In this paper the ‘ideal child’ is traced in the life histories of Greek-Cypriot primary teachers entering the profession in six decades (late 1950s-2010s) in Cyprus. Their narrations focus primarily on their enactment of Home Economics and Health Education (HE/HE) curricula, which have been a mechanism of modernist, nation-state governance (e.g. Ball, 2013) and have long been part of the programmatic curriculum in Greek-Cypriot education (Persianis & Polyviou, 1992). In the most recent curriculum review in 2010/2015, the subject-area’s timetables, content and approach were revised (Ioannou et el., 2015), including the allocation of citizenship content, which rendered HE/HE the primary curricular space for constructing the ideal citizen. In relevant official documents, this was embodied in the ‘democratic socially responsible citizen’: an individual responsible over personal health, work, and consumption (Philippou & Theodorou, 2018; 2019). Adopting a biographical approach to understand schooling ‘in the middle ground’, multiple, semi-structured life history interviews were conducted (Goodson, 2008) with 30 teachers falling into six cohorts. These were thematically analysed within and across cohorts, based on axial coding of emic codes that adhered to teachers’ narrations of curriculum enactment of HE/HE and to subtle meanings of the ‘ideal child’ pursued in other activities. Teachers’ narrations illustrate how the curriculum remained constant in centrally producing an ideal child over the last 70 years, although of changing constitution: from a strictly ‘female’ endeavour of ‘housekeeping’ in the first/older cohorts, to include content (for boys and for all grades) on physical and mental health in later cohorts. The scope of governance thus expanded to focus on a child taking care of oneself, both for personal hygiene and preservation (food and clothes preparation), and for health, emotional regulation, interpersonal relations and social-civic responsibilities. This ideal child was also narrated as one pedagogically ‘active’ in how and what was taught. However, such findings were in tension with how gradually curriculum policies and teaching materials were narrated as ‘needed’ to be prescribed by the state, marking amplified regulation of HE/HE and of who was ‘expert’ enough to design them. By tracing such changes and continuities, HE/HE instantiates both an institutional context and broader sociopolitical and economic conditions (e.g. Cyprus transition from colony to independence to EU member-state), which remained constant in envisioning particular types of children as ideal (in their ‘future’ capacity as self-governable citizens). This showcases the complexity of curriculum endeavours which ‘educate’ (plural) publics as the latter also flow.

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