In 1825, an unhappy female student at the Loreto Abbey Boarding School in Rathfarnham, Dublin wrote a letter to her parents complaining about ill treatment and severe discipline while in residence at the school. Mother Frances Mary Teresa Ball (1794–1861), mother superior of the Loreto order in Ireland, after reading the student's complaints, included her own letter along with the student’s, explaining the cause of the disciplinary action. The incident had occurred because the young girl had stamped her foot violently, refused to hold her head up and constantly interrupted her classmates during their lessons. Ball stated that consequently,

In what seems to be a mundane episode of student discipline, controlling student space appears to be a typical form of classroom management. Mother Superior Ball believed that the removal of students from the classroom was an appropriate disciplinary method for her genteel female students. Of course for this tactic to be effective teachers and pupils had to understand the significance of embedded spatial hierarchies and their corresponding social consequences. This chapter examines the spatial policies, urban morphology and educational missions of the Loreto Abbey Boarding School, Rathfarnham, and the Royal Hibernian Military Academy, Phoenix Park, to consider ways in which adults literally and figuratively constructed spaces for urban childhood in the first half of the nineteenth century. The production of space, as Henri Lefebvre famously insisted, happens in the physical world, the social world and the imagined world. There is a dynamic relationship between a physical place, its social construction, and the idealised category of childhood. When Irish educators built schools within Dublin's bourgeoning urban environment, they envisioned a space to facilitate a range of social functions and educational goals. Concerns about the unhealthy physical and moral environment of Dublin city resulted in gates, walls and enclosures which would protect children from the dangers of city life, while simultaneously serving as public symbols of the school's exclusivity.