Conference Agenda

This symposium focuses on historical and contemporary cases of diversity and boundary-making in regard to schooling and norms and standards, which can be understood through the centralizing frame of “making up” people (see Hacking, 2002, pp. 99–114) and the educationalization of social problems since the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries (e.g., Depaepe & Smeyers, 2008). In Europe during the Enlightenment and following the French Revolution, new understandings and concepts of the state developed to place a heavy emphasis on democratization and a belief that the state and its people actively legitimize and sustain each other. In its new democratic role, the modern state had to decide how its populations would be politically and socially defined, organized, and categorized as “the people.” The states’ new creations of the people, and their coinciding new categories and labels, also created “new ways for people to be” and new social realities became possible (Hacking, 2002, pp. 100, 103).

With this necessity for “making people,” modern states thus turned to education and institutionalized the making of people through the creation or revision of schooling laws and processes of mass, compulsory schooling (e.g., Westberg et al., 2019). These modern educational institutions were organized in ways that favored certain categorization practices of people, according to the state’s ideal social standards and norms at the time. These practices helped to create both those who fit the standards and norms and “others” who did not quite fit in. What we will focus on in our symposium are cases of how these “others” were created, categorized, labeled, and learned from an early age: notably beginning with children’s entrance into (or even exclusion from) modern state schooling.

We will show examples of how modern European states have been educationalizing the “making of people” and creating and preferring certain standards and norms over others through processes of categorizing and labeling their diverse populations. The “making up of people” via education involved the whole school experiences and lifeworlds of the students (e.g., Pinar, 2004). Therefore, we will be considering the modern state schooling within our cases as encompassing the teachers, students, parents, and their practices as well as the state apparatuses. In particular, we will discuss these modern practices as they were handled in three specific examples from Switzerland, Denmark, and Austria. We start with the case of how Swiss teachers categorized and labeled young children as intellectually “normal” or “abnormal” since the late 19^th century and what this meant for the different types of schooling and education made available to these children. We will then use our second case from Austria to show how a number of “abnormal” categories were merged together to encompass “atypical” children under the umbrella term of “neurodiverse” in the international world by the late 1990s, but how it has been up to individual Austrian teachers rather than official Austrian legislation to bring the inclusive “neurodiverse” label into the schools in an effort to make the “abnormal” children “normal” again. Finally, we will look at a case from today by showing how children (and their parents) in Denmark are standardized through specific notions of “time” regulations in their transition from kindergarten to primary school.

The general tendency towards more state-organized formal schooling in 19th-century Europe (Westberg et al., 2019) overlapped with a growing interest in “abnormal” children and the question of their educability (e.g., Van Drenth & Myers, 2011). After the mid-19th century, the conviction prevailed that compulsory education should also apply to intellectually and physically “abnormal” children. For this purpose, in various European countries special educational facilities were set up to complement conventional primary school (e.g., Borsay & Dale, 2012). Among the different groups of intellectually and physically “abnormal” children identified and categorized since the turn of the 19th century were the so-called “idiots.” In the German-speaking world, a uniform medical classification of “idiocy” (Idiotie) was established in the second half of the 19th century (Hofmann, 2017). Under this umbrella term, three degrees of intellectual impairment were identified: “feebleminded” (schwachbegabt), “imbecile” (schwachsinnig), and “stupid” (blödsinnig). The question of educability was central to this classification, as only individuals belonging to the first two categories were considered to be educable. The classification of “idiocy” provided the framework for the establishment of these different types of facilities. In so-called asylums, “stupid” children received food and care, but no formal education. “Imbecile” children were sheltered and educated in special institutions, and “feebleminded” children were assigned to special classes. In the proposed paper, I will present a Swiss case study on special classes for “feebleminded” children and the categorization of pupils as “abnormal” or “normal” in association with these classes. My analysis, which is based on sources produced in everyday school life, focuses on the allocation of young children to special classes and the role teachers and educational practices played in this process. After entering primary school, Swiss children were observed, and their performance was assessed by their teachers during the first grade. At the end of first grade, those pupils whose intellectual development was deemed “abnormal” were transferred to a special class. My premise is that the one-year-long trial period, during which thousands of children of the same age were observed in school, had shaped the notion of “normal” and “abnormal” intellectual child development. It was the everyday interaction of teachers with their pupils that was crucial when it came to “making up” intellectually “abnormal” people (Hacking, 2002, pp. 99–114) in Switzerland at the turn of the 20th century.

Borsay, A., & Dale, P. (Eds.). (2012). Disabled children: Contested caring, 1850–1979. Pickering & Chatto. Hacking, I. (2002). Historical ontology. Harvard University Press. Hofmann, M. (2017). Schwachbegabt, schwachsinnig, blödsinnig – Kategorisierung geistig beeinträchtigter Kinder um 1900. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 7(2), 142–156. Van Drenth, A., & Myers, K. (2011). Normalising childhood: Policies and interventions concerning special children in the United States and Europe (1900–1960). Paedagogica Historica, 47(6), 719–727. Westberg, J., Boser, L., & Brühwiler, I. (Eds.). (2019). School acts and the rise of mass schooling: Education policy in the long nineteenth century. Palgrave Macmillan.

The categorizing and labeling of school-age children as “normal” or not has continued in Europe since the early mass schooling practices of the 19th century. Since that time (and even before), different countries have come to start diagnosing (and therefore labeling and thus creating) children with specific learning difficulties that fell outside standard expectations. It is especially since the beginning of the 20th century, and especially since the mid-20th century, that many different mental or physical learning or behavioral disabilities were emerging and evolving in Europe and the U.S. to describe school-age children and how they and their education should be handled in the classroom (e.g., Feinstein, 2010, Lange et al., 2010, Kalverboer, 1978, Clements & Peters, 1962). By the late 1990s, “neuro-” terms started to come into use to refer to the multiple neurological “disorders” that have not been considered “neurotypical” (e.g., autism, dyslexia, ADHD). In the more than two decades since then, public and private discourse has started turning to the umbrella terms of “neurodiversity” to describe how there are many different ways of “thinking, learning, and behaving” in the world (Baumer & Frueh, 2021), and those who are diagnosed as a “neurological minority” are “neurodiverse” (ND). In consideration of the historical development of defining, diagnosing, and labeling children as being learning disabled, this paper will focus on the Austrian educational discourse that has surrounded children who would be labeled as neurodiverse. The aim is to see if and how the more “socially accepted” new ND labels entered Austrian educational discourse. The relationship between the official Austrian educational discourse and the unofficial reality surrounding ND will be discusses according to an analysis of a variety of official and unofficial educational sources published since the 1990s (e.g., schooling laws, school board publications, world congress reports, teacher interviews, etc.). By looking into the different discourses, we should then see what roles and effects educational actors, such as the Austrian ministries on the one hand and teachers on the other, have in making people “abnormal” or in trying to re-make them as “normal.”

Baumer, N., & Frueh, J. (2021, November 23). What is neurodiversity? Harvard Health Publishing. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-is-neurodiversity-202111232645 Clements, S. D., & Peters, J. E. (1962). Minimal brain dysfunctions in the school-age child: Diagnosis and treatment. Arch Gen Psychiatry, 6(3), 185–197. Feinstein, A. (2010). A history of autism: Conversation with the pioneers. Wiley-Blackwell. Kalverboer, A. F. (1978). MBD: Discussion of the concept. In A. F. Kalverboer, H. M. van Praag, & J. Mendlewicz (Eds.), Minimal brain dysfunction: Fact or fiction (Adv. Biol. Psychiatry, Vol. 1; pp. 5–17). Karger. Lange, K. W., Reichl, S, Lange, K. M., Tucha, L., & Tucha, O. (2010). The history of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. ADHD Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders, 2(1), 2414–255.

The family and children are historically subject to many norms. Since the late 18th century, the child, family, and community have been subjects of standardizing the ideal of citizenry as a means of regulating populations for the welfare-state (Popkewitz, 2003). The child and family are vital sites of the social welfare system’s modern politics. This paper highlights and discusses how “being a good school parent” and “being a good student” is something that is part of the Danish school and preschool institutions’ contemporary time norms (Lidén, 2001; Schmidt, 2017). This is studied by analyzing parents’ and kindergarten children’s encounters with school’s time norms in various social situations, which are part of cultural rites of passage that help to regulate norms (Westerling et al., 2020; Olsen, 2015). This theoretical paper about how to grasp “time norms” in pedagogical transition practices is part of a project that analyzes which time norms parents and children encounter in concrete practices when they are welcomed at school and how they act in the situated contexts (Ehn & Lofgren, 2001). By getting close to the micro-social processes in transitions in children’s lives, we analyze how parents and children are to be socialized through time norms. Inspired by May and Thrift (2003), who argue that time is inextricably tied to the spatial composition of society, this paper investigates which norms parents and children must display in the contemporary Danish public school as the composition of a specific space with a specific time and how they do this. The parents’ and children’s encounters with school is understood through May and Thrift’s notion of “timespace” (May & Thrift 2003). Timespace refers to the sense of time produced through practices of social discipline, whereby sense of time is structured by the spatial organizations evident within those locations (Lingard &Thompson, 2017). Hence, this paper argues that the parents’ and children’s encounters with school is an interactive process where standards of sense of time norms and understandings of relationships are pieced together as a central part of the practice of social discipline (Bartholdsson, 2009), in which a particular person is created (Hacking, 2002). By analyzing the school’s time norms in transitional practices, the obvious practices through which the school tries to regulate and promote certain standards of behavior among parents and children is made visible. With this, the paper opens up new ways for professionals to rethink time and space.

Bartholdsson, Å. (2009). Den venlige magtudøvelse. Normalitet og magt i skolen. København: Akademisk Forlag. Ehn, B. & Löfgren, O. (2001). Kulturanalyser. Gleerup Hacking, I. (2002). Historical ontology. Harvard University Press. Lidén, H. (2001). Barn- tid – rom – skiftende positjoner. Trondheim: Fakultet for samfundsvitenskap og teknologiledelse, Socialantropologisk institut Lingard, B., & Thompson, G. (2017). Doing time in the sociology of education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2016.1260854 May, J., & Thrift, N. (2001). Introduction. In Critical Geographies ; 13. Timespace: Geographies of temporality (pp. 1–45). London: Routledge. Olsen, B. (2015). Foregribelsens dialektik: ”Skolens” nærvær i børnehavens pædagogiske værdiunivers. Tidsskrift for Nordisk Barnehageforskning. Vol. 11 (3), 1-15. Popkewitz, T. S. (2003). Governing the Child and Pedagogicalization of the Parent - Governing Children, Families, and Education: Restructuring the Welfare State (M. N. Bloch, K. Holmlund, I. Moqvist, & T. S. Popkewitz, eds.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. Schmidt, L. S. K. (2017). Pædagogers samfundsmæssige roller i forældresamarbejde. Professionshøjskolen Absalon. Westerling, A., Bach, D. Dannesboe, K. I., Ellegaard, T., Kjær, B. & Kryger (2020). Parate børn- forestillinger og praksis i mødet mellem familie og daginstitution. Frydenlund Academic.