There is a profound shift underway in the public institutions that are responsible for the training and socialization of children in Anglo-American nations, a shift that marks the final demise of a modern ideal of childhood and the emergence of something new. It is not the idealized possibility of a new regime of rights for children that has been championed by child rights advocates. It is not the incorporation of children’s views and knowledges into the design and planning of public infrastructures, nor the protection of children from the extremes of poverty or forms of exploitation. However, this new shift is nevertheless being ushered on the coattails of a push for expanded rights for children.

This shift is constituted by a changing logic of discipline and new techniques of normalization of children, but, more important, also by the reimagining of the child as subject and object of these technologies, and by a reimagining of the structures of the “normal” itself. New normal is a term that Columbine High School students used to describe their state of being after the 1999 massacre that occurred there. But I rework the term here in relation to an “old” normal: Michel Foucault’s term to characterize techniques of normalization in modern institutions.

Since Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts published Policing the Crisis (1978), scholars have suggested that successive waves of moral panic over youth criminality seem curiously disconnected from any rise or fall in youth crime.¹ What interests me is not the endless “angels or devils” dyad that arises in this work, but the ways in which these cycles serve as signal and site for the transformation of techniques of discipline. To understand the depth of the current transformation, we need to go back over two hundred years to the early foundations of modern notions of culpability and techniques of normalization, which have organized public institutions up until this day.