An Archaeology of the Recent Past: Age and Schooling in Historical and Contemporary Social Context

This chapter deals with the ways in which the structure of schooling serves to school age, that is, how the structuring of formal education helps to discipline and make tractable the categories of age into which social identity is apportioned. In Part I, I begin with a brief exploration of the history and sociology of schooling, framed around a seemingly simple but important question: Why do we put children and young people in schools, and why are schools organised in relation to age? This question leads me to consider how schooling as we know it has emerged, and what its social purposes may be in relation to regulating ideas about age, social organisation, social control and social reproduction (Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). In Parts II and III, I then explore how these historical currents are reflected in the construction of age at the institutional and discursive levels in the example of Lakefield School.