Black Pedagogy and the Limits of Control: Childhood, Agency and Resistance

Abstract

What happens when childhood is framed not as a space of possibility, but as a domain governed by adult authority? This article examines the concept of Black Pedagogy and its enduring logics of discipline, showing how they have historically constructed childhood as an object of control, obedience, and moral formation. Drawing on educational history, philosophy, childhood studies, literature, and contemporary media, it develops a twofold argument. First, it reconstructs the genealogy through which pedagogical and institutional forms of authority have constituted childhood as an object of governance. Second, it examines how literature, cinema, and children’s everyday practices reveal that these logics of control are continuously negotiated and partially reconfigured from within. Rather than treating resistance as external opposition to power, the article conceptualises children’s agency as emerging through play, imagination, cultural narratives, and everyday practices embedded in relations of authority. Accordingly, the article argues not that childhood exists beyond control, but that pedagogical control is never complete because it continuously generates possibilities for negotiation and reinterpretation