"Children Obviously Don't Make History": Historical Significance and Children's Modalities of Power
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it