"Children Obviously Don't Make History": Historical Significance and Children's Modalities of Power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Sarah Maza has argued that "children obviously don't make history" given they are marginal to more meaningful, adult-driven change over time. In her response to Maza's claims, Nara Milanich encourages historians of children and youth to explore children's unique modalities of power, rather than focusing on their agency, to help unearth youthful contributions to historical change. Here, I engage with two of these four modalities of power as outlined by Milanich, namely children's temporariness and their ostensible malleability (via a reciprocal process I call "negotiated malleability") to social reproduction, using examples from my research on the Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) that operated in the western Canadian province of British Columbia between 1919 and the late 1950s. Rather than searching for children's agency in this history, however, I think through their entanglements with temporariness and malleability in relation to adults. In so doing, I demonstrate how and why young people wielded power and how they effected powerful responses from adults—primarily the parents, teachers, and administrators associated with the ECS. I argue that analyzed through a framework that privileges children's modalities of power in relation to adults, children emerge as significant contributors to change over time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".