal mortality, prevalence of violence, growth
and nutrition and others (Clark et al., 2020). Both UNICEF and non-profit Save The Children
have repeatedly ranked the U.S. lowest (or nearly the lowest) among developed nations in
terms of child well-being (Young-Bruehl, p. 15; Save the Children, 2021). The Children’s
Defense Fund paints an equally dire, if not more vivid, picture: “14.1 million children in
America, or 1 in 5, are poor, the majority living in working families…. On any given night,
200,000 children are homeless” (2009).
Undoubtedly, our poor provision for children intersects with issues of racial and
economic inequality which powerfully impact adults, as well–and, as Young-Bruehl notes,
continual increases in income inequality will likely exacerbate these problems in the future (p.
15). This has led the U.S. to consistently approach child welfare by providing aid to adults–
13
namely parents and school and community leaders–with the assumption that the benefits
will trickle down to children. However, these efforts have been insufficient (and often largely
ineffective), perhaps because they fail to countenance the ways in which children are
subordinated even within their own families and communities (Adami & Dineen, 2021, p.
365). Child poverty and neglect is maintained “through a socioeconomic reality in which
children’s access to food for survival, their access to quality education, to a home, to clothes
and shoes depends on the good-will of adults” (p. 365). Our failure to target resources
directly to children has led to “children living in poverty with hunger… [being] asked to ‘carry
the burden of their parents’ choices’ while living with the dire consequences of systemic
racism and the effects of class in society” (p. 365). As a result, “policy aimed at reducing social
injustices may not reach a child in terms of income, social insurance, or family allowances
depending on other risk factors” (p. 365), and often the money and resources provided to
adults are not re-invested in ways that benefit children.
Protection
What little time, policy bandwidth, and money that is spent on children, specifically, is
targeted to ‘protect’ individual kids from abuse and neglect (Young-Bruehl, p. 16). Americans
are largely fixated with shielding children from what they see as inevitable corruption by
adult predators, ideologues, and (often) governments and institutions (Young-Bruehl;
Godwin, 2020; Lesko, Simmons, & Uva, 2020). Crucially, these same anxieties extend to
protecting children from themselves–from their own changing bodies and minds–as well as
from their friends and peers (Lesko, 2013; Lesko, Simmons, & Uva, 2020; Stockton, 2009).
As a result, American efforts to protect children almost never translate to greater rights for
individual children; instead, they most often seek to empower the ‘right’ adults with more
resources and greater control to make decisions on children’s behalf free from excessive
outside interference (Godwin, 2015, 2020).
Consider, for example, the recent conservative efforts in Florida and Texas (and
elsewhere) to ‘protect’ children from ‘woke gender ideology’ (Izaguirre, 2022; Skinner, 2022).
In Florida schools, ‘protecting’ children translates to empowering parents to exclude children
from even discussing gender and sexuality; in Texas, it means empowering adult policy-
makers to restrict children’s access to often life-saving affirming care. And unfortunately,
these instances are not outliers. American discourse about children’s ‘protection’, generally,
employs the same grammars of ‘New Paternalism’ (Davis, 1993) used, for example, to control
women’s bodies under the guise of compassionate care or to cap welfare benefits to those
living in poverty to keep them from ‘misusing’ their them (Ehrlich & Doan, 2019; Godwin,
2020). As a country, we’ve resolved to ‘protect’ our children at all costs–even if that means
paradoxically failing to meet our responsibilities to provide adequately for them or to help
them participate meaningfully in society (Young-Bruehl, p. 10).
However, despite our nation’s strongly-held emphasis on protecting children, American
kids suffer from far greater abuse and neglect than children in other developed countries–
they are disproportionately more likely to experience sexual or physical violence, and to be
neglected by their adult guardians (Young-Bruehl, p. 3). As Rollo (2018) notes, “more than 6
million children are abused every year (U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 2016)... and
14
more than 2400 children are killed by their parents and caregivers every year” (p. 321, GAO,
2011). And while every developed nation-state (including the U.S.) has abolished corporal
punishment for adults, including those who are incarcerated, American law has consistently
“preserved legal sanctions allowing parental and educational violence against children” (Rollo,
2018, p. 321). The vast majority of American children are or have been struck by their parents,
and it remains legal (and in some cases, common practice) to physically punish children in
public schools in nineteen states and in private schools in all but two states (Chiocca, 2017;
Lansford & Dodge, 2008; MacSuga-Gage et al., 2020). In short, Americans’ attempts to
protect children have been largely ineffective at protecting them from abuse and neglect.
They have, however, been very effective at quelling children’s abilities to participate in and
express their preferences about decisions that affect them.
Participation
Despite scholars generally agreeing that children are best protected from abuse when they
are “recognized as rights-bearing persons whose dignity is upheld” (Brighouse, 2002, p. 35;
Hanson & Peleg, p. 20), the U.S. has largely been indifferent or openly hostile to calls for
children to be granted greater participatory rights. Progressive groups that have worked to
expand these rights have, as Young-Bruehl writes, almost universally labeled “immoral, naive,
or opposed to family values” (p. 55). And as for children themselves, they “are rarely
addressed as political agents… are not invited into the political process, and… are not
consulted in the political decision-making process” (Jenkins et al., 2016, p. 47, 60; Giroux,
1996, p. 31). When kids attempt to insert themselves into political discussions or advocate for
themselves in the political sphere, they are often only allowed access–“conveniently
positioned as ‘old enough’”–if “their form of political engagement [is] legitimized by adults”
(Lesko, Simmons, & Uva, 2020). If and when those interests diverge, children’s attempts at
participation are often met with brutal and dehumanizing resistance, from public calls for
children to be spanked for engaging in political protests (e.g., Hesse, 2019; Weigel, 2016) to
death threats being sent to prominent teen activists (e.g., Daugherty, 2019).
Given this context, it’s little surprise that the CRC’s inclusion of participation rights “has
produced the document’s greatest opposition” in our society (Wall, 2010a, p. 123). As a
nation, we may agree that children need some amount of public protection and provision–
though this, even, is disputed by some–but we largely do not believe that children should “be
given the same liberties as adults to speak and act in the public realm for themselves” (p.
124). In 2013, Congressional Research Services published a non-partisan report to explain
why the U.S. has chosen to remain the only U.N. country besides Somalia–which lacks a
functioning government–to ratify the CRC (Blanchfield). Some of the reasons they cited, like
Americans’ resentment of international oversight, fall outside the bounds of this article’s
focus. However, Blanchfield’s summary stresses that most resistance to the CRC–and its
mandate to expand children’s participation rights–stems from our deep investment in the
rights of adults (both parents and those in government) to dictate, control, and punish
children’s speech, behavior, and thought (p. 7, 9-11). And indeed, since 2013 our national
conversation about the CRC has been effectively silenced by implications that it would forbid
parents from striking their children for “associating with people [their] parents would not
15
approve of” (p. 11), for example, or that it would forbid governments from issuing lifelong
prison sentences to child offenders (p. 7).
Our prejudice against children is enabled by how we, as a culture, imagine them
As Young-Bruehl (2012) writes, systemic oppression of children–and acts of abuse against

individual children–are underlain and legitimated by a dominant societal prejudice against
children and adolescents (p. 18). This prejudice has been described by several theorists and
labeled any number of different ways–as childism (Pierce & Allen, 1975; Young-Bruehl),
misopedy (Rollo, 2016, 2018), or adultism (e.g., Flascher, 1978; Wall, 2019). Regardless of
which term we use, it’s well-observed (and substantiated, as in the previous section above)
that children, as a social class, are subjugated and oppressed in our society relative to adults.
They are “subjected to… everyday forms of degradation and insult” that reflect and reify “a
vision of humanity segregated between older and younger” (Pierce & Allen, p. 317). As
Young-Bruehl reminds us, this prejudice–like all prejudices–operates as a “belief system…
[based on] images or stereotypes” of children as the target group (p. 34). Children’s
marginalization in society (and thus in school) is “built into the very way that children are
imagined” (p. 34). If we want to better recognize and empower kids, then, we have to
understand and address our culture’s most prevalent and powerful imaginations about them.
Godwin (2015) argues that the predominant way that children are imagined in
American discourse is as the “quasi-property” of their guardians or the state. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, imagining children as inviolable property–equated with material and animal
assets–has greatly limited children’s rights and heightened their exposure to adult violence
(Godwin, 2015, 2020). Under the guise of protecting them under their adults’ wings, kids
have been excluded from decision-making even on issues that deeply affect them like
custody arrangements (Goodmark, 2000), issues of bodily autonomy and personal identity
(Pyne, 2020; Wiggins, 2021), and their own schooling (Kohn, 1993; Lesko, Simmons, & Uva,
2020). Generally, American courts have denied children the right to exercise full legal rights
on their own behalf (Young-Bruehl, p. 149; Godwin, 2020; Schapiro, 2003) and some
Supreme Court justices have even suggested that children do not have rights to free speech
or free access to information unless specifically granted to them by their parents or school
adults acting in loco parentis (e.g., Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 2010;
Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., 2020, Reno v. Flores, 1993).
Kids’ status as quasi-property positions them as legal non-entities who cannot pursue
litigation, are often not considered reliable witnesses, and who are not afforded the rights
guaranteed to adults (Schapiro, 2003; Godwin, 2015, 2020; Goodmark, 2000). And as a
result, children experiencing abuse are often prevented from seeking recourse through the
avenues available to adult victims of violence, namely seeking a life independent from their
abusers or pursuing legal action against them. If children wish to seek emancipation from
their guardians, they frequently must either get married (often to an adult) or prove that they
have been “abandoned” by their guardians (Godwin, 2015, p. 33). Unless they’re able to
secure that (exceedingly rare) outcome, they are mandated by law to obey their adult
guardians–in many states, children can even be incarcerated for consistent disobedience
under so-called “juvenile-incorrigibility laws” (p. 19). And so long as adults avoid violating very
narrow (and often selectively-applied) abuse statutes, they can effectively use the threat of
16
violence or confinement to coerce children to do all kinds of things, up to and including
forcing them to work (and withholding their pay), admitting them to queer conversion
treatment centers, or coercing them into reactionary political or religious programs (p. 32, 19).
Beyond being imagined as property, children’s positioning in our culture is constantly
oscillating between different imaginations–from “subhuman” to “superhuman” to “savage”
(Murris et al., 2020, p. 7; Rollo, 2016)–each with their own unique consequences for the
rights and welfare of the child. Children and adolescents being seen as savage (“out of
control” and “not fully formed”), for example, justifies continual surveillance and punishment
from adults (Rollo, 2016; Lesko, 2013). Kids imagined as superhumanly immune to pain and
humiliation are expected to show endless resilience and forgiveness even as adults fail to
care for them (Coleman & Ganong, 2002, p. 101). Children’s perceived ‘purity’ or ‘innocence’
may cause adults to deny them their capabilities or to deny them “the constructive evolution
of [their] particular potentials, experiences, and unique personalit[ies]” (Flascher, 1978, p.
517-518). Across all of these different, overlapping images, however, there is a common sense
of children that children aren’t quite persons. A “child/human binary” (Rollo, 2018) is
constructed which sets up children “not simply [as] human beings with different ways of
interacting with the world and others [but] a lesser, deficient, or otherwise incomplete form
of human being” (Rollo, 2016, p. 3).
These imagined differences between children and persons (i.e., adults)–often
portrayed as simply the deficiencies of children–position kids as convenient scapegoats or
phobic objects for adults (Young-Bruehl, p. 38). Perhaps the most famous example remains
the racist mania about “juvenile superpredators” in the 1990s and 2000s, during which time
unprecedented numbers of children–mainly Black boys–were incarcerated in response to
perceived ‘urban decay’ and the Columbine shootings (Miller, Potter, & Kappeler, 2006;
Muschert, 2007). Henry Giroux, in a 1996 review of the movie Kids–labeled at the time as
“Lord of the Flies with skateboards, nitrous oxide and hip-hop” (Detrick, 2015)–observed how
this punitive turn was “fueled by degrading [images] of youth as criminal, sexually decadent,
drug-crazed, and illiterate” (p. 31). In the years since, we’ve witnessed similar panics about
“sexually predatory” queer children (e.g., Stone, 2018), ‘precocious’ girls (e.g., Projansky, 2014;
Mazzarella, 2019), ‘feral’ immigrant children (e.g., Chen & Zhong, 2013; Rollo, 2016), and
mindless ‘screen addicts’ (Bassiouni & Hackley, 2014). And in each case, we’ve seen how
depictions of children as “youthful folk devils” (King, 1994) legitimizes their punishment by
adults, from kids caged at the border to trans youth being denied life-saving care.
These examples illustrate an important point. We seldomly say that we do not
consider children to be persons, at least not directly. However, we convey clearly and
powerfully imaginations of children as not-quite-persons through our language. As Hartley
(2013) writes, “language is used not just to name things but, more importantly, to work out
how to behave towards other people” (p. 1). And for children, both historically and in the
present, adult language has been a means of “entrenched discrimination, degradation, and
exploitation” (Saunders & Goddard, 2001, p. 448). In policy and journalism, for example,
children are often referred to using the pronoun “it”, a dehumanizing convention almost
never used for adults (p. 450). And in popular discourse, adults openly express disdain for
children, only sometimes affectionately (Saunders & Goddard, 2001; Saunders, 2018). It’s
acceptable practice to refer to children as “assholes”, “psychopaths”, “maniacs”, or “animals”
17
not only in comedic conversation but also in popular parenting books (e.g., Moyer, 2021;
Laditan, 2015) which offer strategies for how to “tame” or “train” children into behaving the
way adults want them to (Saunders, 2018, p. 66).
Likewise, children’s pain and humiliation are often cloaked in vague or euphemistic
language which minimize and trivialize harms inflicted by adults. The ubiquitous practice of
striking children, for example, is softened using terms like “corporal punishment” or “biblical
discipline” (Saunders & Goddard, 2007, p. 38; Saunders, 2018, p. 72). And these semantic
games have a tangible impact on kids. Brown et al. (2016) observed, for example, that using
euphemism and ‘soft’ language caused people to more readily excuse hitting children. Our
language paves the way for children’s dehumanizing treatment “to be masked as a normative,
and therefore acceptable and justifiable, response” to kids’ behavior and their moral standing
as non-persons (Saunders, 2018, p. 72). Taken together, these examples highlight the “textual
abuse” of children (Saunders & Goddard, 2001): our use of language as a “vehicle of
disregard” (p. 445) to objectify kids, minimize their abuse and neglect, exploit them, degrade
them, and/or deprive them of full recognition of their rights (p. 446). The way we speak to
and about children reveals how we imagine them, and each of the instances I highlighted
betray an all-too-common imagination of kids as not-quite-persons. And importantly, when
we employ this language–comparing children to irrational animals, for example–we create a
permission structure which perpetuates and legitimates children’s current dehumanization,
both for adults and for kids themselves.
Children identify and internalize their subjugation by adults
So far, we’ve been operating mainly from adult scholarship about children’s experiences–as a
result, one could reasonably wonder if children’s marginalization is an academic construct, an
overwrought projection by adult scholars. Admittedly it is, to some extent, difficult to assess
children’s perception of adult prejudice against them as a social class. Children are seldomly
sought out for their thoughts on how they are viewed or treated by adults (Walton &
Saunders, 2020; Yoon & Templeton, 2019). However, there is a body of research–including
studies set in Australia (e.g., Saunders & Goddard, 2007), Ghana (e.g., Twum-Danso Imoh,
2013), and in the U.S. (e.g., Vittrup & Holden, 2010)–soliciting children’s views on corporal
punishment at school and in the home. And even a cursory review of this literature clearly
demonstrates children’s ability to perceive their subordinate position in society and question
their dehumanizing treatment by adults (Walton & Saunders, 2020).
Though children commonly view themselves as persons (Saunders & Goddard, 2007,
p. 39) and challenge inequities between themselves and adults, they often perceive
themselves to be less valuable than adults. As one 10-year-old interviewee said, “It’s what
keeps us apart, adults [are] more important than children” (p. 40). And, as a result, many kids
see poor treatment from adults as “putting [us] in our place” (Twum-Danso Imoh, p. 9)–
conveying an understanding that their place is below that of adults (Dobbs, Smith, & Taylor,
2006; Walton & Saunders). Children also often recognize that adults have significant power
over them, and cite “abuse of [that] power” as a common issue between adults and kids (p.
42). Where adults have power, children are largely left with little recourse even when they
feel like they’re being treated unfairly by adults. “We don’t get a say… we just suffer the
consequences”, one 10-year-old wrote when describing their physical punishment at the
18
hands of their parents (Dobbs, Smith, & Taylor, 2006, p. 45). Though children are forced to
accept their lower status relative to adults, it’s a source of anger, sadness, and fear for many
children (Saunders & Goddard, 2007; Walton & Saunders). Still, many feel vulnerable to
adults and unable to resist adult authority because “adults are bigger and more stronger” and
“they’ll get really mad” if children act against them (Saunders & Goddard, 2007, p. 40). As a
result, children’s ability to combat their marginalization is undermined by their (often
reasonable) fear of painful punishment or exclusion by adults (p. 36; Walton & Saunders).
Perhaps in response to that sense of powerlessness, children also often rationalize the
subjugation (and even violence) they suffer at the hands of adults. They may see themselves
as the possessions of adults (Saunders & Goddard, 2007, p. 41) or the objects of adults’ love,
affection, and control (p. 40). They may also justify their treatment through their internalized
belief that they require adults’ control and punishment to become good adults (Walton &
Saunders, 2020), or because children are inherently disobedient. One child in Saunders &
Goddard’s (2017) research, for example, argued it was acceptable and even “inevitable” that
adults might “shake… or slap children” because “children are a handful and… it would have to
get to the time when enough was enough… to show who’s boss really” (p. 40-41). This is not
to say that children are simply the unknowing victims of oppression–across all of these
studies, we see kids actively interrogating and resisting their treatment by adults and
imagining new ways that children could coexist and collaborate with adults (Saunders &
Goddard, 2007; Walton & Saunders, 2020). However, that imaginative space–and children’s
abilities to act upon what they imagine–are constrained by a dominant prejudice that they
themselves clearly perceive and know they must reckon with.
There is clearly a need for more children’s voices in understanding these issues–
particularly in schools, where students are seldomly invited to share their views. The glimpses
we have, however, suggest that children can identify the ways in which they are demeaned
and dehumanized by adults, and they connect these offenses to an internalized perception
that adults are superior to children. It is striking to consider that the children quoted here, like
most children, will grow up to be adults, and many of them will be given power over kids
themselves as parents, teachers, and/or caregivers. When they do, they will have transitioned
from being marginalized by adults to being in a position to marginalize children themselves.
The way in which “children learn, through themselves being oppressed as children, to
become in turn oppressors in diverse ways as adults” highlights just how crucial it is for us to
better understand how we might better affirm childrens’ personhood and work towards a
more equitable future for children, both those who are kids now and those who will be in the
future (Wall, p. 7; Pierce & Allen, 1975).
Anti-child prejudice is reified and reinforced in schools
As Dumas & Nelson remind us, although schooling is not inherently oppressive, schools do
reify and reinforce structural inequities (p. 33; Anyon, 1981; Ferguson, 2001; Fine, 1991; Giroux,
1983; Tuck, 2013; Willis, 1977). “Schools do not stand outside of these structures and
ideologies, innocent of the dynamics of oppression”, Kumashiro (2000) writes, “but are
institutions or ‘apparatuses’ that… reproduce existing social order” (p. 36). In our society, then,
where children are systematically subordinated relative to adults, it’s not surprising that
schools are largely “unresponsive and even hostile to the needs and desires of children”
19
(Dumas & Nelson, p. 33; Chu et al., 2014; Heath, 1983; Lareau; 2003; Orellana, 2009;
Stephens, 1995). In fact, several scholars (e.g., Kohn, 1999; Meier, 1991; Darling-Hammond,
1997) have suggested that the dehumanization of children and adolescents is baked into the
design of the average American school. Darling-Hammond (1997) observed this apparent
(and perhaps intentional) contradiction between what children and adolescents are entitled
to and what they encounter in public education:
“When students need close affiliation, they experience large and depersonalized
schools; when they need to develop autonomy, they experience few opportunities for
choice and punitive approaches to discipline; when they need expansive cognitive
challenges, they experience work focused largely on the memorization of facts” (p.
122).
These dehumanizing tenors of schooling are much more pronounced–and carry far greater
consequences–for marginalized children5 (Darling-Hammond, 1997; Kumashiro, 2000;
Dumas & Nelson, 2016; Au, 2016). Punitive school discipline policies, for example,
disproportionately target Black children, “leading to increased rates of school
dropout/pushout and fuel[ing] the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ by criminalizing youth and
bringing them into contact with law enforcement” (Oakes et al., p. 282; Meiners, 2010;
Sojoyner, 2013; Morris, 2016; Wun, 2017). Black and Brown students are far more likely to be
suspended than their white peers, and in schools that practice corporal punishment, “poor
children, minorities, and students with disabilities are among those struck most frequently”
(Oakes et al., p. 282, 284). The constant barrage of “physical and psychological attacks”, as
Love (2016) observes, contributes to the “spirit murder” (p. 22) of Black and Brown children in
schools which causes some to be pushed out of schooling altogether and many more to
simply drift through to graduation feeling alienated and dehumanized (Taines, 2012;
Newmann, 1981). And similar phenomena have been observed for queer children (e.g.,
Palmer & Greytak, 2015) and students with disabilities (e.g., Reschly & Christenson, 2006).
The urgency of children’s personhood in an ‘overheating’ world
Children’s experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic
Children’s marginalization has perhaps never been so clear as during the COVID-19
pandemic, when imaginations of children as non-persons or objects of adult control have not
only dominated our discourse, but become more extreme. Children have been deeply
impacted by school closures, inequitable access to resources, and (most urgently) illness and
death within their families and communities. And all the while, adults in power have largely
5
The term ‘marginalized children’ could be said to minimize the extent to which all children are marginalized by
virtue of their being children. It might be more accurate to use the term ‘multiply marginalized’ when referring to
children who also experience marginalization as a function of their race, gender, ability, etc. However, ‘multiply
marginalized’ has a specific connotation in education research, where scholars have used the term powerfully to
describe the experiences of queer youth of color (Lucero, 2017), for example, and immigrant students with
disabilities (Cedillo, 2020). To avoid appropriating this term out of context and causing undue confusion, I use
‘marginalized children’ here and elsewhere in this article. Doing so, however, should not be understood as
erasing children’s particular marginalization as a social class (as is too often done in adult research and theory).
20
failed to provide for or protect children from the multiple traumas inflicted by the pandemic.
Though relatively few children have died from the virus, about 1 in 500 have lost a primary or
secondary caregiver and this impact, like so many during the pandemic, has been borne
disproportionately by poor children and children of color (Hillis et al., 2021). As Adami &
Dineen (2021) note, many children have gone without adequate food and housing,
particularly those whose families were destabilized by health issues and economic turmoil (p.
363). Schools were left without adequate supplies to stay open safely or carry out remote
instruction effectively, particularly for poor children, and governments refused to provide
money and resources to ensure alternative childcare in most cases (p. 363). Eventually,
governments did intervene to provide extra money and resources; importantly, however,
they largely directed this help to adults, namely parents and school administrators, and failed
to directly target needed support to children (p. 365).
The discourse about kids and schooling during the pandemic also reflected an
imagination of children as subordinate objects of adult concern and control. Kids have been
commonly reduced in popular discussion as obstacles to their parents’ ability to work, with
both governments and large employers leaning on schools to reopen so adults have a place
to ‘store’ their children during business hours (Lingo, 2020). Conversely, images of children as
“vectors, not victims” or “little balls of disease”, language that evokes dehumanizing
comparisons to “animals like ticks or mosquitos”, were used to prolong school closures in
areas where reopening might have been relatively safe (Adami & Dineen, p. 355). Even in
discussions about how to protect children from the impacts of COVID-19, the discourse has
privileged adult voices focused on conflicts between government health initiatives and the
presumed rights of parents to make unilateral health decisions on their children’s behalf
(Schneider & Berkshire, 2021b; Khazan, 2021). Even in sympathetic conversations about the
impacts of COVID-19, kids are mainly framed as future members of the labor force; the focus
of much of our discourse, as a result, is not on the impacts of children as they exist now but
on “learning loss” that will affect their future job prospects (Jandric & McLaren, 2021).
Children’s unique vulnerability in our ‘overheating’ present
What we have seen during the pandemic, I argue, is just one manifestation of the overheating
(Eriksen, 2016) that has characterized our world for the entirety of many children’s lives. As
Biswas (2021) describes, our world is not only literally getting too hot because of climate
change, but is experiencing a dizzying acceleration in conflict, instability, and inequity as a
result of Anthropocene neoliberalism6 (p. 2; Eriksen). This overheating, which will surely
continue long after the pandemic has subsided, could prompt an unprecedented,
intergenerational movement towards greater justice and recognition of children’s equal moral
standing to adults (p. 1). However, it is equally possible that this overheating could make
children’s position in our society even more precarious–and, in fact, the observable facts
indicate that this is the path we’re on now.
6
As Biswas explains, ‘Anthropocene neoliberalism’ refers to “overheated zeitgeist of the early 21st century”. This
epoch has been characterized by “the acceleration of acceleration” and exponential growth–of human
population, but also of environmental degradation, capital flow, income inequality, and waste colonialism.
21
Where the pandemic could have provided us with an impetus to build solidarity with
children and adolescents, to invite them to participate and share their experiences and needs
with us, I argue that it did just the opposite. Kids’ bodies, their access to education and even
to healthcare, have been wielded as weapons in culture wars. Conflicts over school curricula,
vaccine mandates, and gender-affirming care may be related to children, but they are almost
exclusively only being discussed from the point of view of adults and they have been
fundamentally non-responsive to the agency and experiences of children themselves (Wall,
2010a). Rather, they represent a drastic return in demand for the “privatization of childhood”
(p. 116). Childhood activities are increasingly structured “in order to serve the economic
interests of adulthood” (Biswas, 2010, p. 59). And overwhelmingly, the recent discourse has
been dominated by a movement for “parents’ (though, interestingly, not children’s) liberation”
(Wall, 2010a, p. 143), perhaps best exemplified by Senator Rand Paul’s recent proclamation
that what makes the U.S. great is that “the state doesn’t own your children, parents own the
children” (Godwin, 2015, p. 35).
All the while, children and adolescents are in the midst of an unprecedented mental
health crisis which predates the pandemic (OSG, 2021, p. 8). While this crisis has (perhaps
understandably) prompted many to ask, ‘what can adults do to fix this?’, that framing skirts
the more difficult work of addressing the root causes of the spiritual, existential crisis facing
our country’s youth–and the role that adults play in perpetuating it. And further, the
presumption that the answers lie simply in more mental health care ignores the fact that, in
the past twenty years, psychiatric diagnoses and treatment have been “systematically
employed to discipline” children “with reference to the boundaries of social acceptance of
adult thought, mood, and behavior” (Beder et al., 2009, p. 206-207).
The picture, unfortunately, is not much brighter in schools, which are increasingly
being enlisted (voluntarily and by coercion) to collaborate with capital-holders and
ideologues to strengthen and enforce an imagination of children as objects of adult control.
We are in the midst of an unprecedented (since desegregation, perhaps) hailstorm of
legislation and discourse seeking to strip rights away from children and adolescents to suit
the political and financial interests of adults in schools, business, and government (Berkshire,
2021; Rooks, 2017). Marginalized students, in particular, stand to suffer the greatest harms
from these intensifying discourse and policy battles around schools. Indeed, it’s hard to look
at proposals to ban discussion of queer people in schools (e.g., Hernandez, 2022) or to
remove antiracist books from classes and libraries (e.g., Berkshire, 2021) and not project an
existential threat to the safety and well-being of marginalized children and their families.
Meanwhile, schools have also succumbed to increased pressure from law-makers and
moneyed interests by adopting the language and structures of corporations (Taubman,
2009, p. 103; Au, 2016; Bybee, 2020). Academic performance has become the sole focus of
schooling, and a narrow focus on assessment and accountability have pushed schools to
target the vast majority of their time, bandwidth, and funding towards improving
standardized test scores with the goal of creating more suitable candidates for future
employment–often at direct cost to students’ mental, social, emotional, and intellectual
development (Au, 2016).
22
Children’s marginalization as an impetus–an an opportunity–for reimagination
Though it might be tempting to treat these examples as discrete offenses perpetrated by

ideologues, I argue they are symptoms of an ongoing and intensifying crisis in the way
children are imagined and positioned in our society. Many of these problems are also
reflections of racism and xenophobia and queerphobia, no doubt, but it’s worth considering
why adults have so readily and so consistenly chosen children’s spaces as their battlegrounds.
Ideas about children which subjugate them to adults–as fragile or savage, as products to
optimize or weapons to wield–permeate our society (and thus our schools) as part of what
the social imaginary (Taylor, 2003): “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they
fit together with others… and the deeper normative notions and images” that shape what
people expect for themselves and others (p. 23). Importantly, though it informs practices and
attitudes that are the objects of theory, the social imaginary is universal, ingrained in all of us
and flowing through all we participate in and create.
Prejudiced imaginations of children which deny them full personhood are firmly
embedded within us, and they legitimize and naturalize the dehumanizing tenors of
schooling. This requires us to move beyond suggesting specific reforms that would inevitably
maintain traditional, adult-centered notions of children and childhood. Students’ concerns
are valid and urgent, and we can and should take steps to address them in their current
context. However, as we’ve seen, these issues are ultimately symptoms of a larger,
overheating crisis in how children are imagined and positioned in our society and our schools.
If we want to get at the root of the problem and drive systemic change, our shared response
requires radical re-imagination: sustained effort to “imagine the world, life, and social
institutions [like schools] not as they are but as they might [and should] otherwise be”
(Haivan & Khasnabish, 2014, p. 3). As Oyler (2012, p. 159) reminds us, social
transformation–like the kind we seek to bring about in schools–begins with “bring[ing]
alternative realities into consciousness”, “look[ing] at things as if they could be otherwise”
(Green, 2010, para. 2). And our work cannot and will not end with simply imagining–we must
bring the possibilities we imagine back to our present and let them guide our practice
towards creating the kind of world in which we want to live (Haivan & Khasnabish).
We can find inspiration, here, in Biswas & Mattheis’ (2022) analysis of recent global
school strikes, initiated by the #Fridaysforfuture movement, in which children and
adolescents demanded adult action to combat climate change. Make no mistake, these
efforts have been met with prejudiced resistance from governments and adult
commentators who wish to silence or exclude children from public discourse and
decision-making (p. 146-148; Hesse, 2019). Nonetheless, Biswas & Mattheis argue that these
conflicts illuminate a “passage for childist thinking” in the opportunity they present for joined,
intergenerational struggle towards greater justice and social relatedness (Biswas & Mattheis,
p. 150). Rather than viewing children’s actions as disobedient or threatening to adults’ power,
we might “give humble way to letting children play their simultaneous parts as boundary
breakers and bridge builders in our era of Anthropocene neoliberalism” (Biswas, 2020, p. 28).
Both in school and society, we might pause our constant efforts to teach to children, to
discipline and dictate to them. And, instead, we might seek to learn from and with children,
and act alongside them as mutual teachers (Biswas & Mattheis, p. 153). This, as Biswas (2020)
23
emphasizes, would require us to fundamentally reimagine children through a childist lens,
“slowing down while surrendering to the daunting task of letting the stiff internal and external
boundaries of our adult natural attitudes to dissolve” (p. 28). But, the rewards of such
reimagination may be enormous, for children and adults alike. Since heat and speed are
inextricably connected (p. 185), our slowing down to reimagine children and reconstruct our
social norms and systems in response to them, as persons, may help us in cooling down our
overheated present.
The necessity for a critical, childist lens

“From the perspective of childism, understanding and empowering marginalized groups requires
not just constructing understandings of their lives, or even deconstructing hegemonic discourses
that marginalize them, but, in the end, reconstructing interdependent social relations as more
radically and imaginatively difference-responsive.” (Wall, 2019)
In this project, I explored what it would require–and what it would mean–to reimagine
children in the context of schooling, specifically. Schools lie at the heart of the overheating
conflicts over childhood, and are perhaps an ideal setting for this reimaginative work. As
Dumas & Nelson (2016) write, if we “consider where children live much of their lives, we are
moved to critique schooling as a site in which childhood is constructed through the
instruction, surveillance, and disciplining of children” (p. 33). I take Dumas & Nelson’s lead in
suggesting that such critiques of schooling require a theoretical framework which is both
responsive to children and critical of the “cultural-ideological forces [which] powerfully shape
the discourse on childhood and exercise material control of children’s bodies in ways that
(most often) contain and constrain children’s ability to act on their worlds” (p. 32). In this
project, I applied concepts and approaches from both critical childhood studies (Alanen, 2011;
Dumas & Nelson, 2016) and childism (Wall, 2010a, 2010b, 2019; Biswas, 2020) to both
structure my inquiry and make sense of my and my student co-explorers’ findings.
Critical childhood studies: The foundation
Childhood studies (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998; Spyrou, 2018) emerges as a useful lens for
unpacking and combating children’s marginalization because, in Biswas’ words:
“it is state of the art in terms of a. addressing the power imbalances between children
and adults, b. Its emphasis in doing research with and not on children, and c. the
methodological openness of the field to innovation of methods.” (2020, p. 81-82).
As a structuralist framework, childhood studies emphasizes the “social constructedness” of

childhood and the necessity of positioning children as social actors (Wall, 2019, p. 8). Rather
than silent observers, childhood studies figures kids as “active participants in and interpreters
of” their societies (p. 8). This is a significant departure from the dominant developmentalist
view of children, which focuses on children-becoming-adults and their socialization towards
the end-goal (or telos) of adulthood. However, post-structuralist critics–inspired by theorists
like Butler (1990) and Ranciere (1991)–argue that social phenomena like childhood are best
understood “not in terms of structural patterns or individual agency, but in terms of lived
24
experiences of social difference” (Wall, 2018, p. 8). These critiques prompt a new focus on
power structures and systems of oppression which made any single, hegemonic
interpretation of childhood impossible (Wall, 2010a, p. 6). “Childhood is always fluid, shifting,
and responsive to cultural struggle and deliberation”, Dumas & Nelson write (p. 32), and
critical approaches to childhood studies have been developed to more meaningfully reckon
with how “children’s specific positions are marked by their multiple subjectivities (e.g., race,
ethnicity, gender, sexuality, language, nationality, dis/ability, religion, citizenship, etc.)”
(Templeton, 2021, p. 4).
Critical childhood studies is not one unified framework; rather, it represents an
ongoing dialogue between adult scholars, practitioners, and children about how best to
foreground children’s agency and “imagine a childhood in which the very meaning of
childhood is informed by how children themselves express its meaning” (Dumas & Nelson, p.
32). However, these approaches overlap in their focus on “regard[ing] children as experts in
narrating their own lives”(Templeton, 2021, p. 4; Yoon & Templeton, 2019). And though
attuned to how children are affected by systems of power and oppression, critical childhood
studies does not view kids as simply victims of their societies. Rather, children are agentic
persons with “social, economic, cultural, and political rights, including rights not just to
protections and provisions but also to participation and power” (Wall, 2019, p. 2). Their
“individual and collective perspectives on their lived experiences can (and should) shape
what childhood means” (Dumas & Nelson, p. 33). Children are “already living and being in the
world as both cultural participants and producers” (Yoon & Templeton, p. 59), and must be
invited to participate meaningfully in discussions and research that seeks to understand their
experiences, amplify their interests, and make changes to empower them.
Turning towards childism
Just as early, structuralist childhood studies were criticized for minimizing (or neglecting) the
impacts of difference and power relations in how children experience and access agency, the
poststructuralist turn towards critical childhood studies has recently been “kindly” critiqued
for the way that it “marginalizes the particular marginalization of children” (Wall, 2019, p. 10;
Biswas, 2020). This critique focuses on the post-structuralist assumption that “marginality is
best and most authentically deconstructed by those occupying the margins themselves” (p.
10; Spivak, 1988)–while this is undoubtedly correct for many marginalized groups, children
present a challenge that’s difficult to untangle. Youth, particularly younger children, might
(and often do) “need others… who can help them speak or who can interact with them in
such a way that speech enters into the normative discourse” (Wall, 2020). Very young
children are not, on their own, going to be able to effectively “lead the fight, at least not on
their own” (Wall, 2019, p. 10). And older children and adolescents, who may be markedly
more able to advocate for and empower themselves, are often systematically excluded from
decision-making and discourse. Although children “are capable of significantly greater social
participation than is generally assumed”, Wall (2010a) argues that they “should not be
expected to bring about their social liberation for themselves” (p. 120).
Post-structuralist approaches to childhood, while they undoubtedly reveal essential
insights, inevitably minimize children’s marginalization as children in favor of other differences
which are more visible and relevant to the adult observer, interpreter, and researcher. In
25
response, childism has been put forth as a reconstructive, “post-post-structuralist” approach
which not only seeks to understand and include children’s experiences but also “critique and
transform” adult scholarly and social norms in response to children’s experience of childhood
(Wall, 2019, p. 10; Wall, 2010a). Like critical childhood studies, childism “urges that we
conceive of children beyond the developmental perspective” (Biswas, 2020, p. 4). And, it
similarly insists that a focus on children’s systemic oppression does not minimize or neglect
the importance of other power structures–particularly since children, too, are affected by
racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression. Rather, childism envisions differences as
“demarginalized only interdependently” (p. 10) and argues that responding to specific
marginalizations–of race, of gender, of age–requires a reconstruction of societal and scholarly
norms towards more expansive social understandings for all (p. 11). Responding to children’s
particular marginalization, Wall argues, requires us to “understand difference in not only its
social independence but also, in a more complex way, its social interdependence” (2019, p.
10). Childhood studies should be reimagined to center “not just children’s agency, voices, and
participation, but also their distinctiveness, diversities, and otherness” (2010a, p. 181).
Wall envisions childism as something of a parallel to ‘third-wave’ feminism. Butler and
others (e.g., Heywood, 1997) argued that feminism must not only understand and advocate
for women’s experiences, it should “critiqu[e] the larger normative frameworks [defined by
men] that obscure and marginalize women’s experiences in the first place” (Wall, 2019, p. 4).
Likewise, the goal of childism, Wall writes, is to “reconstruct more difference-inclusive social
imaginations” of both children and adults (p. 11). Rather than trying to apply existing adult
practices and ethics to children, childism insists that we “systematically rethink” our social and
scholarly norms in response to children (i.e., with children as the default) (Wall, 2010b, p. 39).
As I sought to reimagine children as full persons in the context of schooling, childism
provided a lens through which I could approach children’s experiences as not only objects of
research but “lenses of social subjectivity” which could “creatively challenge engrained
normative assumptions” (Wall, 2019, p. 5, 12).
Attempting to listen with children: My research approach

“Childism means addressing children’s experiences by deconstructing and transforming social
structures for all humans (Sundhall, 2017; Wall, 2019), and hence demands that adults must
simultaneously allow themselves to be critically addressed by children” (Biswas, 2021)
Scholars and educators have powerfully applied both critical childhood studies and childism
as lenses for analyzing education–to reflect upon how we listen to children’s critiques of
schooling (Yoon & Templeton, 2019), for example, and to explore the educative possibilities
of protest movements (Biswas & Mattheis, 2022). In the process, they have illuminated how
such approaches can aid in not only analyzing children’s experiences but developing
methodologies that better invite children to participate as narrators and meaning-makers
while confronting the reality that (particularly marginalized) children “are less likely to be
heard–or are easily misheard”–by adult researchers (Templeton, p. 4; Dumas & Nelson).
My own methodological approach extended from a memory of a time when we, as a
grade level team, had to cancel a planned lesson at the last minute. Instead of throwing
26
something new together, we decided to hold a ‘vent session’ for students, similar to the
“Complain, Moan, and Groan” game described by Santos Rivera (1983-1984) “in which
students dialogued about and identified problems in the school and community” (Nieto,
2018, p. 124). We gained so much valuable insight about students’ experiences of school,
mainly by sitting back and seeking to listen rather than to teach. We never did much as a
faculty, unfortunately, to reflect upon or act in response to students’ feedback, but that
missed opportunity called out to me as I considered how to invite students to participate in
this current inquiry. I wondered what children would say if they were given the space to
dialogue about what parts of school they find humanizing and which they find
dehumanizing. And further, I wondered what it would look like to go beyond soliciting their
thoughts and towards empowering them to reflect and act upon our discussion.
In this project, I asked students to share and discuss their thoughts on which elements
of their schooling experience affirmed their sense of personhood and which did not. Then, I
invited them to act as co-explorers in this inquiry by analyzing one another’s findings,
drawing out key conclusions and patterns, and sketching out what they would want their
school to do to respond to their concerns. Our methodology was both a response to what I
saw as a missed opportunity from my teaching past and an amalgamation of protocols and
reflections from scholars carrying out similar research with children through the lenses of
both critical childhood studies and childism (e.g., Yoon & Templeton; Mayes, 2013; Saunders
& Goddard, 2007; Biswas & Mattheis). My approach was aimed at “letting teach” (Biswas &
Mattheis, making room for children to contribute to my and this project’s formation by
seeking to listen with–rather than simply to– my student co-explorers (Yoon & Templeton).
And, in both my listening and analysis, I attempted to “interrogate the presumed rightness of
adult interventions” (Dumas & Nelson, p. 32) and to trouble prejudiced imaginations of
children which reduce them to hollow stereotypes (p. 33).
Our study was carried out at the school where I teach, an urban K-8 elementary in
Chicago Public Schools, with a group of about eighty seventh grade students. Middle
schoolers, like my students, are unfortunately often characterized by developmentalist
caricatures which portray them as irrational or ‘difficult’. Some scholars (e.g., Kohn, 1999;
Darling-Hammond, 1997) suggest that these young adolescents are reacting to the widening
gap between their emerging sense of themselves as persons and their dehumanizing
treatment by adults. Others, like Lesko (2013), question how hegemonic notions of childhood
and adolescence may, in fact, “effect the identity crises” that are so often cited as reason to
suppress or ignore middle schoolers’ contributions (p. 112). In any case, it’s clear that schools
enact a prejudiced imagination of middle schoolers that conflicts with their understanding of
themselves–they know themselves to be persons but their school (and its adults) clearly
disagree, and they are forced to navigate that dissonance. As ‘early adolescents’, they are
often subjected to dehumanizing practices, policies, and discourses aimed both at their older
adolescent counterparts and much younger children. However, I believe this placement ‘in
the middle’, at the crux of adults’ prejudices against children and their anxieties about
adolescents, makes my seventh grade collaborators especially qualified and compelling
collaborators for this work. And indeed, their observations and analyses were both powerful
in their own right and relevant to concepts and issues identified in adult scholarship.
27
That said, our work together was greatly limited in scope. Our group, drawn from a
majority-white and mostly affluent school community, could not possibly understand or
address the wide range of school discourses, practices, and policies that students and
teachers experience across geographical, racial, and social contexts. In response, I combined
students’ findings with a broad review of available literature on children’s experience of
personhood (and proximal concepts) in school, which I hope will at least begin to bridge
those gaps. This survey included both empirical studies based in schools and theoretical
works from scholars of education, sociology, and philosophy–at every turn, I attempted to
find and lean on scholarly work which sought out and transmitted directly the perspectives of
children themselves. And, since Black, Latine, and immigrant voices were greatly
underrepresented in our study–both as subjects and as researchers–I tried to prioritize
studies which described their experiences and challenged the normative assumption in
educational research that ‘children’ means white, affluent children (Dumas & Nelson). Patterns
I identified and theoretical concepts I encountered during this literature review, along with
interactions I’ve had with teachers and students across different schools, were used to
support and, when appropriate, trouble students’ and my findings.
Listening ‘to’ and ‘with’ students
Saunders & Goddard (2007) observe that common “perceptions… that children are… less
than people, and even ‘not fully human’ (Jenks, 1996) can lead to the dismissal of children’s
voices as insignificant and important” (p. 36). This attitude unfortunately persists in
educational research despite the fact that when adult scholars have intentionally included
them, children consistently demonstrate their ability to reflect thoughtfully upon their
schooling and issues that affect them (Saunders, 2018, p. 44; Yoon & Templeton, 2019;
Oakes et al., p. 298, Phelan, Davidson, & Than Cao, 1992, p. 98). As Wall (2019) notes,
childhood studies argues in response for a shift towards “dialogical approaches” (Christensen,
2004, p. 174) which include children “not only as research objects but also research
participants” (p. 2). In response, I attempted throughout our study to maintain a listening
stance (Paley, 2007), letting children’s thoughts–conveyed through their written and verbal
contributions–guide my inquiry and analysis.
However, I recognize that even when we attempt to listen to students “without adult
tendencies”, teachers and researchers inevitably exert “subtle gestures of power” which shape
students’ thoughts, words, and interactions (Yoon & Templeton, p. 80). “[Adult] researchers
ask leading questions and/or create conditions that curate children’s words to align with our
existing frameworks and viewpoints”; as a result, “[we] end up listening ‘in order to fit what
we hear into what we already know and to judge it accordingly’” (p. 60; Davies, 2017, p. 66).
Even when working sincerely to listen to children, “the researcher listens for key ideas that
directly respond to their questions… [and] the parameters of the study can dictate just what is
heard, interpreted, and analyzed” (Yoon & Templeton, p. 57). In response, Wall (2010a)
argues that observations and transcripts of children “need to be informed by self-critical
exploration of the assumptions that are brought to doing so; and these assumptions need in
turn to be rethought in response to children’s actual experiences” (p. 181). Further, we must let
children’s words guide our reconstruction of scholarly and social norms to further enable
children’s participation and empowerment (Wall, 2019, p. 3). Kallio & Häkli (2011), for
28
example, stress that it’s not enough for the researcher to observe and understand how
children perform political activism; rather, the researcher must then “help transform
policy-making in response to children’s critiques” (p. 73).
Towards this aim, I attempted in our study to explore what it would mean for me, as
an adult teacher and researcher, to listen with children–not merely to them. This shift was
inspired by Biswas (2020), who describes how, when researching with children, she
“embraced the methodological attitude of immaturity and muddled through with children as
co-explorers” (p. 7). Biswas suggests pulling back from our adult tendencies to formalize and
to systematize, and instead to conceive of our work with children as play. This meant, for our
project, encouraging students to talk freely with one another–to complain and meander–and
to decide, themselves, what was important enough to share with adults. Though I didn’t
always succeed in doing so, I made the attempt in the hopes of suggesting a shift in my own
approach as a researcher and teacher towards recognizing children as “active, collaborative
participants in knowledge construction” (Murris et al., 2020, p. 6), thoughtful “critics of
schooling” (Nicholls & Hazard, 1993, p. 8), and “competent, contributing social actors” (Mayall,
2000, p. 247).
“Oh boy, have you turned”
Despite these efforts, I recognize that there is inevitably a “space between” (Ellsworth, 1997)
students and myself as a teacher and researcher. And while I have outlined some of the steps
I’ve taken to bridge that gap, it’s important to acknowledge the ways in which my own
positionality affects my analysis of students’ findings. Ideologies about who counts as a
‘person’ are inseparable from racist, sexist, ableist, and cisheteronormative notions, both
historical and ongoing, about who counts as a person and who is afforded all the rights and
privileges that come with personhood. Withholding personhood from marginalized peoples,
inside and beyond schools, has been and continues to be an essential practice of maintaining
white supremacy and patriarchy. As a privileged, white, able-bodied person, I can’t account
fully for the dehumanizing experiences many of my students have had that undoubtedly
shape their sense of personhood. I am also privileged in my status as an adult, and one with
power and authority over students in my role as a teacher. Though I was, at one point, a
middle-school-aged child who encountered adult ideologies about my personhood and that
of my peers, my current status as an adult affects my own subject position and how I view
children’s rights, capacities, and personhood.
At each turn, I sought to highlight intersections of age, race, class, and ability (both
those that I identified and those that students did) that informed how marginalized students
and families are impacted disproportionately by school policies and discourse. Further, I put
my own analysis in conversation with findings from a diverse body of literature, both
theoretical and empirical, that reflects, in subject and authorship, how ideologies and
experiences of personhood in school are shaped by age, culture, race, ability, class, and
gender. As a queer person (and formerly, I suppose, a queer child) I tried to specifically
highlight moments where adult practice, policy, and discourse either empowered or
dehumanized queer children–that is, both children who identify as LGBTQ+ and kids harmed
by hegemonic, cisheteronormative notions of what makes an ‘acceptable’ or ‘normal’ person
29
(Sumara & Davis, 1999). Taking these steps does not negate nor fully account for my personal
subjectivity and privileged positionality. I undoubtedly misunderstood some of what
students said, missed important voices and findings in the literature I didn’t include in my
review, and allowed my own ideas about how schools should color my interpretation at every
turn. However, I hope that the efforts I made help make my findings and recommendations
more useful for diverse groups of students and teachers across a greater range of contexts.
And finally, I come to my status as a teacher and community member within the
particular school where this research is set. Employing a critical perspective, this project
operates from the understanding that schools–as a function of existing in an unjust society–
reify and reinforce prejudiced ideas about marginalized peoples through their discourses,
policies, and practices. In our society in which children are systematically oppressed and
dehumanized by adults, schools (including, but not especially, mine) are set up in ways that
undermine students’ sense of personhood. This is a serious claim; however, it’s also
well-considered and well-substantiated by both prior scholarship and students’ observations
and analyses. Students in our study were asked challenging questions, and they offered
honest, vulnerable, and (often) provocative answers. Some of these children’s claims, often
grounded in a real sense of hurt and sadness and anger, are quite confrontational to their
teachers and school administrators. However, students conveyed (and I want to emphasize)
that they, nearly without exception, did not blame their teachers for the problems they
identified. Their (and my) intention was not to point out the failures of specific school adults,
but to draw attention to the complicated ways in which very common moments in schools
often undermine students’ sense of personhood.
As my middle school co-explorers were quick to point out, as an adult and a teacher
my hands are not clean in any of this. In a discussion about children’s lack of privacy in school,
one student reminded me that I, too, used to spy on his computer screen during class. Oh,
boy, have you turned…, he said slyly. But my positionality, as I’ve laid out, prevents me from
fully turning. I am implicated in the problems identified here, and I share (perhaps an outsized
portion of) the responsibility for working with students towards making our school–and
schooling generally–more just and humane. Unable to shed my differences, the best I could
attempt was ‘muddling through’ (Gallacher & Gallagher, 2008). As Biswas (2020) writes, this
means acknowledging and embracing one’s ignorance as “an asset whilst investigating with
children as an adult, [as a] part of the methodological attitude” (p. 8). This meant making
myself, and this project, vulnerable to being shaped and directed by children’s experience
and the knowledge we constructed together.
Students reflect upon their experiences of school: A 3-part mini-opera

“I liked this class because it lets you feel heard and you can be honest” (VK)
Our study took place over the course of three sessions in January and February of 2022.
Since we worked together during students’ normal ‘literacy time’, their normal literacy
teachers, paraprofessionals, and special education teachers were present and acting as
co-facilitators. On one hand, this meant that there were several adults in the room who cared
for our students and could offer support as they worked; however, the sheer number of
adults and their presence–both physical and discursive–sometimes seemed overwhelming or
30
stifling to students. This appeared to have a chilling effect, at times, when children were
trying to recall, point out, or reflect on problematic adult behaviors. When one student
shared that they felt disrespected by their unwillingness to trust them alone in the hallway,
for example, an adult in the back of the room responded out of turn, sarcastically asking,
“Well, don’t you see why we can’t trust some of you guys?” (JO). Though these moments
were few and far between, they (and the constant threat of adult rebuke) undoubtedly
colored students’ responses and their ability to offer honest, vulnerable reflections.
Students were also still expected to follow our school’s normal, adult-dictated rules
before, during, and after our sessions. They put their phones away at the beginning of class in
their classroom’s ‘phone jail’; they sat in their assigned seats and responded to adults’ verbal
and visual cues to be quiet, transition between tasks, and carry out standard classroom tasks.
Overall, our work together mostly took on the normal grammars of ‘school’ and ‘class’–this
meant that, at times, students could point to discourse, policy, or practice happening during
our sessions that they felt were dehumanizing or emblematic of problems they had with their
experience of school. This presented an apparent contradiction (which many students noted)
between the purpose of our research work and the ways in which it was carried out. While we
encouraged students to use these moments of dissonance and frustration as material for
their analyses, they also demanded further reflection on how we could better align the
structures and flow of our research with the critical, transformative aims of our work.
I tried to soothe some of these tensions, during our first session, by asking students to
(re)set norms for themselves and their teachers for our work together. They agreed that we
should all “think before we speak”, “respect other people’s ideas and perspectives”, “disagree
respectfully”, and “participate in class”. The adults in the room, particularly, should “follow all
the norms, too”, “help keep us on track and done on time”, and “talk only when they need to”.
In that spirit, in this section I will present a summary of our work together that focuses on
what students thought, did, and said, adding my adult commentary when I feel it’s needed to
support or explain students’ findings.
Act I: What makes a person feel like a person?
Just like this article, our first session began with a provocation. In this case, it was a quote from
a popular teacher-turned-YouTuber, CGPGrey. When asked in a Q&A video, Do you have any
advice for new teachers?, Grey replied, “Watch The Dog Whisperer. I am deadly serious about
this. It’s also my advice for new parents” (Grey, 2016). Some of our classmates had seen The
Dog Whisperer before, and knew that it was a TV show about how to train dogs. I shared with
students a news summary which explained that on The Dog Whisperer, the host Cesar Millan
advocates a number of training techniques including restraint, leash jerks, kicks, and snaps of
the hand against the head in order to induce “calm submission” in dogs (Peeples, 2009). I
also pointed out to students that Grey’s advice is not all that unique–numerous parenting
pundits (e.g., CBC, 2019; Williams, 2009) and teachers (e.g., Knoll, 2017; Jaeschke 2016) have
compared training dogs to getting children to obey.
31
When asked how they felt about Grey’s suggestion for teachers, students almost
universally agreed that it was “weird to be compared to a dog” (VK7). Beyond just weird,
seventh graders argued it was “ridiculous” (LA) and “insulting” (DG), often employing
(sometimes humorous) changes in facial expression and tone to convey their frustration. One
child, for example, observed that “You can’t say ‘here, human!’ to a human like you would a
dog”, mimicking an owner talking to a pet and eliciting laughter from our group (LB). Others
pointed out how silly and offensive it would be for their teachers to reward them with treats
or candy every time they sat down in their seats or answered a question right (e.g., BH). And
while some children pointed out that “humans are animals too, like dogs” (DG), and a few
others suggested that dog training techniques might be appropriate for younger children, our
group mainly focused on the ways in which people–including children–are essentially
different from dogs and deserving of better treatment. Students referenced dogs’ lack of
understanding of language or how the world works (RK), but their grandest objections
focused on humans’ unique moral capacity and their ability to make reasoned decisions.
“People don’t necessarily need a treat to do the right thing, like dogs do” (JW), one student
wrote, and when people decide to follow rules, “it’s not like it’s just something in our brains,
like a dog… people do things because they decide they’re right” (CM).
From this opening discussion, it was clear that students felt there were some
important characteristics which set persons (‘humans’, ‘people’, etc.) apart. We separated
these traits into three main categories: rights people have, stuff people need, and stuff people
care about. I asked students to brainstorm what they thought belonged in each category, and
when we gathered back together we found there were some clear patterns in how we viewed
what makes up a person. We identified some obvious, basic needs–food, water, shelter,
sleep, etc.–but also others which, while more abstract, students agreed were vital. People
need privacy, a “tribe” (CM), freedom, forgiveness, “love” (BP), and “a life” (EB). When I asked
students to expand on what constitutes a ‘life’, they said that a person needs “something or
someone who makes [them] happy” (LB) and “something to do” (NG). We also had a lot of
ideas about what matters to persons: “themselves” (JW), other humans, friends, possessions,
pets, or big things like “the economy” (SW). Students also added that persons care about
“their culture” (NS), “their future” (LM), and “their rights/freedom” (OM). And those rights
include both constitutional rights–freedom of speech and freedom of religion, for example,
were often cited by students–but also moral rights like “healthcare” (JL), equal pay for equal
work (LM), and “to be who you are” (LB).
7
Note: contributions from both child and adult collaborators are cited in the rest of this article using
anonymized initials–e.g., (CG) or (SF).
32
As we wrapped up our discussion, some students drew our attention to the fact that there are
many people–“homeless people” (JS), people in prison, people in other countries, or people
who are systematically oppressed–who don’t get all the things we agreed are necessary for
persons. And this led us to consider places, like prisons, where people commonly don’t have
all that persons are supposed to have. Several students identified school as one of those
places, and while there were some giggles and dramatic gasps when one child exclaimed
they have “no rights!” in class (LA), many of their classmates came to agree that there were a
lot of rights and needs that they couldn’t meet while at school. They pointed out that while
we agreed that persons have the right to “their own thoughts” (HS) and “an entitlement to be
heard” (SW), children often don’t have either in class. Others added that kids can’t “talk when
they want to” (BP) or “move freely” between school spaces or even to the bathroom” (JB).
Basic needs were in question, too, as students observed that they didn’t receive much privacy
at school and were certainly not always guaranteed love or forgiveness from their teachers. In
response, I asked students to end our first session by identifying specific parts of school that
made them feel as if they weren’t fully respected as persons.
Act II: When do we feel like a person (or not) in schools?
I began our second session by sharing with students a list I made of the issues that came up
most frequently in their responses. Students identified policies they felt were unjust–the
dress code, for example, or the way the school’s schedule was set up, or the way cell phones
were policed–as well as dehumanizing practices like being made to walk in silent lines
between classes or having to ask to go to the bathroom. Importantly, however, students’
responses also highlighted anxieties and injuries they experienced because of the way adults
talked to and about them in school. I asked students if there were any important responses
that I’d missed, and they added a couple more–namely, standardized testing and grades. By
the end of our opening discussion, our list included the following:
● How the school’s schedule is set up ● Grades and homework

● Walking in lines between classes ● Assigned seats
● Standardized testing ● How we do our work in class
● Asking to go to the bathroom ● Lunch and recess
● ‘Phone jail’ ● Privacy
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● How adults talk to kids ● Teachers choosing who can talk
We then spent the rest of our session in small groups discussing the items from our list. Each
focal practice, policy, or discourse feature was given a spot at a table, and we all roamed
freely between these different discussion spaces, sharing and listening to different
perspectives. Afterwards, we gathered as a whole group to debrief important themes and
noticings from our discussions.
Students observed that every one of the issues they discussed felt (sometimes very)
different to different people in our group. As we talked and listened, we found several places
where we disagreed with others or had completely different experiences depending on our
identities, our values, and our experiences. Several children also found that they had stronger
feelings about some of these issues than they initially thought. Some children shared that
having time to sit and think about some of what happens in school made them feel “weirdly
angry” (HF) or helped them to realize, as one child wrote, “how mad it makes me” (LM). As it
did for students in Oyler’s (2012) research, just the act of talking about what they experience
“underscored for them the injustice of their daily inequities” (p. 94). They shared that it felt
“nice to discuss the unfair ways that students are treated” (JS), especially since “nobody ever
talks about [students’ problems]” (EH) and “most people overlook it as a normal thing” (JS).
Importantly, however, while students largely agreed that children “should have a
voice” in school (JB) and that “someone should make [kids’ ideas] real” (HF), many didn’t
believe that our work could amount to anything. They recalled times, previously, when they
were given surveys soliciting their opinions which seemed to just “disappear” (BP) afterwards
with no response from adults. One child shared that in a recent school-wide discussion of the
dress code, for example, “they asked us what we thought, but just did it so they could say
they asked and not do any of what we said” (VH). Overall, students seemed to agree with one
classmate who put it this way: “I think we kids deserve more rights, but I don’t think that kids
will actually get any more rights” (HS). When I asked what it would take for them to believe
that adults would take action, my student collaborators accurately pointed out that better
questions to ask might be, How do we get adults to actually take action? What actions do we
want them to take? These questions became the starting point for our third and final session.
Interlude: ‘Cracking down’
During the couple weeks between our second and third sessions, I heard from a colleague
that our school was “cracking down” on what adults viewed as middle schoolers’ worsening
behavior (AA). This rhymed with what I had heard from teachers, that they felt conflicts
between students and adults were heating up and the situation was reaching a breaking
point. Students were described as “taking advantage of” what freedoms adults felt they had
graciously extended to them (MP), and some teachers I talked to were upset that school rules
“weren’t being enforced properly” (AA). In response, administrators and middle school
teachers decided to “reset expectations” for middle schoolers at the turn of the academic
quarter (BK). They put together a presentation–entitled New Quarter, New You–which
reinforced to students what adults felt were important rules and stressed that these rules
would be enforced more strictly than before. Teachers presented this document to all of their
34
classes on the first day of the new academic quarter, and the presentation file was shared
with families via email.
The stated purpose of New Quarter, New You was to respond to adult concerns that
students were having trouble getting along with their teachers and engaging meaningfully in
schools. Some of these concerns were grounded in specific incidents–including
student-student fights and major acts of misbehavior–and others were justified by a vague
sense that teachers and parents had that “something [was] off” about the middle schoolers
this year as they returned to ‘normal’ school during the COVID-19 pandemic (RL). In
response, New Quarter, New You aimed to clarify and strengthen limits on students’ conduct
during the school day in order to, as the school’s principal said, “reiterat[e], especially in the
middle school… our expectations… respect, integrity, and safety… making sure students know
what that looks like” (BK). These are the policy directives contained in the presentation given
to students:
● Students are now required to turn in their cell phone to their classroom’s “phone jail”
for the duration of the school day. If they don’t, teachers will call their guardians to
determine if they have a phone–if they have a phone and it’s not in the “phone jail”, it
will be confiscated and students will be “written up and referred to administration for
disciplinary action”, regardless of whether or not they were (mis)using it during school.
● On other smart devices, like smartwatches, policy is similar but contains an important
caveat–the device will be taken away and the student will be disciplined if and when
the student uses it for “non-academic reasons”.
● Students who are not seated in each class by its designated start time–which is
described as especially unacceptable because students aren’t traveling “that far”
between classes and they know “what time each class starts!”–will be written up for
disciplinary action on the third offense.
● If students need to leave that seat during class to, say, use the bathroom or get water,
they are now required to sign out with their name (“first and last”), the date, the time,
and their destination on a list by the door. Accompanying this rule on the document
were a few reinforcing phrases: “Where are you going?”, “Don’t take long!”, and a
reminder that “You are not allowed to leave without [sic] teacher’s permission!”
● Hallway expectations, generally, will be tightened to limit students’ presence during
class time. Only one student from each class will be allowed in the hall at a time, and
students were reminded that they need explicit adult permission to “be anywhere
besides class” at any time besides when transitioning between classes.
● Recess expectations will be strengthened, as well–recess is “your time”, the document
admits, “but needs to be organized better!”. This includes playing and speaking more
respectfully (specifically, more calmly and quietly) as well as bringing something to
keep busy during “frustrating” indoor recesses.
● In response to student laptops being “destroyed by careless behavior” and “not being
put back or put back correctly”, students are now forbidden from using these devices
during indoor recess when teachers “are not there… to monitor usage”. The document
also emphasizes that these are “OUR devices [emphasis theirs]”, presumably to
remind students that the school, not the student, owns each laptop.
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● And finally, to address especially urgent issues with behavior amongst eighth graders,
“everyone in the 8th grade” is to receive a “contract” that would make their
participation in community events contingent upon their adherence to these new
rules. “Consequences of unacceptable behavior will result in a behavior plan [emphasis
added] and possible consequences of losing participation in activities” like
end-of-year parties and the school’s graduation ceremony.
School adults provided rationales for some of these new expectations, and these mainly
focused on adult concerns about ‘efficiency’, ‘safey’, and ‘orderliness’. Students are directed to
not bring their headphones to school because “while they’re very cool”, children “don’t need
them for class” and “a lot of [students] lose them!” Students’ mobility being restricted is
justified because adults “need to know where [they] are at all times to ensure everyone is safe
and accounted for”. Tardiness is a particular problem of concern because it’s possibly
disruptive to others’ learning when a student arrives late to class. And, importantly, all of
these expectations are viewed as needing strict enforcement across all classes, without
exceptions, to “create consistency” for students and teachers (AA). But while there were
some appeals to students’ reason and moral sense (e.g., “We are very fortunate…”, “We’re not
the only ones in the school…”, “You’re the role models of the school!”), the document was
largely received by students as one of many “list[s] of threats” (Kohn, 2011) that they receive
from adults. To paraphrase a summary given to me by one seventh grade boy, the message
conveyed by New Quarter, New You seemed to be, ‘There’s a new sheriff in town, and it’s
gonna be trouble for you if you don’t get in line’.
Within that context, note that nearly all of the dozen (or so) directives in the
document were focused on laying out a clear punishment for specific student (mis)behaviors.
The notable exception was a new policy for how to access period products, and even this
seemed punitive to some students; they pointed out that they had to ask adults for access to
what they needed for their bodies, and that the document firmly warns them to “only take
[products] if you are in need”. Both colleagues and students pointed out to me, when I
returned for my third session with the seventh graders, that New Quarter, New You seemed
like a reiteration (or even a ‘doubling-down’) of exactly the policies, practices, and discourses
that students had identified as dehumanizing.
And indeed, when I returned for our third session, children shared with me how
frustrated and discouraged they felt. They largely agreed that the climate of the middle
school was overheated, and that there was a lot of tension to unwind between students and
adults. But they pointed out that they weren’t ever really consulted on how to resolve that
tension, and that their teachers’ attempts amounted to little more than punishing them more
harshly for breaking the same rules. As one student said, “It’s like, okay, now we might not do
all that bad stuff, because we’ll get in trouble, but we’re not any happier than we were before”
(JB). The overwhelming feeling I got from students was that while these new expectations
might cool the air, they wouldn’t put out the fires that caused the overheating to begin with.
Act III: What from our sessions do we think adults need most to hear and act upon?
Like our first session, we began our third meeting with a provocation–this time, it was an
excerpt of a recent speech from teen activist Greta Thunberg. Speaking at a global climate
36
change summit, Greta shared her frustrations with adult leaders who want to be seen as
responsive to children, like her and Ugandan activist Vanessa Nagate, but only “pretend that
they listen to us” (Carrington, 2021). Middle schoolers immediately made connections
between Thunberg’s words and their experiences at school; as one student wrote, “like Greta
Thunberg said, adults pretend to listen but don’t because they don’t… care about our opinion”
(LM). In this, our final session, we tried to resist that pattern by inviting students to act as
listeners for one another as well as collaborative scholars, both summarizing and analyzing
their classmates’ responses. We distributed to each group of students a stack of
(anonymized) reflections from their classmates about a particular topic–grades, for example,
or ‘how teachers talk to kids’. Then, we instructed students to read the comments with their
group and identify key patterns and quotes that capture the most important findings that
they would want adults to attend to. We did so with the goal of determining what students
wanted adults to hear and what actions their school could and should take to better affirm
them and their classmates as persons. These, we reasoned, we could share with adults in the
hopes of initiating productive dialogue that could lead to real, responsive change.
Students’ findings from their analyses will be described and unpacked in the next two
sections of this article. However, I do want to note here a change in affect that I perceived in
this final session. Where, in our earlier meeting, students had seemed relatively energized
and encouraged by our discussions, many of them now seemed to be more cynical. They
pointed out issues and perspectives which resonated with them, just as before, but these
became a source of frustration and ambivalence. For lack of a better way to describe it, the
vibe of our work felt like it shifted from ‘Hey, there are some problems we need to fix!’ to ‘We
know there are problems, but nothing’s going to be done about them, so why bother?’
I asked students, as we wrapped up our time together, to give me their thoughts on a
new question that occurred to me as I observed their work: Do you think that students can
make important changes in school? Some responses were pessimistic, with students saying
things like “I honestly think teachers won’t do anything” (BH) and “I don’t think students can
make important changes in school because the adults never act” (AW). Others were more
hopeful, arguing that “students can speak up for what they want” (MM) or “make a petition”
(LB) to “improve stuff” (MB). Even the most optimistic students, however, still saw adults’ sole
possession of power as the key to change. As one seventh grader wrote, “I think students can
make BIG changes in school because if [adults] listen to our ideas, then we can make big
changes with them [emphasis added]” (MB).
‘What keeps you from feeling respected as a person?’: Students’ findings

“[Children’s demands] are painfully reasonable. They want a better education, a more ‘relevant’
curriculum, some voice in the subject matter to be taught and in the running of the school, and
some respect for their constitutional and human rights” (Stein, 1971, p. 177)
During our sessions, students shared their thoughts and feelings both verbally and in written
records that they kept during our discussion activities. They were also asked to highlight
‘important’ findings from others’ reflections, which in our case we defined as those findings
which we thought adults needed to hear so they could better respect children as full persons.
Students’ work, along with my transcriptions of select conversations with children and adults,
37
form the basis of the summary offered in this section. Taken together, they offer a picture of
our work that is more diverse and more rigorous than any summary I, alone, could provide.
However, as the author of this article I had to select “key” moments and excerpts
(Erikson, 1986) from students’ (and adult scholars’) work that I felt best represented their
findings as well as the affective tenors of our discussion. As Erickson outlines, key moments
are those which “the researcher assumes… [have] the potential to make explicit a theoretical
‘loading’” (p. 108) and either provide evidence or counter-evidence to judgments that the
researcher has made based on patterns in their observations (Hanson et al., 2003, p. 29-30).
Equipped with an overwhelming amount of stories, quotes, observations, and suggestions
from my student co-explorers, I selected and sequenced specific fragments that would allow
me to most effectively communicate students’ findings and place them in conversation with
existing literature and theory. To ensure that the excerpts I chose were genuinely key,
however, I had to “compare [my] own interpretations and judgments to those of other
analysts with different perspectives” (p. 30).
For this section, I located key moments and excerpts by “triangulating” my choices
(Hanson et al., p. 30) with 1) students’ analyses of their classmates’ responses and 2) findings
from existing adult research and theory. As an example, I felt after our sessions that students’
feelings about having to walk in lines between classes were important to include in my
analysis. My determination that this was a key moment worth including, however, came only
after I ensured that several students also emphasized this practice and that there was existing
research and theory to support my analysis. Though these attempts at mitigating my
subjectivity could not be sufficient, I hope they helped to minimize the extent to which I am
“speaking for” my student collaborators (Alcoff, 1991; Mayes, 2013) and to ensure that this
project reflects children’s concerns and priorities rather than merely my own or other adults’.
“Teachers choosing who can talk”
Recall that early in our sessions, students identified the rights to “speak freely” and “to be
heard” as vital for full personhood. Further, they pointed out immediately that those two
rights were ones they didn’t feel they always (or even often) had at school. It should not be
surprising, then, that nearly all students referenced talk when discussing parts of their
schooling experience that made them feel dehumanized. Though students’ concerns and
feelings varied, their main issue concerned their teachers’ insistence on almost always being
the point person for classroom discourse, controlling students’ entrance into the conversation
and taking up a lot of the air time themselves. Some pointed out ways that teachers use this
power for good–“letting people who haven’t shared their thoughts talk” (MM) and “controlling
noise pollution”, for example. Many others, however, described how teachers’ strict control
over classroom talk stifled their (and others’) ability to participate fully. This included those
“have really good ideas… but never [get] the chance” to share them (AS) or those who “will
raise their hand but will not get called on” (OG). However, children also shared concerns
about quieter students feeling “pressured” (EH) or “upset” when their teachers force them to
talk when they may not be prepared or comfortable to.
Several students were quick to point out that it wasn’t a problem with individual
teachers’ intentions, necessarily, but that it was generally problematic for one person to have
unchecked power over discussion. They identified that teachers (often consciously) don’t
38
direct discussion equitably, for example; they “only call on… favorite students” (LB) or “pick
one person over and over again” (MM) or choose not to include some students who they
might think will be disruptive or get the answer wrong (CM). They may also misinterpret
students’ words, children said, or make unilateral decisions that disrupt productive discussion,
such as “mov[ing] on… right when we have something to add” (CM) or spending too much
time focused on their personal connection to or interpretation of the conversation (LB, JB).
These problems highlight students’ overall issue with teacher-centered classroom discourse
in which, as one student put it, “the teacher is telling [students] something” (AS) rather than
opening up space for meaningful and equitable dialogue.
Students’ findings mirror what has been observed in prior studies on students’
experiences of monologic classrooms, where teachers exercise authoritative power over
classroom talk with the aim of transmitting specific ideas and values to students (O’Connor &
Michaels, 2007). Observational studies across contexts have found that monologic discourse
is “the predominant mode of classroom communication today”, with the majority of teachers
“control[ling] both the content and the form of classroom communication by choosing
questions and topics, nominating students speaker, and correcting their answers”
(Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013, p. 115; Alexander, 2008; Mehan, 1998; Nystrand et al., 2003;
Applebee, Langer, Lystrand, & Gamoran, 2003). Overall, “in many contemporary classrooms,
‘teachers rather than learners do most of the talking’” (Reznitskaya & Gregory, p. 115; quoting
Alexander, 2008). Importantly, however, classroom discourse can be monologic even if
students are talking–as O’Connor & Michaels (2007) observe, oftentimes teachers engage
children in ‘discussions’ where children are directed to speak, but that talk is narrowly
controlled by the teacher and is limited in ways that convey the teachers’ power, their values,
and their educational aims.
Scholars (e.g., Wells, 2007; O’Connor & Michaels) have argued that monologic
discourse can sometimes have educational value, particularly for the transmission of
knowledge–including cultural knowledge–between adults and children. For our purposes,
however, it’s important to note that several studies have suggested monologic approaches to
classroom discourse are corrosive to students’ autonomy (e.g., Reeve & Jang, 2006; Reeve,
2009; Patall et al., 2018) and experience of personhood (Power-Carter & Bloome, 2021;
Bloome & Beauchemin, 2016). Power-Carter & Bloome, specifically, theorize that monologic
interactions reflect a stance that positions teachers as the sole subject of the classroom (the
“I”) as opposed to students who are objects of their talk (the “its”). Importantly, adults’
exertion of power and control over school talk reifies and reinforces systems of oppression
which stifle, minimize, and exclude speech from children–and marginalized children,
particularly (Banning, 2019; Rex, 2006; Power-Carter & Bloome, 2021).
“Adults say mean things”
Teachers don’t simply direct student talk–they do a lot of talking themselves, and students’
findings suggest that the content and tone of that talk can often be dehumanizing to
children. Though depending on the individual and the context, “adults talk to students in
[both] nice and mean ways” (ML), students’ analyses focused particularly on the impact of
adults’ hurtful talk. When they were asked to choose quotes that represented their
classmates’ experience of teacher talk, students overwhelmingly chose their classmates’
39
observations that “adults say mean things” (KK) and “adults can be so mean” (NS). Individual
children also identified specific practices that they felt were “mean”, like “ask[ing] very
personal things” (DS) that “get invasive of our privacy” (BB), but mainly their findings focused
on a generalized sense that teachers often speak in a “unnecessarily rude or disrespectful”
way (LB) or are “condescending and don’t treat students like people” (HS).
Students’ particular focus on condescension prompted a group discussion in one
session about what the word condescending meant to each of us. Many children connected
the term to similar concepts like superiority or talking down, as in, “adults think they are
superior, so they talk down to us” (BP). Whether they intend it to or not, adults’ frequent use
of condescending language and tone leaves students feeling “bad”(HF), “lower” (DG), and
“like little kids” (HS). One student took it a step further: “Adults are bullies, despite the
preaching they do about anti-bullying” (GS). She (along with other students) identified yelling
as one feature of adult talk that verges into bullying. Teachers “shouldn’t yell in our faces if we
do something wrong”, they wrote, or “if we don’t understand [in class]” (JB) or “for no reason”
at all (AA). Interestingly, this point about yelling felt like a particular injustice to some students
because “adults don’t get yelled at, but kids do” (CM); some of them argued, for example, that
“students shouldn’t be getting yelled at because students cannot yell at teachers” (KK).
The strength of students’ emotions parallels Saunders & Goddard’s (2001)
observation that “even small words chosen by large adults… can and do reveal larger
meanings'' that shape children’s perceptions of their personhood and their status relative to
adults. (p. 448). Diamond (2011) suggests that this is particularly true in classrooms, where
“the language that teachers use… transmits attitudes… fake or genuine, manipulative or direct,
encouraging or punitive” (p. 129). Several scholars (e.g. Stevens, 1977) have suggested that
teachers’ hurtful language and tone can “reinforce negative self-concepts” (Stevens, p. 319)
and make students feel “guilty and stupid and impotent”. And, generally, findings from
empirical research support students’ intuitive claims that teachers’ ‘mean’ language and tone
are dehumanizing for children and convey a sense that children are “lower or less important
than adults” (DG). Studies eliciting students’ direct feedback (e.g., Mergendoller & Packer,
1985) support our middle schoolers’ finding that teachers yelling or demeaning language
makes students feel they aren’t getting “the basic trust and respect they feel to be their due”
(p. 595). And further, the deleterious impacts of teacher’s talk–on students’ mental health or
their self-efficacy for example–are most often borne by ‘at-risk’ students, especially
marginalized children and those considered insufficiently ‘well-adjusted’ to the school
environment (e.g., Brendgen et al., 2007; Brendgen, Wanner, & Vitaro, 2006).
“Students who do nothing wrong seemingly get punished”
Middle schoolers in our study also identified dehumanizing tenors in their school’s policies–
particularly, they questioned and problematized their school’s narrow emphasis on
controlling their behavior. Some children mentioned how their school punished
misbehavior–lamenting, for example, that their teachers “made assumptions” and emailed
their parents instead of trying to understand students’ perspectives (OG). However, perhaps
because formal discipline is relatively rare at their school, students mainly focused on their
feeling that they were being unnecessarily punished and controlled by policies which seek to
tightly constrain and dictate children’s behavior, speech, and appearance.
40
There were several examples that emerged in our discussion–some, like dress code, I
will explore later in this article. However, the most provocative policy that students identified
was the rule that middle schoolers had to walk between classes (or other school spaces) in
silent, single-file lines led by their teacher. While their summaries noted that that it may be
important to be quiet in the hall sometimes, “like during testing” (RK) and that “like 20% of
people are fine with it” (MBB), many students employed strong, evocative language to
describe how “disrespected” (JW), “embarrassed” (CE), and “un-human” (LB) it makes them
feel. “Lots of people feel like they’re being babied or [treated like] animals” (BG), one student
wrote, and another pointed out all the different “metaphors” (CM) that their classmates used
to explain how they felt having to walk in lines: “inmates” (AS), “robots” (OG), “objects” (QK),
“trophies” (QK), and “soldiers” (JL). These metaphors conveyed students’ “anger” (HF) and
“frustration” (OM) with “being herded” (JS) into lines despite what they see as their obvious
ability to walk between classrooms.
Students struggled to identify a clear rationale for this policy, and even offered several
logical justifications for their anger. “At my old school, I was used to walking on my own to
class… Now I get here and we gotta walk in lines and stuff so I’m, like, confused”, one child
shared (JW). Others referenced peers at other schools where kids their age “can just walk
around once the period is over” (LA). Several students also questioned why they are being
treated so differently than high schoolers, who are only a couple years older but are given
much, much more autonomy and freedom in the hallways (e.g., LM). Ultimately, though, it
largely came down to a moral objection that they were “seemingly get[ting] punished” (SW)
for no reason. In this way, having to walk in lines appeared to be symbolic for students; in fact,
one student even wrote that the policy “symbolizes that [adults] don’t trust us” JS).
We identified a similar feeling of being preemptively punished when students were
discussing the school’s policy that teachers have to confiscate all students’ phones and keep
them in a public ‘phone jail’ all day. While students identified that some policy on phones
may be necessary to minimize distractions, they questioned the moral right of their teachers
to take their property, especially when they weren’t even misusing it (e.g., SW, KK). Others
expressed practical concerns about not having access to their phones in case of an
emergency, like a school shooting: “We should be able to keep our phones in our bag… it is a
resource that some kids need” (GS). Students also point out hypocrisy in how often their
teachers used their own phones during lunch, passing periods, and even during class. They
argued that students should be able to keep their phones and use them at reasonable times
or that “adults should turn in their [phones], too” (KK). Overall, there was an overarching
sense that “teachers lack trust” (HS) and that it was dehumanizing for students to constantly
be punished without clear rationale and before they’ve even had the chance to misbehave.
The examples that students identified may be (at least somewhat) specific to their
school and grade level. However, their main finding–which centers on their sense of
dehumanization stemming from their school’s punitive control over their behavior–is well
substantiated by prior research. In fact, as Raible & Irizarry (2010) suggest, the “disciplinary
gaze” is so well-entrenched in American schools that it has practically become “tradition” (p.
1197). The ubiquitousness of punitive, control-oriented policies has led several scholars (i.e.,
Kohn, 2006; Kohn, 2011; Darling-Hammond, 1997; Oakes et al., 2008) to observe that
American public schools are perhaps best characterized by discipline–that is, they operate
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with “order and conformity” as their ultimate goal and spend the majority of their time and
bandwidth on designing “elaborate systems of rewards and punishments to elicit obedience”
from students (Kohn, 2015). Policy is constructed to “get students to do ‘what they are
supposed to be doing’” (Curwin & Mendler, 1991), to “learn what’s acceptable [to adults] and
what’s not” (Albert, 1989, p. 67; Kohn, 2006, p. 59). And since adults’ expectations for
children and schooling are often misaligned to children’s desires, values, and sense of
themselves as agentic persons, there is a “truly awful level of coercion” employed in schools
to force children to conform (Noddings, 2001, p. 35).
Students in our study didn’t spend much time or bandwidth on specific punishments
that their school employed; however, prior scholarship emphasizes that the punishment
practices employed in many schools are not only inhumane but markedly unjust. Oakes et al.
(2008) observes that the “authoritarian tendencies that pervade public schools” are evident
in the widespread application of “crude behavioral theory” (p. 280) and use of “behaviorist
strategies–like using rewards, punishments, threats of failure, and so forth” (p. 275; Kohn,
2006). On the extreme end, schools enforce policy with the threat of corporal punishment
(Gershoff & Font, 2016) or punitive ‘zero tolerance’ approaches (Stephens, 2021). However,
even behavior management systems which “appeal to educators who are uncomfortable
with using bribes and threats” (Kohn, 2006, p. 53), like Positive Behavioral Interventions and
Supports (PBIS) or Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports (MTSS), have been criticized by
scholars for “emphasizing teachers’ power over students rather than students’ capacities for
problem-solving” (Oakes et al., p. 281). And importantly, the disciplinary gaze is–and has
always been–directed mainly at marginalized students, particularly students of color and
those from low-income backgrounds (Raible & Irizarry; Gonzalez, 2012; Skiba et al., 2014;
Joseph-McCatty et al., 2022). Researchers have observed time and again that both have
outsized and disastrous impacts on marginalized (particularly Black) students while failing to
even prevent or address what’s being perceived as misbehavior (MacSuga-Gage et al., 2020;
Gopalan & Nelson, 2019; Gregory & Fergus, 2017; Milner, 2013; Gladden, 2002).
Coercive, control-oriented approaches to school policy are largely ineffective for
directing students’ moral and intellectual development (Oakes et al., 2008; Kohn, 2006).
However, more immediate to students’ concerns in this study are the impacts of these
policies on students’ experience of personhood, particularly their access to key rights like
‘respect’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘trust. Previous studies (e.g., Taines, 2012, Newmann, 1981)
suggest that students, especially marginalized students, experience “alienation… isolation,
and normlessness” as a result of schools’ “demeaning or unfair” policies (Taines, p. 57).
Watson (1984) similarly suggests that attempts to strictly control student behavior may cause
children to internalize negative conceptions about their moral abilities, “undermining their
natural predispositions to develop self-controls and… uphold cultural norms and values” (p.
42). In either case, scholars’ concerns map onto students’ findings that policies which they
see as punishing children preemptively undermine children’s sense that they are being
respected as full persons in school.
“Teachers get invasive of our privacy”
One student, summarizing a range of experiences and feelings from their classmates,
observed “[kids] don’t have any privacy [at school] except in the bathroom” (GS). (As I’ll
42
explore later, some middle schoolers questioned even that caveat, citing adult surveillance
over when and how they use the restroom during the school day.) Middle schoolers
described teachers “staring at [them]” (EB), waiting and watching closely for the slightest hint
of misbehavior, as well as “looking over [their] shoulder” (LM) and “listen[ing] in on [their]
conversations” (VH). They also pointed to the physical and digital tools that enabled their
constant surveillance by adults. One seventh grader pointed out, for example, that “there’s a
lot of cameras everywhere” (BM), and many others mentioned their teachers’ use of
GoGuardian, an online program that allows school adults to see (and interact with) all of their
students’ computer screens in real time.
While some students felt that tools like this one could be useful for keeping some
other kids on task, they largely objected to teachers being able to see what they were doing at
all times. One group had a particularly emotional conversation about an instance when they
witnessed a teacher “reading kids’ emails that they were sending to each other” and to their
parents (LB)–students looked and sounded genuinely wounded and offended at what they
saw as a serious breach of their privacy. On the whole, students similarly felt that “there
needs to be more privacy at school” (HS) to counteract adults’ often “invasive” (EF)
surveillance that made them feel “unsafe” (KM) and infringed on their right to keep some
parts of their lives at school “personal” (DS).
Intense surveillance, as several scholars (e.g., E. Taylor, 2012) have noted, is a natural
extension of schools’ current narrow focus on controlling and punishing student behaviors.
The disciplinary gaze, as Raible & Irizarry emphasize, implies watching–and indeed, they
observe “powerful collusion of teachers with a broad system of youth surveillance and
regulation” (p. 1197). Schools are structured in direct opposition to privacy; they are and
traditionally have been “sites of [adult] surveillance” over children (E. Taylor, p. 225), and that
dynamic is becoming more extreme as security cameras and more sophisticated means of
digital surveillance become ubiquitous in schools. In a culture where schools are perceived as
needing more and more surveillance to “safeguard” pupils (E. Taylor, p. 228), studies that
have elicited students’ feelings have revealed their deep concerns with their lack of privacy
(e.g., Birnhack & Hazan, 2020). As Birnhack & Hazan note, students identify the safety
concerns that motivate increased surveillance; however, they have raised concerns about
surveillance creep (E. Taylor, 2012) that leads these measures to be used in ways that
“undermine an ethos of growth and the development of trust… and criminalize school
discipline” (p. 1314; Rooney, 2010; Warnick, 2007; Hope, 2009; Kupchik & Monahan, 2006).
As indicated by students in our study and others, constant and/or punitive surveillance
has a tangible impact on students. Besides enabling more punishment, this anxious watching
and correcting also contributes to strict normalization and enforcement of conformity (E.
Taylor, p. 230; Foucault, 2007), both of which disproportionately affect marginalized
children, particularly low-income children of color (Birnhack & Hazan, p. 1315; Weiss, 2007;
Kupchik, 2010). Consider empirical studies, for example, which have found that educators
disproportionately surveil Black boys when asked to look for “challenging classroom
behaviors” (Gilliam et al., 2016; Joseph-McCatty et al., 2022). These biases, implicit or explicit,
cause marginalized children to not only be more thoroughly (and often invasively) surveilled
but also more often disciplined–since, after all, the entire purpose of school surveillance is to
identify children whose behavior has to be corrected (i.e., punished).
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And while some studies (e.g., Bracy, 2011) suggest that many students are so
accustomed to constant surveillance at school that they do not challenge them,
overwhelmingly the existing literature confirms that “children and adolescents value their
privacy, especially when the intruders into their privacy are adults” (Birnhack & Hazan, p.
1316), and they experience harm to their sense of themselves as full persons as a result of
these breaches (E. Taylor, 2012; McCahill & Finn, 2010; Weiss, 2007). This maps onto
observations from scholars (e.g., Reiman, 1976) of the close ties between personhood and
privacy, which Reiman argues “is a social ritual by means of which an individual’s moral title to
[their] existence is conferred” (p. 39). To acknowledge someone’s right to privacy is to
acknowledge that they are a person with both the capacity for and the moral right to
autonomy in deciding what elements of themselves they wish to share with others. Melton
(1983) further argues that privacy is especially important for adolescents’ autonomy and full
personhood, writing that an acknowledgement of youths’ right to privacy “is predicated on
respect for the boundaries–both physical and psychological–of the person” (p. 100). In our
current context, in which students are reduced by adults’ constant watching from agentic
persons into “passive recipients of [adult] ontologies” (E. Taylor, p. 230), it’s only reasonable,
then, that students perceive their lack of privacy as devastating to their sense of personhood.
“I can’t think of any choices… that students get to make”
Middle schoolers’ concerns about a lack of respect and trust from adults also came across in
their discussion about student agency. School, from their perspective, provided them neither
1) meaningful opportunities for individual choice nor 2) “a say” in decisions that affect them at
the classroom and school level (GS). While students did express concern about children’s
tendencies to “make worse choices”, the vast majority argued for “more options” (JB) and
more opportunities to choose. “I can’t think of any choices besides recess that students get to
make”, one student wrote, “other than… whether or not to do work, I guess?” (GS).
And even recess felt limiting for many middle schoolers who lamented that they
couldn’t make relatively simple decisions like “whether to choose inside recess or outside”
(MHH, CM) or “to do art instead of recess” (JW). Similarly, the choice of whether or not to do
work–which, as Kohn (1993) argues, is a false choice since it incurs punishments like poor
grades or disciplinary referrals–felt hollow to some students who felt that their teachers too
tightly controlled how and when they complete their assignments. “I get very pissed off”, one
student wrote, “when I am told to do something else… but really I am just doing it in a
different, much easier way” (GS). Others pointed out that they often couldn’t even choose
what they did at home because while “home time is [children’s] time, not schools” (MR), they
ended up spending a lot of it doing “stressful” and “not-needed” required homework (EH).
Beyond withholding opportunities for individual choice, students felt that adults didn’t
give them sufficient voice in the bigger decisions being made about their schooling–they
largely agreed that it was unfair that “students didn’t have a choice or a say” in their school’s
rules or curriculum (GS). Middle schoolers in our study argued that “teachers shouldn’t be the
only ones in control” (AS); rather, “students should have a say in what happens in school
sometimes” (CE). Some observed that adults, when making decisions, didn’t or couldn’t
factor in “all that goes on… for different kids” (QK) as well as “kids’ mental health and what will
help them” (PK). Simply, students agreed that “adults shouldn’t assume [they know] what is
44
best for students” because they can’t really know what “students are going through” (RA) or
“what specific students need” (AS). And if children were more involved in decision-making,
students argued, they could help make “fair rules” (AW) that “give more options and take
things into consideration more” (AS). Presently, however, they described themselves as
feeling disrespected (BP) and “weirdly angry” (HF) at how little influence they have over what
happens during the school day.
Students’ frustration at their lack of decision-making power corresponds to other
findings from schools where, as Kohn (1993) notes, “students are rarely invited to become
active participants in their own education… [instead] schooling is typically about doing things
to children, not working with them” (p. 1; Silberman, 1970; Goodlad, 1984; McNeil, 1986).
Children often have little to no agency in deciding what they do or what happens to them in
school, their power mostly limited to choosing how to react to adults’ agendas, demands,
and threats (Yoon & Templeton, p. 56; Dumas & Nelson, p. 33; Jackson, 1990). Beyond being
simply subordinated by their teachers, they are “routinely and systematically silenced”
(Murris et al., p. 8) both in classroom decision-making (Kohn, 2006; Kohn, 1993) and in
discussions about how to improve schooling, particularly in schools that serve mainly
low-income students of color (Su, 2009; Oakes et al., 2008, p. 288). And, in response, many
children perceive school as “an adult-controlled space where children do as they’re told”
(Yoon & Templeton, 56) rather than a place in which they have power or voice as agentic
persons. And this carries observable consequences; empirical studies focused on students’
self-determination (Deci & Ryan, 1985) observe that students have a diminished sense of
autonomy and motivation as a result of having little control over what happens at school
(Chirkov & Ryan, 2001; Ryan & Grolnick, 1986; Grolnick & Ryan, Reeve & Jang, 2006; Patall et
al., 2010; Niemiec & Ryan, 2009). Researchers (e.g., Kamii, 1991; Kohn, 1993) have similarly
suggested that a lack of meaningful choice or ‘say’ diminishes students’ moral development.
Withholding decision-making power from students, then, may have deleterious
academic, motivational, and moral effects, but perhaps the greatest impact of not allowing
students a say in what happens at school is that students’ “intrinsic value” as persons is
undermined (Kohn, 1993, p. 5). It corrodes children’s sense of themselves as “people whose
current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously” (p. 5; Charnoff, 1981),
denying them trust, dignity, and agency. And while agency, as I’ve outlined, does not alone
characterize persons, it’s clear that the abilities to make choices and have meaningful input
on the direction of one’s life are essential for personhood.
“One grade shouldn’t decide our future”
Students also identified evaluation practices–both classroom grading and standardized

testing–as “unfair” (CE) along two major dimensions: their teachers’ influence over how they
are evaluated, and how the current assessment paradigm reduces them to “one grade” (BB)
or “one test” (GS) or “one number” (NS). While students appeared to accept grades as an
inevitable part of school, they almost universally identified the fear of getting bad grades as
among their biggest stressors. “It is very stressful to keep up with good grades” (XI), students
agreed, because “people get a lot of work” (BG) and “teachers [often] don’t give enough help”
(AS). The role that teachers play in students’ grades, both as grader and instructor, was a
prominent theme in students’ reflections. “If I get a bad grade, it’s because I didn’t understand
45
the subject”, one student reminded (RK). Another pointed out that teachers often simply tell
struggling students to “pay more attention”, but “[students still] don’t understand” what their
teachers are trying to convey (GS). Students largely felt that “when [they] don’t understand
the material, [they] don’t get the help [they] need”, leading some students to say that they
felt that teachers “let you get bad grades” because “students don’t get their questions
answered or get them answered quick enough” (BG).
Many students went beyond teachers’ problematic authority as grader, directing their
attention to the unfair “grading system”, instead (GS, CE). “Grades drop faster than you can fix
them” (QK), students said; one lamented that “if you get a 90 on a test and you have a 70”,
you only “go up a little” (JW). Others pointed to schools’ dependence on summative
assessments, highlighting their belief that many of their classmates with bad grades are
struggling mainly because “[they] don’t understand tests” (LB). And in fact, testing (especially
standardized testing) was referenced by nearly every child as their biggest problem with
assessment. Children identified some good reasons why testing could be helpful–“it gives us
good information [for] what I have to work on” (LW), as one student wrote, and others said it
could be “appropriate for [measuring] learning progress” (AS). However, students almost
universally resented how “stressful” (HS) and “unfair” (CE) standardized testing reduced them
(on paper and in adults’ minds) to a single number from a single test. “What if you score a
496 if you need a 497”, one student asked, “but you have so much more to offer than being
smart?” (NS).
The intensity of students’ feelings about grading and testing appeared to be linked to
the importance of their grades and scores for access to favorable treatment at school, both
present and future. “Grades can be stressful for kids who want to go to a high school that
requires all As” (AS), as one student wrote, referencing the selective enrollment schools
which are often the most desirable landing spots for Chicago middle schoolers. And indeed,
the grade and testing requirements of these schools was a source of constant anxiety and
frustration for many students. Several lamented how high school admissions protocols “only
focus on grades” and don’t take into account “all the awesome things that people have to
offer” (NS). Their thoughts on standardized test requirements were similar; as one seventh
grader wrote, “It seems messed up that one test we take in April [determines] if we get into a
good high school… [some classmates feel] that their life will fall apart if they do badly” (GS).
Generally, students associated grades and testing with “a lot of pressure… because [they]
matter so much” (CM).
However, the consequences of poor performance, as students noted, aren’t only in
the future; several children noted how assessments are used in school to separate the “best
students” from the “normal people… in the ‘regular classrooms’” (NS). While this school does
not track by ability, students are sorted by standardized test scores for ‘WIN groups’–daily
test prep classes. Middle schoolers observed that this made “WIN groups… not fair for some
people” (NP); “it is really bad because we are separated”, as one student wrote, and some
students don’t get the same opportunities as their classmates “because of their scores” (VK).
The differences between these ability-tracked groups was a source of significant frustration
and sadness for some who felt they were “put in the wrong group… that didn’t allow me to
get to finish my work” (EH) or who missed out on extracurriculars (like helping out backstage
with the school musical) because they were in the ‘low’ group and not allowed to participate
46
(JS). Overall, the consequences of both grading and testing seemed to be borne by those
who struggled the most in school, like one student who wrote, “it makes me sad when I don’t
get good score[s] and it determines a lot like high school and WIN groups” (DS).
Schaffner et al. (2000) observes that “little research has been done on… students’
perception of [assessment] practices”, and that unfortunately remains true today–perhaps
because, as the authors argue, adults often place little value on students’ thoughts about their
grades (p. 2). However, existing studies generally agree that students perceive a gap between
all that they are–and all that they’ve learned–and what is measured on a typical assessment
(e.g., Schaffner et al., p. 4; Spage, 1996; Oakes et al., 2008). Similarly, the relatively few
studies that have sought students’ perceptions of standardized tests (e.g., Roth & Paris, 1991;
Paris, Turner, Lawton, & Roth, 1991; Dutro & Selland, 2012) indicate that students generally
challenge these exams’ validity and fairness. Typical teacher-centered grading practices have
been associated with diminished student autonomy (e.g., Schaffner et al., p. 10; Oakes et al.,
2008). Likewise, research suggests that standardized testing is not only a common source of
anxiety for children (Simpson, 2016) but a primary cause for students’ alienation from school
and decreased academic motivation, self-esteem, and self-determination (Simpson, 2016;
Dutro & Selland, 2012; Ferguson et al., 2015). This findings support Darling-Hammond’s
(1997) claim that our current narrow focus on grades and testing serves to “undermine
students’ motivation and crowd out opportunities for making academic knowledge
meaningful and useful” (p. 59-60; in Oakes et al., 2008, p. 253).
These impacts, too, are generally accepted to be greater for marginalized students,
particularly low-income students of color for whom grading and testing protocols were not
designed and who stand to lose the most instructional and recreational time in favor of
punitive test prep (Oakes et al., 2008; Au, 2016; Au, 2007; Au, 2009). Studies have
consistently demonstrated that test scores are “determined more by structural conditions”
like racism and poverty “than any kind of individual, meritocratic effort” (Au, 2016, p. 56;
Berliner, 2013). And as Au (2016) writes, “high-stakes testing has [forced] multicultural
curriculum and culturally relevant pedagogies that can speak more directly to children of
color and their communities out of the curriculum and out of the classroom.” (p. 51; Au,
2009; Darder & Torres, 2004; McNeil, 2000). And, as a result, “children of color have
experienced sharper curricular and pedagogic squeeze, resulting in a qualitatively different
education than that experienced by their White, affluent counterparts” (p. 52; Nichols &
Berliner, 2007; von Zastrow, 2004).
Taken together, existing literature supports students’ assertions that traditional grading
and standardized testing–both by structure and by practice–are inequitable and
counterproductive to the stated developmental goals of schools. However, scholars have
gone further to suggest that schools’ narrow focus on assessment diminishes adults’ and
students’ sense of children as full persons. Bybee (2020), for example, argues that
standardized tests reduce our imagination of children to ‘banks’ (Friere, 1968) for adults to
deposit into and then ‘check the balance’ through assessment. Yoon & Templeton (2019)
observe that schooling based on measurements of children’s performance “by culturally
insensitive scales of academic and behavioral ability” have the effect of muting “children’s
individual and collective agency”, two fundamental components of personhood (p. 58). And
Kohn (2010) summarizes these concerns in a review of assessment programs, in which he
47
suggests that schools have “turn[ed] children into data”–and educators into “accountants”–by
reducing children from full, complex persons to simple, discrete quantities that can be
measured, scrutinized, and manipulated by adults.
“Unfair… and targeted”
As I’ve summarized in this section, students in our study identified several components of
school discourse, policy, and practice that (at least at times) felt disrespectful or
dehumanizing to them. Importantly, students recognized that not every child is impacted
equally by every problem; across our discussions, students continually identified moments
where their experience of school is shaped by their identities. I’ve mentioned some of these
observations already. However, I want to highlight three additional issues which exemplify
students’ concerns about how the dehumanizing tenors of schooling disproportionately
impact marginalized children.
Our study school’s dress code has been a topic of discussion throughout the academic
year, both between students and between adults. While some children rationalized that a
dress code (even a “very relaxed” one) can help to “keep things in order, and professional”
(CM), overall they found that “students mostly dislike [the] dress code” (CM) and “think it’s
bad” (AS). There were arguments that the code itself is too restrictive, and several students
raised general moral objections with adults dictating how they dress. However, by far
students’ most pressing concern was that the dress code was “unfair and targeted” (BB),
especially towards girls. This, students argued, is reflected in the rules themselves–“the dress
code… doesn’t have as many rules for boys” as it does for girls (CM), for example–but also in
enforcement: “if boys wore something not in the dress code, they wouldn’t get in trouble, but
if a girl did then she would” (LM) and “teachers will publicly embarrass [her] for it” (AS). While
the girls in our groups spoke out most strongly about these issues, the disparate impact was
also noted by boys who observed that the dress code is “targeted towards girls” (BH).
In addition to what they viewed as a clear gender bias, students also expressed
concern that “some people can’t afford to buy clothes” if the ones they have don’t meet the
dress code (GS). This led some students to label the dress code as “expensive” (LB) and
“classist” (LM) in addition to “sexist” (AS). And although it was not nearly as clearly
represented in students’ analyses, a rule in the dress code forbidding students from wearing
hoodies up over their head prompted side discussions among teachers and students about
how the dress code may impact students of color disproportionately, too. At one point right
before one of our sessions, a black male student was directed by his teacher to take down his
hood. When he objected, a white classmate stepped in and said that hoods weren’t allowed
“because of gang activities” (GS), which some classmates (and teachers) later labeled as not
only racist but indicative of the kinds of systemic racial biases present throughout school
policies like the dress code. This led to further informal conversations about another
transparently racist provision in the dress code which specifies that when students are
allowed to wear hats (like out at recess), they must only wear their hats “facing forward”.
While these observations were by no means definitive, they do fit into a larger set of
intersectional concerns that students identified with the dress code.
Students expressed similar frustrations with having to ask for adults’ permission to use
the bathroom, particularly under the new rules where they had to not only ask but write
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down their reason for going in a public place. While students understood that “teachers need
to know where you are” (MM), they were angry and insulted that they had to ask for
permission–and risk being told ‘no’–to access something they felt was their human right.
“People should be able to go to the bathroom without having to provide a reason”, as one
student wrote, and “bathrooms shouldn’t feel like a privilege” (EC). Students offered logical
objections–“you can’t control your bladder” (LM), “we need to pee” (MG), “you can’t do
anything to change it if you need to go” (LB)–but also highlighted their classmates’ “feel[ing]
invalidated” and “controlled” (MHH), “like they have no rights in the situation” (LB).
Making students’ ability to take care of their bodily needs contingent upon permission
from adults–who may and do restrict students’ access as punishment for misbehavior–is
clearly dehumanizing. However, students also pointed out that this practice is especially cruel
for people who menstruate and people with disabilities and/or chronic illnesses. “Some
people HAVE to go to the restroom… for example, girls with [periods]”, as one seventh grader
wrote (LM). Several children pointed to peers (and teachers) they know with chronic illnesses
like Chrohn’s disease who might require constant access to the bathroom. And one student,
who identifies as a trans boy, further problematized this practice, saying that having to ask for
permission to go to the bathroom while he’s menstruating may force him to ‘out’ himself
(QK). Taken together, these concerns seem to justify students’ findings that this policy is
“targeted towards [people who menstruate]” (GS) and people “with medical issues” (SH).
And, as a final example, students also pointed out intersectional concerns when
describing their frustrations with school lunch. The fact that their thirty-minute lunch period
was the only time when students could eat leaves them feeling “hangry” (HF) and “anxious”,
according to their summaries. “The fact that even if we’re really, really hungry, we can’t eat
until the only time we get to” (JL) felt unfair and dehumanizing to many students. However,
the more common (and stronger) concern about lunch centered on the quality of the food.
Though children acknowledged that people work hard to cook the school lunch and that “it’s
nice of the school to offer free lunch” (AS), they largely felt that the majority of the food was
“gross” and the portions were insufficient. As one seventh grader summarized, “on the
[school] website it is stated that they serve fresh produce to us. However, when we eat our
lunch all we get is mushy fruit and veggies and cold sandwiches” (LA).
While it’s important, for this project, that students connected the poor food they
received to a sense that they were viewed as less than full persons by adults, in this section I
want to highlight the specific concerns they had about the impacts of “gross” school lunch on
marginalized children. When one student said that the school lunch is “like a punishment”
(BM) when he forgets to bring food from home, it prompted a discussion of how bad it is “for
kids that don’t have enough money and hate the food” (DS). “Some kids can’t depend on
their home for breakfast and lunch”, as one student wrote, so “[the school] should put in
more money for a decent meal” (PK). Another referenced issues of power and privilege in his
reflection: “we need better school lunch [for those who can’t afford to provide their own]...
the people who… aren’t the ones eating it… they just care about money!” (DG). The clear
implication then, from students’ words, is that unacceptable school lunch affects most those
who cannot afford to bring their own food, and even perhaps that this disparate impact
explains why adults (who don’t eat the food, and may prioritize the interests of the
privileged) have not made any real effort at addressing the problem.
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The concerns that students raised about the disproportionate impacts of the dress
code, bathroom policy, and school lunch point to a more general (and plainly obvious)
finding: the dehumanizing discourses, policies, and practices identified in this section are all
more common and more damaging for marginalized children. Talk between students and
adults in school is inseparable from “social constructions of personhood” that subordinate
people of color (particularly Black people), immigrants, people with disabilities, and queer
people (Power-Carter & Bloome, p. 144). School policies enact a historical (and still presently
dominant) drive to “teach children–especially ‘other’ people’s children–to act ‘right’” (Oakes et
al., p. 277), and thus schools are structured around “fixed routines, unambiguous rules, and
firm disciplinary policies” that punish marginalized children. And school curriculum and
practice, too, are “always and already emblematic of particular social and moral ideologies”
(Lim, 2013, p. 87) which marginalize and silence voices, versions, and interpretations outside
the dominant narrative (Oakes et al., p. 279).
Middle schoolers’ attention to these issues in their analyses demonstrates their
capacity to unpack “sophisticated ideas about learning, knowledge, curriculum, diversity,
discipline, and control” (Oakes et al., p. 298). Further, the concerns they raise underline the
importance of a critical, childist response that combats children's marginalization in response
to “students’ actual personal lives and the institutional barriers they [may] encounter as
members of marginalized groups” (Nieto, p. 199). As we proceed, in this article’s final sections,
to discuss how we can affirm children’s personhood in school, students’ findings remind us
that we must do so with the aims of 1) empowering students to navigate their concrete
sociopolitical contexts (p. 199) and 2) reconstructing schooling to place the concerns, abilities,
and perspectives of marginalized children at the center of our work.
Troubling prejudiced imaginations of children in our findings

“What’s true of attitudes about education is also largely true of the way we think about children in
general–what they’re like and how they should be [treated]” (Kohn, 2014)
In the previous section, I attempted to amplify and expand upon middle schoolers’
reflections on their experiences and their ideas for how we can best affirm them as persons.
They have made “painfully reasonable” observations and suggestions (Stein, p. 177), and at
every turn they have set the bar remarkably low for adults. They have asked us to speak to
them as persons, to respect their ability and right to make decisions, and to take seriously the
problems that they face and the role we play in perpetuating those problems. Some of their
suggestions are practical and (relatively) easy to implement–not yelling at them, for example,
or letting them walk to art class on their own. We must be careful to pick this low-hanging
fruit, to be sure; otherwise, it will fall to the ground and rot. However, if we ignore the
imaginative roots of those issues, we risk addressing students’ concerns only superficially,
patching over the specific problems that are easily identified and conveniently addressed.
Students did not only catalog and describe the parts of school that made them feel
dehumanized; in both our discussions and their written reflections, my co-explorers tried to
understand and explain why schooling is the way that it is, why children are talked to and
treated the way they are at school. Their explanations–like those of adult scholars–are closely
tied to how children are imagined by individual adults and by schools and society, structurally.
50
At times, students identified those imaginations directly: “adults think they are superior [to
kids]” (BP), “adults think because [kids] are young that makes them dumb” (HS), or “[adults]
don’t think the kid is quite a person” (JS). In other instances, they captured the way children
were being imagined using metaphors, comparing themselves to “animals being herded”,
“objects”, “inmates”, or “robots”.
Recall that scholars like Young-Bruehl (2012) have similarly theorized that children’s
subjugation is enabled and legitimated by our culture’s “profoundly distorted” (Wall, 2010a, p.
2) imaginations of children (p. 18). Dumas & Nelson extended this thinking to schools,
specifically, arguing that they should be critiqued as sites in which prejudiced notions of
childhood are constructed and reinforced (p. 33). In this section, I lay out several of the most
prominent imaginations of children conveyed (or explicitly named) in students’ analyses,
mapping their findings onto existing theory from education and critical child studies scholars.
Though the practices, policies, and discourses of schools manifest different–and sometimes
contradictory–notions about children and childhood, I argue that they all share a central
refusal to affirm children’s full personhood and equal moral standing relative to adults. By
excavating and unsettling these prejudiced imaginations of children, my hope is that we may
begin to understand what will be required to reconstruct schooling in response to
children–not simply changes in practice and policy, but a constant process of “ethical
self-critique” (Wall, 2010a, p. 35).
“Good enough for kids”: Children (and their problems) as “less important” than adults
During our discussion about the poor quality of school lunch, one seventh grader jumped in
to share that he’d been served spoiled milk several times over the course of his school career.
Strikingly, however, he ended his comment by shrugging his shoulders and saying, “but, you
know, most of the time it’s edible… good enough for kids anyway” (BG). That phrase–good
enough for kids–emerged as a neat encapsulation of a theme that ran across several students’
reflections: much of what children experienced in school would be unacceptable for adults,
deemed too humiliating or cruel or punitive. Teachers don’t walk in silent, single-file lines in
the hallway; as one student exclaimed, if you look out into the hall at any given time, you’ll
almost always see adults “walking side by side, talking!” (LA). Adults don’t need to ask to go to
the bathroom, either, and they have separate, private facilities that students can’t use. And
my co-explorers agreed that if a teacher were to get yelled at by a student–even in
classrooms where it’s common for the inverse to happen–there’d be “real trouble” (AA).
Simply, what’s good enough for kids is clearly not seen as good enough for adults. Like
the high schoolers in Su’s (2009) research, my co-explorers understood that “if we were
adults, they wouldn’t treat us like that” (p. 150). Some adults I talked to recognized this
hypocrisy, too. One private school administrator shared that she often reflected on “how I, as
an adult, would feel to be treated like one of these kids for a day” (RS). She said she imagined
she’d feel “sad”, “dispirited”, and “miserable”, citing the frantic, inflexible pace of children’s
school days and the granular control that adults exercise over children’s rights “even to go to
the bathroom or just, like, take a break for a moment”. However, students in our study felt
that most of their teachers didn’t think twice about applying a lower standard for children
because “they think they are superior to [kids]” (BP). “Most adults disregard our [problems]” or
“overlook [them] as a normal thing”, they argued (QK), because “the things… kids want are less
51
important than what mostly [sic] adults want” (DG). We can find similar sentiments in
research soliciting children’s thoughts about corporal punishment (e.g., Saunders & Goddard,
2007; Saunders, 2018; Walton & Saunders, 2020). In interviews, kids recognized the clear
hypocrisy in adults’ ability to hit children when children cannot (legally or practically) hit back
(Saunders & Goddard, 2007, p. 39). And they, too, observed that this discrepancy was
rationalized by the notion that adults are “more important than children” (p. 40) and thus
deserving of better treatment.
Murris et al. calls this an imagination of children as “subhuman”, less important–less
‘human’ and thus less deserving of recognition–by virtue of their supposed ignorance and
weakness relative to adults (p. 7). When children are imagined this way, scholars suggest,
their subjugation appears largely unproblematic, even natural or morally correct to us (p. 7).
Rollo (2016), for example, traces a long history of dehumanizing treatment of children back
to the image of the child as “degraded [and] not fully human” (p. 61), arguing that children’s
status as subhuman has been used to legitimate their abuse and exploitation even as (some)
adults’ access to human rights has steadily improved. Kohn (2014), drawing from an analysis
of popular discourse about children, suggests that we as a culture believe that not only do
children deserve worse treatment from adults, they benefit from it because it will make them
more resilient (p. 17), more thankful for what they have (p. 23), and more accepting of “their
place” below adults in society (p. 104).
It is perhaps unsurprising (obvious, even) that children in school do not receive the
same respect and dignity afforded to adults. This certainly didn’t shock my middle school
co-explorers; they understand that “it’s an adult’s world, and children [just] happen to live in
it” (Yoon & Templeton, p. 59). However, it’s important that we recognize that students’
subjugation isn’t inevitable–rather, it’s an extension of a misguided, prejudiced imagination of
kids as ‘lesser’ than adults, either deserving of or resilient to harm and humiliation beyond
that which adults would tolerate. We can (and must) work to assure children’s equal moral
standing in schools. To do so, however, we have to unsettle often unquestioned assumptions
about what’s good enough for kids that rely, even if unconsciously, on an image of children,
their needs, and their dignity as ‘less important’.
The example that students identified–school lunch–is illustrative here. It should be
disturbing that we, as a society, have seemingly just accepted that the food we give to our
children in schools–particularly those which serve low-income communities of color–is
notoriously inadequate. School lunch programs are largely underfunded and understaffed,
neglecting the plainly obvious fact that, as Olson (2021) observes, the demands of serving
quality food to hundreds of people “don’t just magically get easier just because the patrons
aren’t old enough to buy cigarettes”. The poor quality of the food along with its relative
inaccessibility for low-income students are problems which are well observed and
well-understood, so much so that ‘school lunch’ is synonymous in adults’ minds with meager
amounts of gross food. And little to nothing is done to seriously address those problems;
even well-intentioned reform efforts (e.g., the HHFK Act of 2010) mainly focused on lunches’
nutritional value with little concern for culinary or aesthetic quality.
If there were any doubt about the adequacy of the food we serve to schoolchildren,
one only has to observe, as one seventh grader asked, “How many teachers [do] you see
eating the school lunch?” (JW). His joke, however, conveys a striking observation; adults are
52
clearly aware of the problem, and yet we don’t act on it even as children repeatedly tell us
how much it bothers them. As with school lunch, in school policy, practice, and discourse
children are almost never given the respect extended to adults (Kohn, 2014, p. 43) because
we, as adults, carry within us an imagined sense that they do not deserve it by virtue of their
being children. We mistake children’s resignation and our own thoughtlessness as evidence
that children are unaffected by dehumanizing treatment that we, as adults, would rightly
resist. That’s clearly false; we can see so in the frustration and resentment that students
displayed as they described their experiences at school. Yet, students’ age functions as a
shorthand (Lesko, 2012, p. 4) that marks them as less important, somehow less worthy of the
considerations entitled to adult persons. And until and unless we reimagine children to
position them as full persons, equally as important as adults, our students will remain at the
whim of whatever we decide is good enough for them, spoiled milk and all.
“Kids aren’t developed enough”: Children as objects of development-in-time
As Murris et al. (2020) observe, the notion that children are less important than adults (and
therefore less deserving of moral treatment) is enabled by a dominant developmentalism
which “control[s] the educational landscape” (p. 6). Developmentalism conjures the child as
“not-a-fully-fledged-human-being-yet, only having the potential to become a complete
human being” (p. 6) by progressing through development in time towards adulthood (Lesko,
2013). And this imagination flowed through several students’ reflections in our study. Some
cited developmentalist ideas as justification for what rights they weren’t afforded by adults–
“there are things that kids aren’t developed enough to do”, one seventh grader reasoned (JS).
“It’s good that kids are treated unlike adults because they aren’t adults yet”, another wrote,
implying that children’s perceived incompleteness made them unable to reason for
themselves (BG). These comments were met firmly by replies from classmates who pointed
out that adults, too, often “act like children… [and] don’t make the best decisions” (SH). Some
middle schoolers even leveraged developmentalism to advocate for themselves. One
student railed against the dress code, for example, by insisting that she was too young for her
body to be sexualized by adults–she called out the “disgusting” implication that it was
inappropriate for her to wear sleeveless shirts, arguing that she was not yet developed
enough for adults to think about her in such a “gross” way (LM). Others drew explicit contrasts
between themselves, as middle schoolers, and “younger kids” (LF). “Now that we’re older”,
many students agreed, “teachers should trust us to be more responsible” (NS).
Underneath all of these different assertions is a shared, developmentalist sense that a
person’s age determines not only their abilities but their access to key aspects of personhood
like autonomy and dignity. It shouldn’t surprise us that children believe this; after all,
developmentalism is perhaps the dominant frame through which children are viewed in
society In schools, particularly, talk about ‘children’s brains’, stages of development, and what
certain-aged children are like or can’t do is ubiquitous–so much so that we seldom pause to
consider developmentalism’s underlying assumptions. Lesko (2013) reminds us that our
modern understanding of children’s “development in time” is a somewhat recent invention,
emerging alongside the standardization and industrialization of time in the early twentieth
century (p. 92). Bolstered by new, scientific ideas about “timely development”, childhood was
conceived as essentially temporal, its moral aim to “develop into the temporality of
53
adulthood (Wall, 2010a, p. 62). And children became expected to develop on “identical
timetables “on identical timetables” and were punished for both delay and precocity–that is,
learning or behaving in a way reserved for adults (Lesko, 2013, p. 105). These
developmentalist norms persist today—schools are quite literally organized around a “strict
division of humans according to chronological age” and development (Biswas, 2020, p. 19).
Scholars have thoroughly criticized developmentalism on the grounds of its scientific
and methodological validity (e.g., Donaldson, 1978), its enforcement of normative ideas of
development (e.g., Egan, 2002; Lesko, 2013; Stockton, 2009), its reduction of complex
issues to convenient generalizations (e.g., Dahlberg et al., 2013; Moss, 2014), and its capitalist
and colonialist implications (e.g., Burman, 1994; 2008; Lesko, 2013; Rollo, 2016, 2018). It’s
apparent that assuming that children, an immensely diverse class of complex persons, can be
sorted into chronological categories does little to help us understand or serve actual kids;
rather, it simply flattens out children’s diversity and agency in favor of creating useful
developmental caricatures which legitimate their oppression and subjugation by adults. For
the purposes of this article, however, I want to focus on the obstacles that developmentalist
notions of the child present to affirming children’s personhood, specifically. The problem with
our dominant “stageism” (Wall, 2010a, p. 81), is not in how it fails to study children—in fact, it
does so quite extensively—but rather because it makes “flatly unilinear assumptions” about
children, their moral agency relative to adults, and their progression through moral time.
As Wall points out, the developmentalist narrative relies on the idea that children
grow and develop towards a specific destination–namely, a hegemonic vision for adulthood
(p. 29):
“Childhood is interpreted through the lens of what children are not yet, namely,
developed adults. Adulthood, in contrast, is usually considered somehow complete, or
at least more complete. To have developed fully is to have reached some kind of
non-childlike humanity… childhood is given value chiefly as a means to adulthood”.
This unstated assumption that adults are ideal persons who have reached the end-point of
human development, the telos of human progress (Rollo, 2016), excessively idealizes
adults–namely “white, rational adult male[s]” (Murris et al., p. 8), as autonomous,
independent, and mature (Saunders, 2018, p. 63; quoting Rosen, 2007, p. 299). In contrast
to adult, ‘complete’ persons, the position of children and adolescents “remains one of lack or
absence” (Lesko, 2013, p. 111). This contributes to an ingrained sense in our society that while
“adults are people who are”, children only “will be in the future” (p. 111). Rather than being
current humans, children are imagined as developmental objects for adults to “measure,
compare, control, and actively form” into the proper, future persons that they are expected to
become (Cregan & Cuthbert, 2014, p. 11). And this, of course, stands to harm most children
who are the furthest from being white rational adult males–namely marginalized and
“divergent or noncompliant youth” (Lesko, Simmons, & Uva, p. 3)–who may never develop
along the timelines or towards the targets that the dominant culture sets out for them.
This imagination of children as “becoming-adults” (Dahlberg et al., 2013, p. 48) or
“potential adults” (Rollo, 2016, p. 70) powerfully influences their experience of schooling.
Goals for children’s proper development “influence adult engagement with youth and
emphasize that rules, guidance, and curricula prepare them for some time in the future rather
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than here and now” (Lesko, Simmons, & Uva, p. 2). When I questioned one teacher, for
example, why their school shouldn’t give middle schoolers the freedom that their
similar-aged peers enjoyed in high school, she answered, “We feel that we’re scaffolding
students so that they’re ready to do all that once they’re older” (RS). Practices like making
students walk silently in lines, making them ask to go to the bathroom, or exercising granular
control over their behavior are justified by the notion that they’re required to make students
grow into the ‘right’ kinds of adults. Even children’s play, as Wall (2010a) observes, is often
“interpreted as a means for development into adulthood rather than an interest in and of
itself” (p. 119). Consider, for example, the prevalence of arguments to preserve recess for
elementary school students not because children are entitled to it, but because it supports
their cognitive, social, and (importantly) academic development (e.g., Murray et al., 2013).
Schools’ developmentalist understanding of children may not always even lead them
to punitive responses–they may, for example, see children’s supposed incompleteness as
impetus to ‘protect’ their ‘innocence’ or instruct them to guide their precarious growth (Murris
et al., p. 7). This, however, also contains its own dehumanizing tendencies (Wall, 2010a, p.
24). For one thing, a narrow focus on children’s purity “can too often suggest a certain
invulnerability” (p. 24) to harm and marginalization. It also importantly strips humanity–and
children, especially–of “genuine moral diversity” (p. 29). “However much they have in
common with their peers”, Wall observes, children experience themselves as in part creators
of their own unique development in time” (p. 72). Each child, each human, is “narratively
self-creative”, and developmentalism minimizes both their differences and their moral
agency (p. 81). As a result, kids graduate through our developmentalist educational scheme
into adulthood “having been deprived of their own history-making power, their ability to act
upon the world in significant and meaningful ways” (Polakow, 1992, p. 8).
Children are painfully aware of the discrepancies between our developmentalist
images of them and what they’re actually capable of, as evidenced by our study. When I
asked students if they thought children could make important changes in their schools, they
resoundingly agreed that kids could, but that adults wouldn’t let them because, as one seventh
grader wrote, “adults think that because [kids] are young that makes them dumb” (JL). Some
students went even further, arguing that adults’ developmentalist ideas may actually create
the supposed deficiencies which adults use to justify control over students. One child
hypothesized, “I kinda think we’ve already been manipulated, because the reason we’re
agreeing [that kids aren’t able to make good choices] is because… it’s the way we’re treated…
maybe if we were treated differently for our entire lives, we would think differently” (DG).
Lesko (2013) suggests a similar phenomenon: “youths’ passive temporal position, always
‘becoming’, waiting for the future to arrive, may effect the identity crises that, in turn, prove
[their] need to be kept with little power and few decisions” (p. 112).
There is, in schools, this incredibly contradictory attitude towards children’s capabilities
where developmentalist notions about what children can do runs up against accountability
structured focused on what students must do to keep schools running smoothly. We came to
call this ‘the responsibility trap’ in our study. Students pointed out that their school’s stated
goal is to, as their principal said, “develop leaders… who will take responsibility at every age”
(BK). They pointed to all the places during the school day where they are expected to
exercise self-control and responsibility like that expected from adults–doing homework, for
55
example, or behaving in the hallway–or else risk punishment. And they questioned why,
then, they were so often denied the trust and dignity afforded to adults that normally
accompanies those responsibilities. As one seventh grader asked, “Teachers want us to take
care of ourselves, our grades, and our attendance, but we aren’t allowed to walk to the
bathroom or specials on our own?” (GS). Another wrote, “Why can I be punished for sitting in
the wrong seat, yet I can’t go to art on my own?”(CM). On the whole, students were beyond
frustrated by hypocritical messages from adults about what they, as middle schoolers, were
capable of: “Adults are always like, ‘Oh, you’re too young to talk with us’, but then they’re like,
‘you’re too old to be doing that’” (JL).
Students’ thoughts, here, evoke Lesko’s (2013) concept of expectant time as applied to
adolescents: as Lesko observes, “adolescents [exist in] a temporal narrative that demands a
moratorium of responsibility yet expects them at the same time to act as if each moment of
the present is consequential” (p. 91). They are demanded at once to be responsible (or risk
punishment) and yet are denied recognition of their responsibility and input in decisions that
deeply affect them because they are perceived, developmentally, as incapable of making
decisions. As a result, “children and youth are both imprisoned in their time (age) and out of
time (abstracted)... denied power over decisions or resources” since they are perceived as not
fully developed or socialized (p. 106). Both students’ and Lesko’s findings highlight the way in
which the developmentalist image of the child doesn’t actually fit real children (Stockton,
2009). While we place children in developmental boxes and insist they grow up how and
when we allow them to (p. 6), they continue to stretch and grow up and sideways and in all
different directions, defying our normative assumptions about development and our
conception of children as simply adults-to-be.
There may, in fact, be benefits to viewing children as becomings in the midst of
development—chronological, biological, intellectual, moral, or otherwise. However, we must
begin from the understanding that while children “change [and] become different with time”,
“that realization does not and should not challenge their status” as present beings (Spyros,
2019, p. 4). And further, we should keep in mind that children have already grown quite a bit
already in their lives—they, like adults, are beens just as they are beings and becomings
(Hanson, 2017). “The difference in developmental aims for children and [adults] is not a
matter of kind but of degree”, as Wall writes (2010a, p. 152); “children need to learn over time
— as do adults—how to form more complex and meaningful relations to those with whom
they share their lives”. They, like all of us, are in the midst of growing, but not in any one
direction. Rather, children grow all of the time in all different directions, consciously and
unconsciously, towards all different destinations, intended and unintended (Stockton, 2009).
We must not reduce them to hollow stereotypes based on what we think they ought to be
given their age, and (perhaps more urgently) we must not use those stereotypes as a cudgel
to deny them the recognition they are entitled to as the full, unique persons they are, have
been, and will continue to become.
“The school would be in chaos”: Children as dangerous minds/bodies
It’s important to consider why, as I mentioned, school’s developmentalist orientation leads to

more surveillance, punishment, and control of children. Why is children’s development cited
as a reason to more tightly restrain their movement, for example, or to justify punitive
56
approaches to discipline? After all, this focus could instead motivate more humane
treatment, as was suggested by a seventh grader who argued that adults should remember
that “they are guiding [kids’] futures and helping them” to become good adults (ID). The
reason, I argue, is our culture’s dominant belief that children’s ‘incompleteness’ makes them
inherently dangerous–to themselves, to others, and to society. This was reflected in students’
observations that adults seem to think that “the school would be in chaos” (BG) if it weren’t
for their close monitoring and restriction of children’s behavior. And indeed, we can see these
anxieties about children’s immoral nature written across teachers’ actions (and messages)–
embedded in demands for students to account strictly for when and why they’re in the
hallway, for example, or to never stray beyond adults’ supervision is an implicit belief that
students, if given the opportunity, are inevitably going to do something harmful. Some
students seemed to internalize this prejudiced imagination of children, describing themselves
and their classmates as “hard to control” (JW) and “out of order” (SH).
Scholars have similarly observed that children, in our culture, are largely positioned as
“savages” to be “civilized” over time through adult intervention (Murris et al., p. 6). Rollo
(2016) traces antipathy towards children throughout history, observing a ubiquitous
understanding that “adults are morally obligated to raise children out of the darkness of sin
and ignorance” (p. 63). Children and adolescents are understood, in common discourse and
practice, as “archetype[s] of naturalized violence… and criminality” (Rollo, 2018, p. 310;
quoting Duane, 2017), justifying “endless watching, monitoring, …evaluating” and punishment
by adults (Lesko, 2013, p. 94). Conflicts between adolescents and adults (or adult structures)
are framed by the child’s supposedly rebellious nature, and we, as adults, are conditioned to
identify the problem not as between students and policy but within children themselves. “In
this way”, Lesko argues, “the discourse on [children and] adolescents tends to produce a fixed
opposition between adults and youth approaching the permanent opposition of the
colonizer and colonized” (p. 110). Children are “declared naturally unfit”, viewed, “like
colonized peoples, [as] need[ing], crav[ing], demand[ing] dependency” on adult surveillance
and discipline” (p. 110). This positions the role of education as progressing children from
“feral… animal-human[s]” to “fully human” adults (Rollo, 2016, p. 63).
And we can see the consequences of this view of children as dangerous minds and
bodies to be disciplined and reformed through schooling. In our study, students identified
practices (walking in lines, for example, or placing their phones in ‘phone jail’) and described
themselves in ways (“prisoners”, “inmates”) that evoke carceral grammars which several
scholars suggest are characteristic of American public schools (e.g., Jackson, 1990; Kohn,
1999; Darling-Hammond, 1997). Schools’ imagination of children as carceral objects leads to
all kinds of dehumanizing practices, policies, and discourses, particularly for Black children for
whom schools often function as extensions of the carceral system (Wun, 2018; Morris, 2015;
Meiners, 2010; Sojoyner, 2013). And children need not even do anything wrong to justify this
treatment; rather, their status as children is reason enough for punishment. They are
preemptively guilty by their “bad, wild, … originally sinful” nature (Young-Bruehl, p. 291) as
“animal children” needing to be tamed into human adults (Rollo, 2016, p. 2).
One might point out here that much of popular discourse positions children not as
essentially bad but essentially ignorant, and that that ignorance may instead be viewed as
‘pure’ or ‘innocent’. As Murris et al. outline, “Children are often positioned as both childish and
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‘child-like’, the latter of which is valued for its lovability, fragility, and innocence” (p. 9). This is
reflected in imaginations of children as “natural” or “divine”, requiring adult protection from
corruption (p. 9). However, I echo scholars (e.g., Lesko, 2013; Nandy, 1987; Kennedy, 2006;
Rollo, 2016) who have pointed out that these more positive views of children are normally
only extended when children are acting in ways that satisfy adults, and that often hiding
behind these conceptions are anxieties about children’s dormant (but ever-present)
capacities for evil, resentment, and disruption. Also, these conceptions might be more
positive but, importantly, they do not actually ascribe full, agentic personhood to kids. As
Rollo writes, the animal or savage nature of children “has sometimes been viewed as
problematic [and] at other times… has been idealized”; however, “the equation of child with
animal remains” (p. 70). Whether children are seen as innately “lovable, spontaneous, [and]
delicate” or “dependent, unreliable, [and] willful” (Nandy, p. 56), both “maintain an adult
projection of the child” not as a person but as “physically, linguistically, and behaviorally
other” (Kennedy, 2006, p. 5).
Although “children generally commit smaller acts of violence than societies imponse
on them, as Wall (2010a, p. 48) observes, it’s undeniable that children, like all persons, are
capable of doing harm, both accidentally and purposefully (p. 44). We needn’t look very far
for children acting in ways that are cruel, like in cases of bullying, and unspeakably violent.
Wall cites, for example, the words and memories of Ishmael Beah, who as a child soldier in
Sierra Leone killed countless innocent people (p. 6). Beah’s story of redemption, he writes,
“complicates… any notion that children are inherently incorruptible or innocent” (p. 6). And he
goes on to suggest that such a view would be “strange and dehumanizing” in itself (p. 44).
Children’s capability for both good and evil, for both meaning and destruction, does not set
them apart from humanity but instead marks them as fully (even quintessentially) human.
As persons, children are capable of being dangerous or unruly–perhaps more so than
adults, because children’s “newness to the world” often provides them with fewer resources
to combat and overcome depravity (p. 45). However, they are no more reducible to this
potential for harm than adults are, and our choice to imagine them as essentially unruly or
dangerous says less about them than it does about us. Our control and punishment of
children, justified by what we imagine they might do, reflects the troubling reality that we
seem to be scared of the children who we are to love and protect (Stockton, p. 41). This is
undoubtedly most true for marginalized children, particularly Black and Brown kids and those
who may identify as LGBTQ+ (Goff et al., 2014; Wiggins, 2021). Whether we understand
children as currently dangerous (by their savage or animal nature) or made potentially
dangerous by their inevitable corruption by peers or adults, much of what we do to children
in schools reflects our imagination of them as phobic objects instead of full persons. Undoing
this will require careful considerations of the assumptions about children’s morality that are
embedded in our current practice; however, as we’ll see next, it will also require troubling our
seemingly insatiable need for control over students’ behavior and communication.
“I feel controlled”: Children as adult pawns
Whether imagining children as “little devils” or innocent “lumps of clay” (Young-Bruehl, p. 38;
p. 291), we position children as to be “subjected, used, transformed, and improved” by adults
(Kennedy, p. 5-6). And indeed, both middle schoolers’ work in our study and prior scholarship
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highlight how adults, particularly teachers, act to shape, subdue, and leverage children in
service to what they see as the best interests of children themselves, adult institutions, and
adult society. This reflects a dominant sense in our culture that the goal of schooling is one of
construction, of ‘cultivating’ or ‘building’ (Pyne, 2020) a person out of a child. This often
requires tamping down children’s own agency, which is seen as an obstacle to the important
work being done to them. Students, for example, maintained that while adults may extend
them some superficial amount of ‘say’, “adults are adults and [will do] what they want” (SH).
As one seventh grader wrote, “Teachers will [say they’re giving us] power but they actually
won’t, because they might say they aren’t superior but they still are” (BP). Another lamented
that “teachers say if we organize something we could present it to the principal, but the
second we do they shut us down” (JL).
Ultimately, middle schoolers in our study seemed to agree that “students aren’t able
to make important decisions… because school isn’t a democracy and [adults] make the
decisions”. This helped to explain students’ suggestions that they could only access power
when their needs and wants aligned with adults’ values and priorities–one student, for
example, argued that “we won’t be listened to unless we tell parents to email the school”
(LB). We also saw students, in their attempts to get adults to act, employ language and
reasoning aimed at convincing their teachers that the changes kids wanted wouldn’t disrupt
the values and outcomes that adults care about. This often meant softening or reframing
their opinions to put them in ‘adult language’. Students didn’t demand complete autonomy
(even when they felt they deserved it)–they instead suggested that they should be able to
“share our opinions on things that teachers decide” (AW). They didn’t argue to do away with
lines because they are dehumanizing (even though they are); they employed adult grammars
of futurity and development to suggest they need to practice walking freely to be better
prepared for high school (which adults care about).
Students’ findings demonstrate their sense that they are not empowered to act
themselves; rather, they have to wait for (or convince) adults to use their power to make
moves that benefit children. This recalls Ryan & Grolnick’s image of children in school as
adult’s “pawns”–“passive, reactive, [and] with little sense of personal causation” (p. 550). The
clear implication of this metaphor is that children are “used for another’s purpose… literally
pawns in a larger game where they are controlled by someone else”, namely adults (Tight,
2013). This strict control over children, as we’ve explored so far, is powered by a “dual sense of
[children’s] potential and risk” and an image of students as persons-to-be who need adult
monitoring and discipline to grow into ‘proper’ adults (Lesko, Simmons, & Uva, p. 4; Kohn,
1999). And, as Wiggins (2021) points out, adults’ control over children as pawns can often be
“rationalized through ‘positive’ behavior, where proprietary interventions strip away agency
and are explained as being in the child’s best interests” (p. 3).
However, our imagination of students as pawns prompts important questions: What is
best for children, and who decides? Adult control over children as pawns may be analyzed at
the individual level. A teachers’ strict punishment of students’ misbehavior may be seen as
her response to punitive accountability measures from her administrators or her belief that
children need self-discipline to be successful later in life (Reeve, 2009). Likewise, a parent’s
refusal to allow their child to participate in sexual education can be viewed as an enactment
of that one adult’s belief that such knowledge will lead their child towards precocity or moral
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decline (Lesko, 2013). However, all of these adult enactments of control over children, large
or small, obvious or subtle, are part of a larger picture: schools are designed to imagine
children as pawns to be moved and shaped in order to maintain a specific, dominant “moral
order” (Bernstein, 1990, p. 184). This dominant moral discourse, Bernstein argues, “creates the
criteria” that determine “students’ character, manner, and conduct”; “in school, it tells children
what to do, where they can go” (1996, p. 46-48). As Buzzelli & Johnston (2001) clarify, the
‘moral’, the ‘instructional’, and the ‘institutional’ are one and the same in schools: adults’
actions to control and direct children as pawns are inextricably linked to the drive to turn
children into the kinds of persons that they and society value (p. 877).
This, predictably, has disproportionate impacts on marginalized children. Nieto
(2001), for example, notes how schools view children of color as primarily requiring
“socialization”–that is, training on how to “act ‘right’” (Oakes et al., p. 277)–and describes
schools’ attempts to “monoculture” marginalized students. Children with disabilities (namely
children with autism) often experience punitive levels of control from adults in the name of
‘building’ them into a ‘normal’ person (Pyne, 2020). Schools and teachers often also employ
dehumanizing, humiliating, and/or punitive controls towards enforcing adherence to
dominant English language practices (e.g., Higgins, Thompson, & Roeder, 2003; Martinez,
2017; Godley, Carpenter, & Werner, 2007). And, as I’ve previously discussed, schools are only
escalating their punishment of students who they consider to be “gender non-conforming”,
enlisting teachers and parents in surveilling students for abberant gender expression and/or
sexuality and ‘treating’ that nonconformity through counseling, conversion therapy, and/or
punitive religous programs (Scaletta, 2021). In each case, we see not only an adult drive
towards normalization (Sumara & Davis, 1999) but an imagination of children as passive
(though possibly dangerous) pawns to be steered by adults towards a normative adulthood.
One place where both middle schoolers and adult scholars observed this imagination
of students as pawns is in school dress codes. Recall that, in our study, students argued the
dress code was “unfair” in that it deprived students of the ability to “choose what we wear” in
favor of a narrow vision of ‘what’s appropriate’. Lesko (1988) observed similar patterns in the
dress policy of a Catholic high school, and drew explicit connections to how these rules
position students (and their bodies) as objects of adult scrutiny and adult action towards
greater normalization. Lesko observes that schools’ categorization and punishment of
“acceptable and unacceptable behavior”, like choice of clothing, are “both real and symbolic;
they represent a judgment about concrete actions as well as an evaluation of being ‘in place’
or ‘out of place’” (p. 124). Dress code, in particular, enacts a sexist image of girls’ bodies as
“dangerous and needing to be controlled” (p. 13)). However, Lesko’s suggestion that school
discourses, policies, and practices enact an image of children as bodies/minds to be
controlled and steered towards “the predominant conventions [of] the dominant class” (p.
124) holds true beyond the dress code.
Adults’ attempts to steer and shape children as pawns may, in fact, be
well-intentioned. They may be grounded in a belief that what’s ‘normal’ is in fact, moral or
desirable or simply expedient for surviving in an oppressive world. However, it simply leaves
unquestioned how ‘normal’ is a hegemonic construction rather than an objective reality.
Recall Stockton’s argument that children are “queer”, “strange” because they are “precisely
who we [as adults] are not and, in fact, never were” (p. 3, 5). And as Stockton observes, adults
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are driven to suppress, punish, and reform children to quash that queerness and bring them
in line with a vision for what it means to be a ‘normal’ adult. While this normalization affects
marginalized children the most, it straightens and flattens out all children in order to squeeze
them into the narrow visions we have for the kinds of adults we want them to become. And
further, by definition this pawn orientation excludes us from understanding kids as full,
agentic persons with intentions and abilities of their own. It encourages adults to construct
narratives for children while denying children’s narrative capabilities, rather than responding
expansively to children’s differences. In response, as Kohn (2006) suggests, we need to make
a transformative shift to reimagine children as shapers and movers, themselves, making and
learning from important decisions in relation with, not under the control of, adults.
“Like a shareholders meeting”: Children as products in neoliberal discourse
One main force driving this imagination of children as pawns (and resisting alternate
conceptions) is adult anxiety about children’s “likelihood to be able to find future success in a
neoliberal society” (Murris et al., p. 4). Recall that schools have become increasingly
dominated by neoliberal logics which position public education as primarily responsible for
“building human capital” to constitute a “competitive twenty-first century workforce”
(Savage, 2017, p. 150; Biswas, p. 16). Neoliberalism, Biswas writes, “demands a constant
supply of resources–whether that be knowledge, people, or financial capital assets” (p. 19).
And, consequently, children and childhood are reduced to “investments for the future–
whether [children] want to be part of that predetermined future or not”. Yoon & Templeton
(2019) describe what typical schooling looks like under these conditions. Schools and
governments hold teachers to top-down accountability measures which focus narrowly on
student compliance and performance on high-stakes tests, making it difficult for teachers to
give students autonomy or meaningful choice because “teachers are rewarded for quiet,
productive classrooms where students seem controlled and on task” (p. 56).
In our study school, students have 60 minutes of Math each day but only 60 minutes
weekly of art (and each other “specials” class, like music or P.E. or world languages). This
conveys clear messages about what kinds of learning are valued–one student, for example,
explained that “we get more time for Math because music is not as important as math…
specials, in general, aren’t” (SH). We saw a similar dynamic in the school’s recent choice to
replace, most days of the week, middle schoolers’ 45-minute SEL period with ‘WIN (What I
Need) groups’. As opposed to SEL time, where students explore parts of themselves and their
lives beyond academics, these classes focus on skills-based intervention (remediation) or
enrichment meant to improve students’ performance on standardized tests. In their
reflections, students lamented the loss of “time to relax a bit… cool down at the end of the
day” in favor of “just more classes” (JS). Students’ exhaustion with the unrelenting pace of
their academic schedule was perhaps best summed up by one seventh grader who, when
asked for his feelings about WIN groups, sighed and said, “I just want some free time, dude”
(JW). Filling the day with more academic time aimed at improving test scores–often at direct
cost to students’ ‘free time’ and other, non-academic parts of their being–is a natural
extension of a neoliberal understanding of children as products to be optimized.
Another important consequence of this imagination is “the disciplining of children’s
bodies and the silencing of their voices” (Yoon & Templeton, p. 56; Au, 2016). Students are
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positioned in our current, neoliberal school discourse as “objects of information” rather than
“subjects in communication” (Taubman, p. 123), denied voice and agency because both are
unnecessary (disruptive, even) for the outcomes that neoliberalism demands. This is also
reflected in the granular control of children’s behavior and voice, as students identified in their
analyses–“compliant dispositions (e.g., being quiet) construct the veneer of success and
progress” in schools focused on efficiently improving children’s academic performance (Yoon
& Templeton, p. 56). Making students walk in lines, dictating what clothes they wear, and
limiting their mobility around school were all explicitly justified by adults (and in students’
reflections) as necessary and/or expedient for getting to the important work of schools.
Students’ experience of full personhood, then, is subordinated when it has the potential to be
inconvenient for the neoliberal functions of schooling–that is, the improvement of a narrow
aspect of students’ being that’s disproportionately valued by those in power.
Au (2016) and other scholars (e.g., Kohn, 2010) observe that the neoliberal emphasis
on high test scores–along with the changes schools make to achieve those ends–lead schools
to reduce children to their academic data. This reduction has the particular effect of punishing
and blaming children for being unable to measure up to our standards or compete with their
peers (Yoon & Templeton, p. 58). Students in our study school, for example, almost
universally identified testing as a key stressor for themselves and their classmates. While they
recalled their teachers telling them “not to worry” and to “do your best” (AS), they perceived
(rightly) from adults’ actions that their performance on these tests had enormous
implications for how they were viewed and what opportunities they would have. This was
true for high school admissions, where students saw “one test… in April” as the deciding factor
for “if we get into a good high school” (GS) and how they’d be taught during the school day
(JS). Some students expressed concern and/or resentment at being reduced to scores; one
child reminded that no matter what score a person gets, “you have so much more to offer
than being smart” (NES), and another decried the “inequality” of basing things like admission
or ability tracking on “test[s] only” without taking into account a kid’s “history”, too (JS). From
speaking with their teachers (my colleagues), I sincerely believe that they would agree that
test scores are wholly inadequate for understanding a child’s abilities. However, we as adults
carry out this imagination of children as data to measure and improve in our daily practice
and discourse. We administer tests and ‘progress monitor’ and make ‘data-driven decisions’,
all the while contributing to an imagination of students as constellations of data points
(Kohn, 2011), as numbers to collect and chart and scrutinize.
This crystallized for me during our school’s yearly address for families, which took
place soon before I began my research with students. We, teachers and families, watched as
our administrators spent several minutes analyzing a graph of primary students’ test scores:
“The green bars are how many kids are on track… the yellow bars are for those needing
intervention… and the red bars are ‘urgent attention’, since those kids are way off track” (KM).
Then, we discussed per-pupil budgeting–I learned that, in Chicago Public Schools, “each child
is worth about $4800” (KM)–and we calculated how many new students would be needed
to offset the budget deficit caused by enrollment decreases during the pandemic. And just as
we were wrapping up, a parent texted me saying, This feels like a shareholders’ meeting. I
laughed, at first, because it felt exactly right to me, but then I shuddered. If this was a
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shareholders’ meeting, I thought, then our students are the products. Not persons, but “a stock
of future human capital” to build and quality-control and optimize (Biswas, p. 17).
I don’t believe that this is at all unique to our school (unfortunately), nor do I think it
reflects any lack of empathy from my colleagues. However, it does underscore how
powerfully neoliberalism has shaped our imagination of schoolchildren and the barrier that it
presents for reimagining students as full persons. As Taubman reminds us, neoliberalism
“exclude[s] entire ways of talking about teaching [and learning]” (p. 124) because it forbids
any vision for schooling that doesn’t produce the data needed to monitor, evaluate, and sort
students. And “once excluded and removed, these absent possibilities are not
straightforwardly available” (Phelan & Sumsion, 2008, p. 1). There is no room for children as
persons in a neoliberal vision for schooling. And until and unless we make a drastic
imaginative shift to question and unsettle neoliberal grammars in schools–which
undoubtedly will require inconvenient, disobedient, or even radical action by school adults–
we are destined to continue our society’s legacy of “abolish[ing] child financial labor only to
replace it with child school labor” (Young-Bruehl, p. 277).
“I don’t think students can make a change”: Children as helpless victims
In this section, I have outlined a number of prejudiced imaginations of children which enable
their oppression by adults. And while I argue that these understandings are necessary to
consider how we might reimagine children and schooling, we must pause here to consider
how children are positioned even as adults try to help them. At times, my student
co-explorers and I drew a narrow focus to what adults were doing to kids and what adults
could do to fix the problems that students identified. And while adults–as authorities and
arbiters of power–play an important role in advancing children’s interests, this emphasis
appeared to disempower my middle school co-explorers. Several of them insisted that only
adults could make important changes; “I think students can request change”, one seventh
grader wrote, “but the adults make them” (BG). Our discussion, overall, was colored by an
assumption that “only adults can act in child-empowering ways” and that children, being
marginalized, are positioned to wait for (or, alternatively, demand) adults to act on their
behalf (Wall, 2019, p. 7)
As Wall (2019) observes, a narrow emphasis on children’s oppression often “offers
only a negative, deficit-oriented lens… rather than a positive, agentic one” (p. 7). Simply, by
focusing on adults’ attitudes towards children, we risk imagining them as simply “victims of
oppression” rather than “socially empowered agents and constructors of meaning in their
own right”. This would be a failure of childism, Wall argues, equivalent to if feminism focused
solely on women’s subjugation rather than on supporting and dvancing women’s
empowerment. It risks reducing children even in our most sympathetic imaginations to
“passive objects of adult socialization or harm” (p. 7). Children may, in fact, “reveal the great
depths to which power shapes all human lives”, but they are not “mere playthings of power”
(Wall, 2010a, p. 103). They may have little control over the world that they are born into, or
how they are allowed to act in response to it, but “the world does not reduce anyone to its
purely passive victim” (p. 40).
Imagining children as simply and entirely vulnerable robs them of their capabilities for
responding to others and to the world, creating meaning and social relations. Not only is it
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dehumanizing, it misrepresents the lived experience of real children. Bluebond-Langner, for
example, powerfully describes how children with terminal diseases “take an active
responsibility for the impact of their dying on others”, reassuring their parents and siblings
and recreating their own narrative worlds (1978, p. 232; 1996, p. 108; Wall, 2010a, p. 37, 167).
Biswas & Mattheis (2022) cite the transformative protest movements formed by kids and
teens fighting for climate justice. And in schools, too, research has demonstrated children’s
power to “construct themselves as subjects” (Candela, p. 139) through “resist[ing] school
practices and hidden curricula” (Dumas & Nelson, p. 33; Giroux & Penna, 1983). As Wall
(2010a) summarizes,
“As agents with voice, children construct their own worlds of meaning and shape their
surrounding social relations. They form responses to poverty, make uses of mass
media, give meaning to families, direct their experiences in classrooms, and engage in
philosophical and religious thinking–and with as much complexity and diversity as
adults” (p. 37).
As I’ve argued previously, this agency is conditioned by vulnerability (as it is for all humans),
but the two are not opposed. Rather, “agency is always conditioned by vulnerability and
vulnerability is in turn shaped by agency” (p. 40). Without doubt, adults need to do more to
not only protect and empower children in their current contexts, but transform social and
scholarly norms to create space for them (and their differences) within our schools and
communities. However, we must do so imagining children not as passive passengers but
“willful, purposeful individuals capable of creating their own worlds, as well as acting in the
world others create for them” (Bluebond-Langner, 1978, p. 7). We must act with and in
response to children, not simply on their behalf.
From ‘what works’ to ‘what’s right’: A childist vision for moral education
“When Lester asks whether we really need the boy, that’s a valid point… He knows he may have
trouble finding his way around. Nevertheless, I maintain we absolutely need him. He’s our living
contradiction. His intransigence speaks against us. We need him to balance things. He’s the listener,
the person we need to judge what we do. This is the power of the young. They know what’s right, if
not what’s left.” (DeLillo, 1976)
As Biswas observes, “adults have not only islanded children physically”–within schools, apart
from or outside of society–”but have also constructed mythical landscapes” which sustain
children and childhood in their imagined forms in spite of the real experiences and worlds of
real children (p. 47). This is a failure of our moral imagination, as Wall (2010a) observes, a
failure to think ethically in response to children (p. 169). “Childhood is morality’s most
profound test”, Wall writes (p. 10); and children demand from us “more expansive moral
imaginations” (p. 172). Our inability to stretch ourselves in response to children, to include
them and their differences as centers of our own moral trajectories, highlight a need–both in
schools and society–for expanding moral education toward a vision of moral growth for
children and adults alike.
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Several scholars and educators have put forth a vision for moral education (e.g.,
Dewey, 1909; Piaget, 1932; Kohlberg, 1984; Tappan & Brown, 2006). However, these
perspectives share a narrow focus on children’s moral development and training by adults
who are imagined as having “reached some plateau of moral certainty” (p. 170). Different
frameworks may have different ideal moral beliefs in mind, and they may differ in how those
beliefs are developed–by passing through defined stages (e.g., Kohlberg, Piaget), for example,
vs. receiving higher moral values through socialization. But, they share a core assumption that
moral education is “imposed by already wise adults” upon ignorant or “morally wayward”
children (p. 170). This belief, as Wall observes, is a dangerous one: it not only “separates
children into a pre-moral group”, but leads adults to assume that they have reached the
endpoint of moral development and that any moral differences between themselves and
children is reflective of children’s moral failures.
The evident truth, Wall argues, is that no person–adult or child–has reached this
imagined goal of absolute moral wisdom (p. 170). “No adult has ever escaped holding moral
beliefs that have turned out to be profoundly flawed”, nor should that be the goal of moral
maturity. Rather, it should be to be attuned to one’s moral limitations, to the fact that
“everyone young and old is capable of growing morally, whether in the face of changing life
experiences or in response to others or problems in society”. Through a childist lens, the
process of moral education is not one of transmission but rather of growth, a lifelong effort to
“expand one’s narrative and responsive horizons” (p. 171). We are tasked with learning how to
“create ever more self- and other-inclusive moral worlds”, and this is a goal we never fully
meet. Wall observes that children perhaps teach us this most clearly, “not because they are
somehow morally wiser than adults, but because they face the task of moral growth in the
clearest possible terms” (p. 171). Children are constantly challenged to “stretch themselves
into new stories and relations”, learning about others’ different experiences, navigating new
relations, and adjusting to their communities’ systems of belief (p. 172). They teach us that
the goal of moral education, of moral growth, is “not simply to learn society’s moral
conventions… but to stretch out their capacities for creating relations to others in society”.
It’s clear, despite its persistent association with developmentalism, that moral
education does not end upon reaching adulthood (p. 172). “Rather, if moral thinking consists
in responsiveness to others”, Wall writes, then “adulthood only widens the scope of the moral
educational task”. And we can see the consequences of adult failures of moral imagination;
the moral growth we have left to do as adults is plainly evident in the dehumanizing practices
and imaginations that students identified in this study. In this last section, I wish to extend
outward from this understanding that moral education “is a lifelong art of moral growth”, that
adults, too, are the addressees of moral education (p. 173). I want to suggest another possible
meaning for the term ‘moral education’, one that draws closer attention to the morality of
schooling. Rather than using ‘moral education’ to refer to teaching moral values, what if we
used the term to refer to education which broadened moral imaginations in response to
children, truly listening to kids and critiquing settled assumptions in light of them?
This article concludes, in this section, with four suggestions to begin forming the base
of this different kind of moral education. I argue that students must be included more
meaningfully as deliberators and decision-makers at the individual, classroom, and school
level. School discourse must become more dialogic to position children as subjects of their
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schooling rather than objects of adult ontologies. And, students’ work in this project also
suggests that schools should make the critical work of empowering children–and working
alongside them to drive social change (Oyler, 2012; Biswas, 2021)–essential to curriculum and
instruction. However, I believe even these significant reforms will be insufficient unless
school adults also make an ongoing commitment to “ethical self-critique” (Wall, 2010).
Building from childist and queer (Halberstam, 2005) concepts of temporality, I will finally
implore adults to take children seriously (DeLillo, 1985) as present persons in resistance to
our current dominant emphasis on children’s futurity.
“Students should be able to be able to make bigger decisions at school”
In our study, we saw that students resented feeling “compelled to follow someone else’s
rules, study someone else’s curriculum, and submit continually to someone else’s evaluation”
(Kohn, 1993, p. 1). They lamented not having any choices “beyond recess… other than
whether or not to do work” (GS) and, in response, suggested various opportunities for choice
that their school could offer them. They suggested, for example, that they should be able to
choose whether or not to go outside for recess (MHH, CM), where they sit in class (NS), when
they eat (JL), and what specials classes they participate in (GJ). Generally, while a few students
expressed concern that children often make bad choices (BG, LF), they largely agreed that
they should be able to make more and more meaningful decisions. “We can [give] students
the choice to do what is right for what they want to do and what they feel comfortable with”,
one student wrote (LW), and another similarly shared that “students should have some
options… sometimes, we should choose” (JB). And, importantly, this requires kids “be trusted”
(OM) and “get a bit more freedom” (SH) to make decisions independent from the goals and
preferences of adults, who “aren’t giving [students] the chance” to make decisions (AS).
Scholars (e.g., Niemiec & Ryan, 2009; Kohn, 1993; Kamii, 1991) have similarly
suggested that students be empowered to make more meaningful decisions in school based
on the observed academic, social, and functional benefits of greater amounts of choice for
children. As Kohn (1993) summarizes, drawing from a wide range of studies, enabling
students to make meaningful choices is associated with greater student well-being, an
increased ability to define and act upon one’s values, and a stronger sense of democratic
citizenship. And perhaps more importantly, Kohn argues that it’s means of reimagining
children as persons “whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken
seriously” (p. 5). The particular choices that children make are highly specific to the needs and
structures of their school environment; however, what may be most important here is to see
choice as a powerful lens through which we can describe, evaluate, and transform schooling
in our contexts.
In a conversation with a school administrator, she and I outlined a hypothetical
experiment for teachers and students to carry out: for one day, count how many meaningful
choices students were empowered to make. When this administrator and I carried out this
test at her school, we found there were shockingly few times during the day where students
had the chance to make choices that 1) meaningfully affected their schooling experience and
2) that weren’t severely encumbered by adult intervention or punishment. We imagined that
this would be the case in most schools, where children are generally autonomy-starved, and
it prompted us to imagine what powerful possibilities could be enacted if schools were to
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approach every element of their structure with the question: How can create opportunities for
children to freely choose? What about our school has to change for us to offer those choices, to
trust children to make them, and to enact the decisions they make rather than stifling them?
Now, schools may rightfully point out that the amount of free, individual choices they
can offer to students is limited. A student’s right to choice has to be balanced against not only
their own needs and well-being but also those of their classmates. And further, the size of
most classes and schools often requires that choices be made at the group level, which
restricts individual agency. However, as Kohn (1993) observes, student choice can be
manifested–and scaffolded–in any number of ways across contexts. The choices that
students can be empowered to make range from small–where they sit for example, or how
the room is arranged–to ones that more substantially change their schooling experience.
Schools can offer students choice over what courses they want to participate in; within
classrooms, teachers might give students choice over what books to read or what topics to
select for open-ended projects. Adults may rotate responsibility for making certain choices
with students, may offer suggestions and guidance to inform students’ choices, or may
narrow the number of possible options from which students choose. They may also negotiate
choices along with children through discussion.
Schools should be careful, however, to avoid offering students only “pseudochoices”
(Kohn, p. 10), which carry neither the benefits nor the moral recognition of genuine
autonomy. Too often, ‘choice’ is used as a weasel word to obfuscate traditional,
teacher-centered pedagogies or as a “bludgeon” to blame and punish children for not acting
the way we want them to (Kohn, 2003, p. 11; Crockenberg, 1982). We see this in the ‘choices’
that students are (often magnanimously) given by teachers which maintain the teacher’s
ultimate control over the student and their behavior. It’s very popular, for example, to declare
that we’ve given students ‘choice’ by allowing them to either write an essay or make a
diorama, for example, but not giving them space to make decisions about the content,
perspective, or topic of their project. Or, we purport to give students a choice even though
there’s really only one option that we deem acceptable, and we’re actively manipulating them
towards making that desired choice. And perhaps worst, we frame punitive approaches to
discipline as responses to students’ ‘choices’; consider, for example, how often children are
chastised for ‘making a bad choice’ when we mean that they disobeyed us (implying that
their ‘choice’ is between obeying and being punished).
This conflict over choice elucidates a problem which we should be familiar with, by
this point–children (particularly in schools) do not fit adult-centered frameworks which
presume that choices are made by independent, autonomous agents (Wall, 2010a, p. 38). A
childist response demands that we reimagine student agency in response to children “not as
an individual possession but… a highly networked and distributed potential which can… take
collective forms” (Spyros, 2019, p. 5). In addition to encouraging students to make
independent choices, we can engage students in making important decisions together–
taking into account the needs and interests of the people involved and affected by our
choices. As Edwards (1993) reminds us, this doesn’t mean the teacher should smooth over
individual children’s opinions in order to make this process run smoothly; rather, they must
act as a facilitator to stimulate (sometimes difficult) discussions and encourage students to
negotiate a genuine consensus. Teachers must be “in control of putting students in control”
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(Kohn, 1993, p. 9), giving them the power to make decisions–both individually and
collectively–and providing guidance that helps them to consider how those decisions might
be analyzed and approached as well as how they impact the larger community.
Seldomly are children invited to participate in this kind of decision-making at the
classroom or school level, particularly on more substantial issues that are traditionally seen as
in the narrow purview of adults (Kohn, 1993). Many students in our study, apparently
resentful of being passive recipients of adult decisions about their education, advocated
strongly that “students should have a say” about decisions that affect them (CE).
Some–either anxious about children’s ability to make wise decisions or pessimistic about how
much power adults are willing to give up–merely suggested that adults should think of
children more complexly when acting as sole decision-makers. One student suggested, for
example, that “teachers should think more of the kids’ mental health and what will help
them” when deciding how school should work (PK). Others wished that their teachers would
“take into consideration… what specific students need” (AS) based on factors like their home
life (QK) or their abilities (BG) or what they’re interested in (CE). However, many more
students went a step further by saying that students should have a direct, meaningful impact
on school decision-making. Specifically, they drew a contrast between being “asked what we
think” (GS) and “being able to make a change” (LM), and said they felt they should be
involved when adults are deciding how the school should be run (RA, AS, LM).
Students’ demands for greater voice and power in decision-making mirror suggestions
from progressive pedagogues that students should be deeply and equitably involved in
deciding how schools are structured and how their work is carried out. In addition to giving
students meaningful choice when possible, schools must invite students to negotiate (e.g.,
Boomer, 1992; Kohn, 2006) important decisions being made about the rules, norms, and
curriculum as collaborators and co-constructors alongside their teachers and other
community members. Though some (e.g., Mayes, 2013; Fielding & Moss, 2011) have
suggested that negotiation is ultimately limited in its ability to address societal constraints
acting on schools or to disrupt the inevitable power differentials between adults and children,
there is clearly immense “emancipatory potential” (Mayes, p. 2) in re-positioning children as
co-evaluators and -creators of their schools’ policies and practices.
There are powerful existing models for how teachers and schools could invite
students’ participation in decision making both at the classroom and school level. Class and
community meetings, for example, have been used across contexts to engage students in
discussion and action around issues that affect and are important to them (e.g., Stephens,
2021; Nelsen et al., 1993; Lickona & Paradise, 1980; Kohn, 2006). Curricular models have
been proposed, too, which give students direct power to negotiate what their class is
learning, how they’re learning, and towards what ends. Educators have demonstrated the
humanizing and emancipating potential of pedagogies of “radical collegiality” (e.g., Chávez &
Soep, 2005) which “require all participants (youth/adult; student/teacher) to contribute
desires, goals, questions, and expertise to the learning environment” (Lesko, Simmons, &
Uva, p. 10). “Storyline” models from science curriculum may also be a useful framework for
giving students’ greater say in classroom decision-making–in these models, students can be
put in control of deciding what questions they want to answer, choosing through discussion
and consensus what the class needs to do to answer their questions and how to link together
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their new understandings towards explanation or collective action (Reiser et al., 2021; Zivic et
al., 2018; Alzen et al., 2020). And, at the macro level, several schools have invited students to
participate (often with voting power) as members of school boards, committees, and working
groups where they are meaningfully involved and supported in discussion and formal
decision-making.
The ways that students are invited to participate in classroom and school
decision-making may vary across contexts; however, as Kohn (2006) argues, what’s key is
how children are involved and empowered in their participation. Class meetings, for example,
are not intrinsically empowering for children–as evidenced by their ubiquitous presence in
classrooms where the adult teacher is unquestionably the only one with decision-making
power. Likewise, many teachers have made the shift towards allowing students to make rules
or norms for their classrooms, but they mostly haven’t disrupted the implicit messaging that
students have internalized about adults’ expectations or children’s place in the school
hierarchy. As a result, “kids [often] either come up with the same rules or even tougher rules”
to conform to their teachers’ expectations or to comply with the subtle directives that
teachers convey through their questioning (Nelsen et al., 1993). It appears that the difference
leading towards genuine student decision-making lies in the intent with which students are
invited to participate, whether they are brought in to evaluate and make decisions for
themselves or whether they are seen as a means of legitimizing or progressive-washing the
choices the teacher intends to make regardless of what students say. This “engineering of
consent” is seductive in its offer of both the veneer of autonomy and respect for students
and the assurance of order and conformity (Beane, 1990); ultimately, however, it merely
“foster[s] the appearance of participation in order to secure compliance” (Kohn, 2006, p. 72).
In response, we have to shift our policy and practice towards involving students
genuinely–rather than trying to create the appearance of doing so–and committing to the
often messy and inconvenient processes and consequences of communal decision-making.
Adults must avoid, as much as possible, making choices for children. And though it may be
more time-consuming and laborious (and perhaps even more contentious) to discuss with
students rather than dictating to them, we must try hard to avoid taking shortcuts like
resorting ultimately to the adults’ preference or simply voting between choices that adults
see as equally expedient. “What we want to promote are talking and listening… solving
problems together and making meaningful choices”, Kohn (1993) writes, and to do so we have
to steer away from familiar patterns of authoritarianism and “adversarial majoritarianism”
which forgoes difficult conversations in favor of quick outcomes that ultimately favor those
with the most power (Barber, 1984). Schools have to create structured opportunities for
children and adults to meet and make decisions, resolve conflicts, and discuss what’s
important to them, accepting that this may end in non-resolution and refraining from
exerting adult authority in favor of honoring students’ participation in deliberation.
Though school’s practices and policies are undoubtedly important–as we’ve observed
–ultimately the critical question may not be the particular rules of a school “but rather who
sets them: the adults alone or the adults and kids together” (Gordon, 1989, p. 6). If there are
adult spaces where important decisions are being made, schools should take great care to
ensure that students are represented there, too, and empowered to not only observe or
share their thoughts but participate in deliberation and negotiation. One teacher in our study
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school, for example, observed that the Local School Council (which functions much like a
school board) has had a vacant ‘student representative’ role for several years. She suggested
the school take a simple step towards affirming students’ value as decision-makers by
allowing students to fill that role and to give that child representative a voting role on the
Council. This may not be applicable to all schools, but the thinking underlying the suggestion
prompts a few common questions to guide our work. Who’s in the room when important
decisions and policies are being made? (Where) are students during that process? Are
decisions communicated to students or made with them? How are their ideas, values, and
opinions sought, treated and weighed against those of adults?
Ultimately, we are called to allow children to participate more meaningfully in
decision-making; and as Wall (2010a) reminds us, “participation precisely means making a
difference” in one’s world (p. 129). The purpose of participation, through a childist lens, is not
to free ourselves from one another but to “create more diversely inclusive societies”. That is
not to say that children should not be empowered to make individual choices–as I’ve laid out,
there is both a pressing need and ample opportunity for schooling to be more responsive to
individual students as irreducibly different others. Rather, childhood challenges us to
reimagine what participating in decision-making means, in schools and society. As Wall
writes, greater openness to children’s participation will help us reimagine social life “in a more
creative, dynamic, and circular way” (p. 125). It will prompt us to structure school systems and
norms to encompass increasingly diverse values, perspectives, and ideas from children and
adults alike. And, it will force us to reimagine children’s place in schools as persons with the
ability and right to act as social creators, to be included in decisions that affect the
communities they shape and are shaped by.
“Teachers need to talk with us, not at us”: Taking a more dialogic stance
Making a transition to include children in decision-making requires a discursive shift, as well.

As Maxine Greene wrote nearly thirty years ago, it is becoming “increasingly indefensible to
structure schooling monologically” (1993, p. 212). We can “no longer set aside the ideas of…
dialogue [and] conversation”; rather, we must respond to students’ perspectives–including
their “excuses and arguments” (Edwards, 1986, p. 212)–and give them power and space to
“struggle with issues” rather than “rely[ing] on adults for truths and values” (DeVries & Zan,
1994, p. 193). Students in our study seemed to agree. Many suggested broadly that classroom
discourse would be improved if “teachers talk to students like they are adults” (HS) or “equals”
(MH), or at least if adults tried to “put themselves in students’ shoes” (SH) before speaking to
students in ways that they might find condescending or disrespectful. However, perhaps the
most prominent suggestion students made has less to do with talking and more to do with
listening. “I think it’s good when teachers respect students’ ideas and actually listen to us”, one
student wrote (AS), and their classmates overwhelmingly agreed that they would feel more
respected if they were included as participants in discourse rather than as audience
members. As two seventh graders so eloquently summarized, “teachers need to talk with us,
not at us” (KK, JB). When I asked students to elaborate on the difference between the two,
many agreed with one classmate who clarified, “the difference is [between] the teacher
telling you to do something… vs. you having the conversation with them” (AS).
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Research on dialogic models for classroom discourse suggest that such an approach
may have academic benefits (Wells, 1999), it may increase student autonomy and
engagement (Reeve & Jang, 2006), and it may help teachers “find out from students how
best to do their lessons” (CE). However, it also importantly positions children as
knowledge-builders and social creators instead of passive receptacles. Teachers taking a
dialogic stance often change the balance of talk in the classroom, restructuring instruction to
encourage student voice (O’Connor & Michaels, 2007; Wells, 2007). However, dialogue is
not as simple as having students talk more–as O’Connor & Michaels emphasize, “it is easy to
find examples… where a teacher asks a question, a student responds, and the teacher follows
up, that are nevertheless inherently monologic” (p. 277). Rather, a dialogic shift requires us, as
adults, to give up power in order to reposition students as actors in (rather than objects of)
discussion. Knowledge is reimagined from something adults transmit to students (whether
by lecture or questioning) into something everyone helps to co-construct (Hanson et al.,
2003). In dialogue, “the construction of knowledge is a mutual enterprise” (p. 44) in which
not only can both teachers and students participate, they must, since everyone’s perspective
(regardless of age) is both valuable and necessary for establishing consensus. And at the
school level, a dialogic approach requires that we transform our vision of policy from
something adults lay out for children to something children and adults co-create without no
predetermined destination beyond mutual respect for one another and the shared goal of
sustaining a school that aligns with the community’s values.
Scholars, practicing teachers, and students have identified specific changes that we
can make, as adults, to make school discourse more dialogic. Buchholz (2013), for example,
drew from observations of democratic class discussions to highlight how dialogic discourse is
best supported when adults invite and affirm diverse perspectives from students, give equal
weight and space to children’s voices relative to adults, and position children as experts in
sharing their own experiences and opinions on issues and questions relevant to them. Rex
(2000) similarly suggests that adults “validat[e] students’ personal knowledge and
experiences as academically viable”, “tak[e] on the roles of listener and learner”, and “redirec[t]
students to take on the role of teacher” when they have expertise or questions to share (p.
330). The types of discussion being had are important, too. Parker (2006) outlines two
purposeful discussion formats that lend themselves to dialogic discourse: seminar and
deliberation. Teachers can use seminar discussions to support students in reaching an
“enlarged understanding” of an idea using texts or guiding questions, and they can engage
students in deliberation to reach consensus about an important issue or a problem the class
has encountered (p. 13).
These shifts may require significant changes to the interactional structure of school
discourse (Hanson et al., p. 43) and may prompt us to question some well-entrenched
assumptions about how classroom talk should and must be controlled. Adults might choose
to physically reorient school spaces to encourage students to talk with one another, rather
than positioning students as audience members to be dictated to. They might leverage
routines and structures from circle processes to promote more equitable talk and hold
themselves, as adults, accountable for how and when they contribute to the conversation
(Kohn, 2006). They may also give students more power over the direction of the discussion
(Buchholz, 2013), perhaps inviting students to decide when to shift topics or to call on one
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another to speak. Wedekind & Thompson (2020) and others (e.g., Kohn, 2006) have even
challenged teachers to unsettle their expectation that children raise their hand and wait to be
called on to speak; they suggest that more equitable and dialogic discourse can be achieved
by shifting towards “hands-down” conversations where “many different students talk and
contribute to the conversation in a variety of ways”, including non-verbally, and where the
teacher’s role shifts from orchestrating classroom talk to “supporting students in leading the
conversation” (p. 11).
Restorative justice scholars and practitioners (e.g., Hantzopoulos, 2013; Stephens,
2021) have also powerfully described dialogic responses to ‘misconduct’ and conflict. Rather
than relying on adults to dictate rules and punishments, restorative approaches “invite
transgressors, targets, and witnesses to discuss wrongdoings’ contexts before cooperatively
negotiating appropriate resolutions” (Stephens, 2021, p. 6). This dialogue, which Stephens
describes as “rooted in love” (p. 6; Braithwaite, 2001), engages students in meaning-making
about why conflicts happen and how best to respond to them as a community. Rather than
depending on adults to decide ‘which punishment’ to dole out, restorative approaches bring
all members of a community together to figure out, as Kohn (1993) writes, why something
has gone wrong and how the group can solve the problem together (p. 9-10). Critical
educators (e.g., Duncan-Andrade & Morell, 2008; Pranis, 2005) have developed frameworks
and procedures for carrying out restorative discussions, often appropriating Indigenous
practices like circle processes and the use of supports like ‘talking pieces’, in which adults are
encouraged to participate as either facilitators or equal participants alongside children. The
particular roles and rituals of restorative discussions may be dictated by context and by the
needs and interests of the students and adults involved; in any case, however, it’s clear there
are dialogic paths towards resolving the conflicts that inevitably come up, even in democratic
schools and classrooms.
But while procedural changes can help to support a shift towards dialogic discourse,
they are not sufficient. It’s possible (not uncommon, even) for a class to achieve greater
balance in who’s talking while maintaining a rigid power structure that privileges adult
perspectives and ideas over those of students. In these classrooms, discourse becomes a
means of “thinly disguised manipulation” rather than negotiation (Kohn, 1993)–the
observable features of talk give the appearance of student autonomy, but the aims and
outcomes of that talk are narrowly determined by adults. One teacher in our study school, for
example, lamented how adults in her school claimed to respond to behavioral issues with
‘restorative practices’ (namely ‘talking circles’) but, in her view, actually ended up using these
discussions to scold students and justify the traditional punishments they were being given.
In this case, adults were ostensibly creating space for dialogue with children–however, the
purpose and outcome of that dialogue was already determined and the child was positioned
not as a subject but an object of the discussion, the receiver of the message (and the
punishment) the adult intended to impart.
As Noddings (1992) writes, “We cannot enter into dialogue with children when we
know that our decision is already made” (p. 23). Rather, we have to reconstruct our
classrooms and schools as “interpretive communities” where students and teachers are
working to co-construct meaning and make decisions together. This will require all kinds of
different discourse structures (student-led, teacher-led, and co-led), but what’s key is the
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“extent of ‘interpretive authority’ that is granted to students” (Mayer, 2012, p. 9). Schools will
have to adapt their norms around deliberation and decision-making to ensure that children
are in the room and empowered as equal participants in discourse. However, teachers may
also have to adapt their curriculum to allow students to construct understandings through
discourse as opposed to receiving them from the teacher. It may be easier for some adults to
imagine this kind of co-constructing happening in humanities classrooms, where students’
interpretations and opinions are often not only sought but made central to the curriculum.
However, teachers and scholars (e.g., Emdin, 2008; Truxaw, 2020) have documented a shift
towards dialogic, interpretive approaches in math and science, as well. Their findings, which I
argue apply across content areas, suggest that dialogic discourse is best supported when
teachers design curriculum and instruction towards an inductive approach (Truxaw, p. 126),
where the teacher presents a ‘rich’ problem or question, the class develops shared meaning
through dialogue, and every person in the room participates in dialogic discourse to
“investigate, explore, and examine ideas that move toward new and/or deeper
understandings and revised frames of reference”.
As Power-Carter & Bloome (2021) argue, dialogue supports us in imagining the other
as a person who is not reducible to our narratives about them, as an “I” rather than an “It”.
Dialogic discourse encourages both students and teachers to see the world through not only
their own eyes but to imagine others–children and adults–as innately valuable, complex, and
human. They quote hooks (1989), who writes, “dialogue implies talk between two subjects,
not the speech of a subject and an object. It is a humanizing speech, one that challenges and
resists domination” (p. 131). Our current social order creates categories which constrain and
silence marginalized persons, adults and children, and positions them narrowly as objects of
the dominant discourse. In opposition, as Greene (1993) argues, we must be “moved to
provoke [children] to keep speaking, to keep articulating” (p. 213). And in order to do so, we
need to deliberately reimagine and reconstruct schooling to provide opportunities for
students to speak, to argue, to tell their stories and to hear those of their classmates. We
need to invite children to share “what they are seeking, what they know and might not yet
know” (p. 218). Doing so will help create spaces where “the teachers’ and students’ voices are
equally valued” and allow us to develop “caring and humanizing” relationships across age
boundaries (de Souza Vasconcelos, 2013, p. 86-87; Bartolome, 1996).
Wall (2010a) complicates this vision in response to children, arguing that an emphasis
on discourse “assumes the largely adult perspective of a subject fully experienced in social
argumentation” (p. 93). Children “can in fact participate in social discourse”, but they often
have less experience than adults in doing so; and, as a result, their participation “is relatively
less likely to change the debate”. While, as previously mentioned scholars imagined,
marginalized adults may experience dialogue as liberatory, Wall argues that “under a schema
of discursive procedures, no matter how fair or inclusive, children will always be
systematically marginalized”. This does not dispute the importance or potential power of a
shift towards dialogue in schooling. However, it does call for us to reimagine discourse in
response to children, beyond simply taking a dialogic stance, based on the “profound moral
fact” that “it is possible to respond to one another’s irreducible otherness” (p. 94). As we shift
towards dialogic approaches to schooling, we must not expect students to dialogue with us
according to expectations which were developed by and for adults. Rather, we must allow our
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basic assumptions to be disrupted and reshaped not only by children’s participation in adult
modes of discourse but, more fundamentally, by their difference.
“I felt good because we are conquering problems”: Employing critical approaches
Dialoguing with children and empowering them to make meaningful decisions prompts us to
engage with issues that affect and matter to them, as children. Too often, issues of social
justice and oppression–including that which children face–are viewed as accessory or
tangential to the so-called ‘real work’ of schools, namely that which produces a measurable
change in academic performance on standardized tests. Students may learn about social
issues in schools (mainly ones that impact adults), and they may at some point apply the
ideologically neutral skills they develop in school towards social action, but these things are
persistently imagined as happening around schooling, rather than through it. Our moral
obligation to children, however, requires us to make social and institutional change the work
of schools. Rather than excluding or suppressing their participation, we must invite students
not simply as learners but social creators who both shape and are shaped by the worlds
beyond their classrooms. This shift will help us to reimagine them as persons who care about
their worlds and have the capacity to act together to improve them.
In our study, students appeared starved for opportunities to share their experiences of
schooling and society. As we wrapped up our sessions, they shared that it felt “good because
now teachers know… how we feel about things in school” (VK) and “because [we] got to talk
about [our] feelings” (RK). Several students contrasted this with their normal experience of
school, in which “most adults disregard our opinions” (AS), “most people overlook the unfair
way students are treated” (LM), and “nobody really talks about these problems” (LB). Overall,
students agreed that “we hit some major problems in the world” (JW) and that it “felt good
because we [were] conquering [those] problems” (EH). But while my co-scholars, like those in
Olsen’s (1998) research, were “gratified simply to have the opportunity to speak about their
experience[s]” (Nieto, p. 123), they also nearly universally doubted that they would be able to
effect the changes they suggested in our conversation. And as I think now about how we, as
adults, might support them in taking action rather than simply giving feedback, I recall one
student who wondered aloud, “What if this was, like, a class? What if we could have a class
where we fix all the problems with school?” (LA).
In making this shift towards schooling to “fix all the problems”, we can draw on lessons
from critical pedagogies (e.g., Freire, 1968; Giroux, 1983, 1994; Ladson-Billings, 1995;
Duncan-Andrade & Morell, 2008) who point us towards a vision of the real work of schools
as supporting children to collaborate “to address urgent needs related to their communities’
and their own liberation” (Stephens, 2021, p. 4). These approaches have been employed
powerfully to engage children of all ages in combating oppression along axes of race, class,
gender, and ability. Stephens (2021), for example, describes her third-grade students solving
problems together through ‘community meetings’ and taking social action by writing and
mailing letters to the White House in response to worries about food insecurity in their
community. Troutman & Jiménez (2016), similarly, paired students’ reading of Black feminist
theory with contributing to the #SayHerName and #BlackLivesMatter movements in both
physical and digital spaces. Chávez & Soep (2005) describe young adult students
collaborating with instructors and community members to compose youth radio pieces that
74
addressed relevant, undercovered issues in their communities. Across these examples and
others (e.g., Lesko, Simmons, & Uva) we can see how schools and individual classrooms have
shifted their understanding of curriculum and schooling towards a conception of education
as “community formation” (Adebe & Biswas, 2021) and social action (Oyler, 2012).
Biswas (2021) points to the educative potential of addressing issues which affect
children as a social class, particularly. She recalls the school strikes carried out by youth
worldwide in protest of adult inaction on climate change, and the reactionary furor it created
from school staff, parents, and government officials that children were “deliberately leav[ing]
the protective ‘learning space’ intended for them” in favor of social action (p. 149). In this
example, we see a flash of immense potential for not only education but solidarity-building
(Epstein & Oyler, 2008) and meaningful action that could spark tangible change on an issue
that affects both children and adults. We can imagine how teachers might take up children’s
concern about climate change–the problems they identify, the questions they have, the
solutions they suggest–as the work of schools. They could support students in weighing
different ideas for action, acting, and reflecting to drive further collaborative study and
movement. And, along the way, they can lend their own expertise and power to help
students become more effective activists, inquirers, and members of their communities.
Climate justice might not be the pressing issue for every group of children and adults–
students might identify other problems in their own school that merit this kind of collective
action. However, it’s important to highlight students’ roles in deciding what the class should
act upon, and that issues may be selected which impact children, particularly, as a social class.
Crucially, while a childist approach may suggest that our critical work in schools attend to
issues which are relevant to children, this does not exclude addressing other systems of
oppression powerfully impact schools and students. Epstein & Oyler’s example is instructive
of these intersections; in the first-grade classroom they observed, students investigated and
discussed child labor, an exploitative practice which affects children as a social class,
particularly, but which has particular impacts on marginalized children. Throughout their
learning, students uncovered (in their words, through educational experiences, and through
their shared social action) that child labor impacts especially children who are marginalized
by their social class, their ethnicity, and their immigration status. One can easily see how
similar intersectional issues could be uncovered and powerfully addressed if students were to
tackle racial disparities in school discipline, for example, or the escalating oppression of
LGBTQ+ children in public schools.
It may be difficult to imagine, practically, how schools could support students and
teachers in taking social action. Towards that end, Oyler (2012) offers a framework for social
action in the classroom that could be a useful model. Oyler first identifies the need for school
adults who “overtly value equity, justice, and the common good” (p. 147)–students, in Oyler’s
view, “learn through [their] teachers’ caring” (p. 146). This doesn’t only include the words that
teachers and other adults speak; rather, it requires that curriculum and instruction are
structured to promote student voice, student decision-making, and open-ended discussion
between children and adults that encourages dissonance and productive disagreement (p.
148-149). The teacher’s role, in a social action approach, becomes one of supporting students
in learning “mature civic participation practices” required to take effective social action
(Kirshner, 2008, p. 94) and creating opportunities for students to reflect and evaluate on
75
their process and the outcomes of their work (Oyler, p. 151). It is a role that combines
“activism and teaching” (Zinn, 2018) and requires that teachers focus not only on the
developmental possibilities of this kind of learning–how it may help children academically
and otherwise–but also on promoting real, meaningful action from students.
“Students must do more than learn to think about social problems” (Bryan, 1993, p.
251); they must act on those problems not simply to learn but “to create preferable and
sustainable conditions for humanity” (p. 252). Students’ work, then, must be guided by and
understood for its value in and of itself, for its impact on the world rather than for its
hypothetical benefit for the child-becoming-adult. The point is not to cleverly teach the
importance of capitalizing proper nouns through the frame of social action–letters may be
written, and discussions of proper nouns may become important, but the purpose remains
the shared action that the class is taking because that action is important for its impact on the
world in which students live. This requires restructuring the work we do in classrooms and
schools, as Oyler outlines. However, it also means we must unsettle our assumption that
taking social action alongside students is primarily a ‘teaching tool’, a strategy or instrument
for adults to transmit knowledge to children. Rather, social action is a capability and
responsibility for all persons, and it’s a collaborative enterprise that requires knowledge and
participation from everyone, young and adult.
Wall (2010a) calls for us to go further than this, however, beyond simply enabling
students’ entry into the adult-gated social action ‘space’. He argues that we must consider
how social action and social justice should be redefined to make themselves responsive to
childhood (p. 102). A chilidst morality founded in “responding creatively to others” (p. 100)
undoubtedly obliges us to combat marginalization of all forms. However, we are faced with
the problem that understandings of social action and social justice are “primarily centered on
the experiences and perspectives of adults” (p. 102). They are rooted in adult-centric notions
of independence and autonomy; and, as a result, it appears inevitable that “children will not
gain social justice if they have to act as if they are adults”. Responding to injustice in light of
childhood should resist this narrow emphasis on agency and instead prompt us to decenter
ourselves around even our most vulnerable others (p. 103). The goal of social justice, after all,
“is not simply to oppose power but to turn destructive social tensions into creative social
tensions that are more radically inclusive of difference” (p. 104). Reconstructing schooling
around ‘fixing all the problems’ means more than simply squeezing children into adult
understandings of social action. Children’s participation in the public realm ought not to just
be “a limited version of adult participation”, but “a model for social participation as such” (p.
125). We should expand our and our society’s moral imagination to remake our norms and
systems “in ways that are more rather than less responsive to others’ obscured voices and
experiences” (p. 104).
We can turn back to Biswas (2021) to illustrate this point. Biswas problematizes the
ways in which schools have typically only conceived of students as future citizens rather than
democratic participants in the present (p. 6). Children are excluded from social action and
placed in schools to learn “about socio-political participation in the future” (p. 7). Even in
critical pedagogies, they are assumed to be “default addresses of pedagogy [who] must
invariably be taught by adults” (p. 1). Biswas observes how, during the school strikes for
climate justice, children broke free from the protective learning spaces (namely schools)
76
“designed for and allocated to them by adults” (p. 5), and in the process managed to not only
participate in but reshape the discourse about climate change. And though Biswas suggests
that this case most vividly points us to expand our view of learning beyond schools (p. 8)–
since, within schools, adults’ pedagogical authority is “structurally protected and reinforced”
(Biswas, 2020, p. 4)–she does lay out some lessons that schooling could learn from the
climate strikes.
Biswas suggests that educators support students in identifying where their power lies
in an unjust system, perhaps even informing students about opportunities for democratic
participation by children–and their possible consequences (p. 9). Further, she argues for a
“radical re-evaluation” of what is taught in schools to include “pressing social topics” which are
relevant to children’s present and future (e.g., children’s marginalization, climate change,
global inequity). And, perhaps most powerfully, Biswas encourages us to view social action as
an opportunity not simply for adults to educate children but to learn from one another,
“highlighting our shared (but differentiated) vulnerability [as well as our] deep
interdependence” (p. 9). Working towards a childist vision for schooling will require all the
shifts that I’ve previously described in this section–taking a more dialogic stance, involving
students in decision-making, offering students more meaningful choices. It will also require
ceding control over what school looks like (and what happens there) to children–“letting
children teach”, as Biswas writes, rather than “including children in curricular planning where
the adult remains the epistemological superior of the child” (p. 9). This involves not only
restructuring what happens in our classrooms but broadening our capacities to see, hear, and
be responsive to what children show and say.
Reconsidering moral education in response to children
The shifts suggested in this section provide a promising base from which we can expand our
vision for what a moral education might look like. As Wall argues, however, without rethinking
moral norms in light of childhood, our attempts at reforming school practice, policy, and
discourse are almost certain to fail (p. 3). As we’ve seen, prejudiced imaginations of
children–what they are and what we owe to them–are reified, reinforced, and rewarded in
most schools. And while we may be able to make incremental progress, within this structure,
towards more moral schooling, we are inevitably constrained by school’s narrow
understanding of moral education as a means for developing within children the
adult-centered moral conventions they’ll need when they ‘grow up’. In this final section, I
want to argue for playing with these dominant, developmentalist notions of time in order to
stretch our moral imaginations in response to children. This discussion is more experimental
and perhaps more personal than previous sections. My aim is simply to sketch the outlines of
a childist rationale for forsaking (if only momentarily) our emphasis on the future children will
inhabit in favor of the reality they exist in now.
As Biswas (2021) observes, we tend to organize schooling around a sense of children’s
futurity, an image of what we want students to be at some point in the future when they are
adults (p. 7). We then backwards-map that idealized adult’s competencies and knowledge
and moral capacities; these become the standards and big ideas that we try to transmit
through schooling. And, we develop curricula to convey these things to children, drawing on
our developmentalist notions of children’s growth, our scientific understanding of how
77
children learn most efficiently, and familiar neoliberal grammars of audit, measurement, and
accountability. The emphasis is squarely on the correct methods, on doing what works to bring
about the outcomes–that is, the kinds of adults–we want (Giroux, 1992; Macedo, 1994;
Bartolome, 1994; Biswas, 2021). Often, those outcomes are noble and desirable: creating a
more just society, enabling technological and scientific advances, equipping future artists
with skills to bring beauty into the world. However, it’s worth unsettling, for a moment, our
overriding concern for children’s futurity.
Particularly, we must problematize how our adult-centered moral norms privilege the
adults children will be when they ‘grow up’ over the persons they already are. The binary
distinction between children and ‘grown ups’ is already fraught. It relies on drawing an
imaginary, arbitrary line to demarcate those who are ‘growing up’ from those who are
presumably up and thus done growing. It minimizes the ways in which children are
‘grown-ups’, too, having changed and developed immensely over their lives. And, as we’ve
seen, the hierarchy it creates–with ‘grown-ups’ at the top and children at the bottom–excuses
and legitimates harms inflicted on children which are seen as necessary (or accessory) for
children’s proper development into adults.
In my view, however, what’s most morally indefensible is that we constantly focus on
what children will be when they ‘grow up’ when we know that not all children will get to. As we
consider our moral obligations to students, we have to confront the tragic fact that some
unacceptable number of them will be deprived of the chance to become adults–by disease,
by tragic accident, or by unconquerable psychic pain8. I argue that we owe it to these
children, to all children, to balance our visions for the persons they will be against our moral
imperative to acknowledge them as the persons they are right now.
Queer temporality and childism as provocation for ‘tinkering with time’
This call for us to remain radically focused on a moral response to children’s present being
stems from the experiences of queer youth–who die in childhood at tragically high rates
relative to their peers, increasingly so during the COVID-19 pandemic (Cohen & Bosk,
2020)–and emerges from the concept of queer temporality (Halberstam, 2005; Ellis, 2011).
Children’s daily lives–especially in schools–are governed by strict notions of temporality
“governed by an imagined set of children’s needs… beliefs about healthful environments for
child rearing… and glanc[ing] ahead… to the future of both familiar and national stability”
(Halberstam, p. 5). And, they are punished for ‘taking their time’ to develop, rewarded for
punctuality, frustrated by being made to wait, and so on (p. 7). “Time weighs on children”
(Robinson, 2004) in large part because their queerness–their difference from adults–resists
the conventional temporal focus on “longevity and futurity” (Halberstam, p. 2). Their
experiences, however–along with those of queer people, who often experience
“stretched-out” childhoods and adolescences (p. 153)–point us to the possibility for
disrupting conventional accounts of time.
8
I believe there is good reason to think that these untimely deaths are sometimes caused by a failure to take
children seriously as full persons. We might consider the suicides of trans children, for example, left
unsupported (often even actively sabotaged) by the state or by their own families. Or, we might look to the over
2000 children killed by their caregivers each year (Rollo, 2018), whose abuse and neglect is commonly ignored,
excused, and perpetuated by the adults (at home and in government) tasked with protecting them.
78
Drawing particularly from the experiences of queer people “whose horizons of
possibilities [were] severely diminished by the AIDS epidemic” (p. 2), Halberstam theorizes
queer temporality in contrast to hegemonic, heteronormative conceptions of time,
development, and futurity. Rather than projecting out into some hegemonic notion of a
stable, predictable future, queer temporality embraces instead “the here, the present, the
now”, seemingly bringing time to a standstill (p. 2). Queer temporality gives new emphasis to
the present, slowing down (Biswas, 2020) so as to expand the potential of our current
moment and “squeeze new possibilities out of the time at hand” (Halberstam, p. 2). Doing so
may help us to wrest ourselves from the future’s stultifying hold on both children and
morality (Whitfield, 2020).
Wall (2010a) similarly suggests that playing in/with time is an essential practice for
reimagining morality in response to children (p. 62). He observes that temporality is typically
reserved for childhood–where adulthood is considered atemporal–and our understanding of
children’s experiences rely on “childhood time being relativized to adult time” (p. 72). Time, as
both Wall and Halberstam remind us, is not an objective, observable reality; rather, time is
“experienced as not only changeable in its meaning but also invested with meaning already”
(Wall, p. 63). And childhood, in particular, shows that time “is capable of tremendous creative
plasticity” (p. 65). Humans can distend time, stretching it out “from relatively small and
immediate experiences of the world into widening temporal richness and significance”.
Playing with time becomes a passage for resisting its objectification in response to the
temporal experiences of children, which are different from our own. As Wall writes, we have
an obligation as humans to “both live in a world of time with others… and to construct this
world of time with others” (p. 69). We can choose to do so in ways which lead to more
expansive moral imaginations rather than reducing children and childhood to the narrow
developmental narratives we’ve constructed for them.
Inspired by both queer and childist ideas of tinkering with time, I propose two queer
pedagogical thought experiments to guide our reimagination of schools:
Imagine you’re a teacher. Now, imagine if you, and only you, knew that the world
was going to end in the next five years. There’s nothing you can do to stop it, nor will
anyone believe you if you try to warn them. You, along with your students and
colleagues, have to continue on with school–nobody knows that the world’s going
to end, after all, and you still have bills to pay.
OR
Imagine if, all the sudden, your students stopped ‘growing up’. Time still passes, the
world continues ‘overheating’, but children pause at their current point in their
chronological development towards adulthood. And what’s more, there’s no
indication that they’ll ever resume growing up again.
What would change about how you see your students? How would your ideas
about them–and about schooling–change if you knew they would never grow
into adults? What would change about the way you see them, speak to them,
79
speak about them, treat them? How could or should schooling change to adapt
to this new reality?
Now, there are good reasons not to behave or to teach as if there is no future. I recognize that
imaginations of a better future can be a source of possibility and hope and that we must
‘bring back’ lessons from imagined futures to improve our present (Haivan & Khasnabish, p
248). In particular, I take Keeling’s (2019) point that an uncomplicated call for ‘no future’
erases those “for whom the future remains to be won in each moment” and who dream
“freedom dreams” (Kelley, 2003) to cope with, reimagine, and reconstruct an unjust past and
present (p. 568; Fanon, 1967). And further, I share Spyros’ (2019) concern that a narrow focus
on the present may keep us from recognizing and empowering children as “future-makers”,
imagining and enacting “new, alternative possibilities for the future with children”–not simply
for them (p. 6). Consider, for example, the #FridaysForFuture movements described by
Biswas (2021) and Meade (2020), in which children powerfully claimed ownership over a
future they will inherit in order to demand social action by adults.
However, these same young activists demonstrate the imaginative and emancipatory
potential of a radical focus on the present in an increasingly uncertain and overheated world.
As they fought to get adults to take climate change seriously, German school strikers
employed a provocative slogan: “Why study for a future, which may not be there?” (Meade,
p. 97; Biswas, 2021, p. 5). Likewise, the thought experiments I propose are meant to provoke
discussion and action in the face of evident indifference to how children are imagined in
schools. Instead of imagining the future, they ask us to reimagine the present: Why educate
only for the future, which may not be there?
“Thinking more” in response to children
Reconstructing moral education, I believe, requires us to resist our focus on futurity. Rather,
we should consider, alongside children, what is morally right to do with the power and
influence we have over current persons who are children. Every aspect of our practice, policy,
and discourse could be interrogated by asking, Is it right to treat persons this way? Is there a
more moral, more respectful, less coercive way to approach this? Is what we’re doing enacting an
understanding of our students as current, full persons? We could then extend outward to
explore, with students, what new possibilities open up for us when we approach schooling as
a moral act. These could become the aims we work towards through our work together as
collaborative learning communities.
This might feel redundant to those who feel like schools are already responding to
these questions. However, both prior research and my student co-explorers’ experiences
illustrate that morality is evidently not the driving force behind most schools’
decision-making. Rather, morality seems to mostly take a backseat to concerns about
student performance and the maintenance of power structures which privilege and empower
adults. And further, I argue there’s a world of difference between considering the moral
implications of our practice and making morality primary and central to schooling. This
perhaps more radically moral aim requires us to re-construct schooling alongside children
around a moral core. It leaves little room for compromise, little support for those who excuse
80
our current dehumanization of children because it’s what ‘works best’ according to narrow,
prejudiced conceptions of kids’ development and the adults we want them to become.
It seems correct, to me, that part of using our power morally may be to ensure that
children are set up for the future they most likely will progress into. I have qualms, though,
about how this rationale is used to justify doing things that are immoral to and with our
students as the persons they are, currently. One might argue that sometimes we need to do
things that are immoral to children to achieve a different, higher moral outcome in the future;
I won’t comment on whether or not it’s necessary, ever, to do something immoral to achieve
moral ends down the road. I will, however, gently suggest that it is itself immoral to
unilaterally decide that we can do things to children which we know are morally wrong
because we think it’s necessary for some hypothetical future benefit. It reduces children to the
narratives we have constructed for them rather than including them as social creators. At
least, children should have some say in weighing the tradeoffs involved in such decisions;
that consideration, alone, might be insufficient, but it’d be radical in many schools.
As Ayers (2004) observes, these moral judgments are not always easy. There is not
always a bright line between humanization and dehumanization; rather, the two often
become “impossibly entangled and difficult to separate” as we weigh out both the short- and
long-term implications of our choices (p. 16). I do not dispute that both the structural and
day-to-day decisions of schooling are “murkier, denser, more layered, and more difficult”
than I have portrayed, at times, in this article. However, I do not think the morality of
schooling is made less urgent by this difficulty, nor do I think our moral choices become
easier by focusing on other things. “As children teach most vividly, to think morally is always
to think more” (Wall, 2010a, p. 176); it’s only by making questions of morality primary in our
pedagogies–engaging in a continual process of ethical self-critique–that we can reconstruct
schooling in response to children and their current experiences of marginalization.
Adults have immense power over children in school, and perhaps the thing that
children learn most clearly from their experiences of schooling is how people with power and
authority wield it over people who don’t. (I shudder to think what message we’re sending
children on this front, currently.) If we were to model that power ought to (and can) be shared
and used to inspire communal action towards greater justice and equity, it seems only
reasonable that children will grow to view and use power that way, too. And, likewise, our
greater moral consideration for students might lead us to model greater emotional
awareness and mindfulness and a deeper dedication to democratic processes of deliberation
and consensus. However, these potential developmental benefits are not the impetus nor
the rationale for emphasizing moral education. Rather, children’s personhood and equal
moral standing provides an “irreducible moral justification” (Kohn, 2006, p. 81) for
reimagining the way we do school. And this moral imperative, I argue, should steel us against
objections to the disruptions that more moral schooling might cause to schools.
No doubt, this moral turn will likely come with trade-offs that will appear disastrous
and unacceptable to those who have internalized dominant assumptions about schooling, its
aims, and its purpose for society. Students may not perform as well on standardized tests, for
example, and school may look a lot less orderly than it does when adults, alone, have the
power to make rules and punish those who don’t obey. I agree that it’s important to be
thoughtful and intentional about those trade-offs, including those that may impact students’
81
future access to opportunities or future success in an unjust (yet firmly entrenched) social
order. However, as I’ve argued, their obvious moral status as full persons demands that we
“take these children seriously” (DeLillo, 1985; Wall, 2010a, p. 19), that we leverage what
power we have as adults towards collaborating with children to reconstruct schools and
schooling. While it may be controversial, difficult, or risky for us, as individual adults, I argue it
is ultimately our moral obligation to our students and children, generally, present and future.
82
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“What if, for a moment, we imagine that these kids are people?

A collaborative inquiry into reimagining children and schooling

Department of Curriculum & Teaching, Teachers College

- Woodhouse (2010, p. 3), recalling the words of a thirteen-year-old boy

As I submit this project, I would like to thank:

Drawing focus to children’s personhood

Reimagining schools around children’s status as persons, specifically, demands some

What makes a ‘person’?

How should we respond to children as persons?

‘Feeling around’ personhood in this project

Children’s current positioning as marginalized persons

The U.S. consistently ranks low amongst developed nations on measurements of

As Young-Bruehl (2012) writes, systemic oppression of children–and acts of abuse against

Children identify and internalize their subjugation by adults

Anti-child prejudice is reified and reinforced in schools

The urgency of children’s personhood in an ‘overheating’ world

Children’s experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic

Children’s unique vulnerability in our ‘overheating’ present

Though it might be tempting to treat these examples as discrete offenses perpetrated by

The necessity for a critical, childist lens

Critical childhood studies: The foundation

As a structuralist framework, childhood studies emphasizes the “social constructedness” of

Turning towards childism

Attempting to listen with children: My research approach

Listening ‘to’ and ‘with’ students

“Oh boy, have you turned”

Students reflect upon their experiences of school: A 3-part mini-opera

Act I: What makes a person feel like a person?

Act II: When do we feel like a person (or not) in schools?

● How the school’s schedule is set up ● Grades and homework

● How adults talk to kids ● Teachers choosing who can talk

Interlude: ‘Cracking down’

‘What keeps you from feeling respected as a person?’: Students’ findings

“Teachers choosing who can talk”

“Adults say mean things”

“Students who do nothing wrong seemingly get punished”

“Teachers get invasive of our privacy”

“I can’t think of any choices… that students get to make”

“One grade shouldn’t decide our future”

Students also identified evaluation practices–both classroom grading and standardized

“Unfair… and targeted”

Troubling prejudiced imaginations of children in our findings

“Kids aren’t developed enough”: Children as objects of development-in-time

“The school would be in chaos”: Children as dangerous minds/bodies

It’s important to consider why, as I mentioned, school’s developmentalist orientation leads to

“I feel controlled”: Children as adult pawns

“Like a shareholders meeting”: Children as products in neoliberal discourse

“I don’t think students can make a change”: Children as helpless victims

“Students should be able to be able to make bigger decisions at school”

Making a transition to include children in decision-making requires a discursive shift, as well.

“I felt good because we are conquering problems”: Employing critical approaches

Reconsidering moral education in response to children

Queer temporality and childism as provocation for ‘tinkering with time’

“Thinking more” in response to children

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