Thinking 7heJoumai of Philosophy for Children, Volume 14, Number J
David Kennedy is Associate Professor of
----
Reconstructing Childhood
David Kennedy
Is Childhood Disappearing?
~
e "disappearance" of childhood
has been an ongoing theme of
cultural speculation in the U.S.
for at least the last 20 years. The
notion that the child is "disappearing"
is both a description of a perceived cul-
tural change and an implicit cultural
reaction to it. It as~umes, first of all,
that there is a normative phenomenon
called "childhood" which has certain
identifiable characteristics which are at
least potentially evident in all children.
It also assumes that such a phenome-
non is a cultural-historical one, since it
is capable of either no longer being
there, or else of changing its form--it is
not clear which. If the former, a further
assumption seems to be that if and
when the "child" "disappears," what is
left is an "adult."
What makes this assumption prob-
lematic is that "child" and "adult" are a
contrastive pair: as there is no notion
of "old" without a corresponding no-
tion of "young," so "child" is unthink-
able apart from "adull." If everyone
were born and remained as "children,"
we would no longer have any use for
the term, and the same is true if we
were all born and remained "adults."
$0 it would seem that if childhood is
going to disappear, then adulthood is
going to disappear too. Any change in
one necessarily seems to imply a
change in the other. Their cultural and
historically mediated appearances are
inseparably linked.
There is something we can know
about childhood apart from its histori-
cal and cultural appearance. "Child" is
also a hard biological category, deter-
mined by height, weight, organ size
and function, hormonal configuration
and neurological state, as well as,
although in a weaker sense than the
latter, cogllitive, linguistic, affective.
and motoric distinctives. The biologi-
cal child will never "disappear," in that
she seems to be a permanent aspect of
how the species reproduces itself. What
can disappear is usually described in
terms like "innocence," meaning typi-
cally ignorance of things that adults
prefer to keep secret even from each
other, like sex, death, madness, and
addiction. What also can appear and
disappear are attributions of compe-
Page 29
Educational Foundations at Montclair State
University, and the author 01 numerous articles
on the philosophy 01 childhood.
lence, responsibility, or intelligence.
Neil Postman, for example, interprets
the characteristics of what we now call
"childhood" as one effect the printing
press had when it replaced the oral,
child-accessible information environ-
ment of the medieval world with one
based on the printed word, thereby
leading to the imposition on children
of a long apprenticeship in a difficult
skill, and hence a new class status as
cultural outsider. I
Postman's argument makes basic
historical sense, but in fact the replace,-
ment of an oral by a literate informa-
tion environment is only one among a
host of factors which have led to the
relative marginalization of children in
the modern world. It must also be kept
in mind that, given the inseparability
of the concepts "child" and "adult," all
of these changes reflect an alteration in
what it means to be an adult. I want to
argue that, from a dialectical historical
perspective, the condition of the child-
adult relation at the end of the second
millenium offers the possibility of a
shifting of the boundaries within this
contrastive pair, and therefore a
Page 30
moment for historical action on the
pan of those concerned, not only with
children and childhood, but with the
reconstruction of adulthood as well.
The role of education in that historical
action is a critical one, particularly
what Freire' calls "problem-posing
education," or "dialogue," for here the
locus of real mutuality between adult
and child is possible. But before
exploring the strucrure of that mutual-
ity, it is necessary to take aCCOUI1l of the
child's actual position in the social
world.
Child as Marginalized Subject
From what we can find of children
in the historical record. they appear
from earliest times to have been sub-
jected to the same marginalization and
cultural outsider status that we find so
often as well when we explore the sta-
tus of woman, slaves, ethnic or racial
minorities, the insane, or the econom-
ically oppressed. Children are, to be
sure. a special case of this marginalized
other, closest to women, in that their
subjugation by patriarchal power cen-
ters is held in place by elements which
are found, then reinscribed in and on
the body. The difficulty in studying the
history of childhood is that children,
like women, are in so many cases sim-
ply absent from the record, and so one
must draw conclusions from indirect
evidence. This difficulty in itself, in
combination with the references we do
lind to children, offers us a strong clue
that children have always occupied the
following position or status vis a vis the
majority of adults.
Children as property
In the ancient Greek and Roman
household, the father held the power
of life or death over his children.
When Lloyd deMause characterizes
the earliest parent-child relation as
"infanticidal,'" he seems to be refering
to this fundamental attitude of unmiti-
gated possession, such that the child is
not perceived to have any humanity
apart from the projected humanity
which the adult accords it. TIle extent
to which children are still construed as
the material property of their parel1ls
is indicated today by the ambiguity
surrounding child custody, parental
infanticide or homicide cases, child
abuse cases. and, arguably, abortion.
In the case of abuse. the child is often
released back into the custody of the
offending parel1ls when it is clearly not
in her best interests, sometimes result-
ing in her death. To the extent that
children are property, they are like
slaves, and. until fairly recently in the
West, like women.
Child as economically
disenfranchised
raditionally, children have no
rights to property and meaningful
work, except at the discretion of their
parents or guardians. Children have
no economic means in our society
apart from episodic menial tasks for
extremely low pay. In historical epochs
in which children were a part of the
labor force, they seem either to have
played a relatively important part in
pastoral or agrarian economies; or, in
industrialized settings, become ex-
ploited wages slaves.
Child as ontological other
Aristotle identifies children with
animals, slaves, and women. The child,
he tells us, lacks the capacity of choice.
"moral agency," or will, i.e. the ability
to deliberately engage in an action
toward a final end, or "some kind of
activity of the soul in conformity with
virtue." For this reason he cannot be
called "happy"; and if we do call him
happy, "we do so by reason of the
hopes we have for his future."·
Aristotle seems to be engaging in sub-
speciation, or the attribution of onto-
logical difference to members of out-
groups, or cultural outsiders. It might
even be called a sort of proto-teratol-
ogy, in the sense that anything not fully
human in the adult, male, free-born
sense of the word is a kind of monsler,
i.e. a being that has not attained or is
incapable of attaining to the human
"substance." In the case of the child it is
the former: what makes the child dan-
gerous is not so much that she is a
monster as that she has every chance of
turning into a monster without shap-
ing by adults. So Erasmus, 1800 years
after Aristotle, tells us:
To be a true father, you must take
absolute control of your son's entire
being; and your primary concern must
be for that part of his charaCler which
David KtIllledy, RecOIu/mcting Childhood
distinguishes him from the animals
and comes closes I to reOccting the
divine.... So what are we 10 expect of
man? He will mosl certainly turn out
to be an unproduclive brute unless at
once and without delay he is subjected
to a process of intensive instruction. S
The tenor of this passage might be
interpreted as merely a rhetorical
exaggeration, did we not find associat-
ed with the rise of the modernism of
which Erasmus is one cultural founder,
evidence of the emergence of a disci-
plinary technology applied to the
riminal, the insane and to the child in
the form of confinement in institu-
tions, harsh and systematic punish-
ment, constant surveillance, and "treat-
ment" in the form of rigid. objectifying
psychologies and pedagogies. The
child of the early modem period is
understood to be in need of being
forged, as Michel Foucault puts it, into
a "docile body that may be subjected,
used, transformed, and improved."6
The child as ontological other can
also be positively constTued--for exam-
ple in the high Romantic notion of
childhood as a natural state of
"genius," like the "primitive," apart
from the corrupt and vain conscious-
ness of society; or the "divine child" of
myth and religion, whether represent-
ed in the childhood of the god or hero
of the Bronze Age, the hermaphroditic
eroti of Hellenistic Greece. or the infant
Jesus of High Renaissance art. Here
the child acts as screen for projections,
not of the sub but of the superhuman, of
an undivided state of consciousness
which, for the adult, is projected both
into the past and into the future. C.G.
Jung has gone so far as to identify the
"divine child" as a fundamental arche-
type of the human unconscious, i.e. a
transcultural image that manifests in
dreams. myth, an, and psychotherapy.'
The physical, linguistic and behavioral
otherness of the child draws adult pro-
jection, whether positive or negative,
of their own felt difference.
Child as epistemically incomplete
Whether we understand the child's
epistemic "deficit" as structural and
ontogenetic, which we find in
Piagetian formulations,~ or as social in
the sense of not yet having acquired
the epistemological and ontological
convictions of her culture, the result is
Thinking: The Journal oj Philosophy J!>T Children, J,Vlum,
./
the same: the child is the irrational
other, the magical thinker, rJle "native."
Again, there is both a positive and a
negative side to this projection: from
the point of view of educating the
young child into the convictions of the
age, it is an absence to be filled, an
ignorance, or primitivism to be over-
come. From the point of view of the
Romantic protest against the rational-
ized epistemic universe of the Enlight-
enment, it is a window into another
form of knowledge, which is capable,
like the forms of knowing of mystics,
shamans, women. the mad, etc., of
yielding significant information about
the world. For the epistemological
counterculture. Piaget's notion of the
adult "decentered" epistemic subject.
which "has found in logicomathemati-
cal strucLUres an instrument of integra-
tion increasingly indcpendem of expe-
Page 31
rience" by which it "conquers" the
"experienced environment"· repre-
sents a form of Western objectivist bias,
a hypenrophy of the Cartesian subject-
object split, emblematic of the alienat-
ed subjectivity of modernism.
Cbild as cultural outsider
It is characteristic of that form of
childhood which is said to be disap-
pearing that children are assiduously
kept from adult knowledge, chiefly of
sex and death, but also of harsh social
and economic realities, and the darker
aspects of the human psyche. Parents
and educationalists frequentJy voice
fears that for children to know "too
much" about, for example, the realities
of political and economic exploitation
and oppression, classism, racism and
ethnocentrism, genocide, interperson-
al violence and sexual predation, wide-
spread abuse of political authority, etc.
is too great a burden for them to bear.
and can lead to cynicism, hopelessness
or depression. Many adults are even
skeptical of introducing "critical think-
ing" into education, in expectation of
an erosion of right authority relations
between child and adult which, they
think, could follow from encouraging
children to "think for themselves."
Thus, the child is an "outsider" to adult
culture, a status which in the modern
world is reproduced institutionally, in
that children are segregated in schools
(as well as age-segregated within
schools), excluded from the adult
workplace, and forced into engineered
recreational areas to play and socialize.
In addjtion, they are objectified by the
scientific establishment as units of
study. subjected to a barrage of norma-
tive classifications, and assigned vari- •.
ous semi-medical statuses when they
depart from the norm ("learning dis-
abled," "hyperactive," etc.).
The child as speciaJ case
of the marginalized other
It is much easier to make the case
for the existence of these forms of mar-
ginalization and objeetifiction for out-
sider adults--whether persons of color,
the mentally ill. "primitives," "the
poor," or criminals. The claim that the
child may be grouped among them is
complicated by the fact that she seems
to be a special case of outsider. There
--0- ,.,. ...
is. after all, a life-cycle of organisms,
human or othernrise. The human life
cycle does have certain distincti~e pat-
terns, apparent stages, with limitations
and possibilities appropriate to each
one. There is a developmental trajec-
tory which can be empirically and bio-
LogicaUy described, a process of "for-
mation" or "orthogenesis," which most
typically can be understood as a move-
ment from "irrunature" to "mature," or
in Werner's classic formulation, from "a
state of relative globality and lack of
differentiation to a state of increasing
differentiation, articulation, and hier-
archic integration." lo The child is
chronologically based at the lower end
of this continuum.
Given these biologically deter-
mined constraints, we notice at least
the following regularities, some of
which may be thought either to justify
at least in principle the forms of mar-
ginalization cited above, or at least to
expLain why they occur with such regu-
larity:
The child needs protection be-
cause of his--relative to adults and
older children-smaller size, lower
weight, and relatively weaker muscula-
ture, which make him potential prey to
those larger and stronger than himself,
and less able than adults to perform
many kinds of labor necessary for sur-
vival.
The child needs protection be-
cause of his relative lack of experience,
which prevents him from having an
inductive base of concrete instances
through which to solve problems, or to
make judgments.
Many children experience intense
periods of emotional lability which,
combined with a comparative lack an
internal locus of control. make them
more liable to behavioral "excess,"
whether in the form of "acting out," or
emotional upset. Thus, the child could
be dangerous to himelf or others.
Many children lack the disposition
or the judgmental apparatus for sus-
tained labor in the interests of survival.
Children can and do work, and in pas-
toral or agricultural economies, are
quite capable of fulfilling necessary
economic functions. But in industrial
societies, those periods we are aware of
in which children have been treated as
adults capable of work have witnessed
dramatic exploitation and maltreat-
ment by those who controlled their
labor.
Granting the special developmen-
tal status of chiLdren, they can stiLI be
defined as marginalized subjects to the
extent to which the precautions taken
by adults to protect children from the
potentially harmful results of this sta-
tus in many cases either do not so pro-
tect them, or "overprotect" them, with
equally disempowering results. I see no
other explanation-except the extent
to which all persons in Western soci-
eties are, to a greater or less degree,
marginaLized-of the following con-
temporary situations in the lives of
children:
• The ongoing and increasing "ghet-
toization" of children in instirn-
tions--schools and child care cen-
ters--and the complete exclusion
of the child from the adult work-
place.
• The ever-increasing disappear-
ance of public space for children's
sociability and play, except those
created specifically for that pur-
pose, i.e. play "reservations."
• The ongoing construal of the child
by the slate and powerful educa-
tional institutions as "raw material"
for its economic, military, and
political uses, or as Ashis Nandy
puts it, "an inferior, weak but
usable version of of the fully pro-
ductive, fully performing. human
being who owns the modern
world.""
When the rhetoric of "human
resources" is combined with increasing
underfunding by public institutions of
children's education, its very lack of
coherence identifies it as rationaliza-
tion.
A normative form of "banking"
education that, abundant disconfirm-
ing evidence to the contrary, continues
to ignore children's developmental
potential, and to make them the object
of a pseudo-scientific and dehumaniz-
ing educational technology.
Society's relative insensitivity to
child abuse in all its forms, analagous
to its insensitivity to spouse abuse. This
is evidenced in court decisions, as well
as everyday reactions of adults who wit-
ness children being neglected and/or
abused in public places.
Davtd &nnedy. Reconstrucbng Ch,lJihood
The century-old discipline of deve-
lopmental psychology, which in a pre-
ponderance of cases, still construes the
child as "organism," and isolates and
denies her subjectivity in stage theories
and objectifying taxonomies.
The fact that these forms of colo-
nization are also imposed on adults--
in the marginalization of workers by
corporate capitalism, of persons of
color by racist and ethnocentric poli-
ties, and of women by patriarchal and
masculinist attitudes, policies and
practices-does not mitigate or excuse
the situation of children. It could be
argued that, in a world of widespread
human objectification and "normaliza-
tion" by state·run apparatuses, that the
strategic locus for reclaiming what
Freire refers to as our "ontological
vocation to be more fully human"l!
from the "technologies of discipline"
perpetuated by the governmental. cor-
porate, scientific, and educational
establishment, is in the area of child-
rearing, whether expressed in family
and local community, or in schooling.
This is because the adult-child relation
is the interpersonal location where the
most fundamental formation of self-
understanding takes place: where the
balance between conscious and uncon-
scious, instinct and repression, social-
ized and unsocialized. freedom and
self-constraint, are shaped and played
out. The character of this balance
determines the capacity of humans in
any given culture or epoch to follow
their "vocation of persons who are
authentic only when engaged in
inquiry and creative transformation,"·!
which would appear to be a necessary
condition for resisting colonization.
The rise of the modern form
of child colonization:
A psychohistorical explanation
A psychohistorical look at the
aduLt-ehild relation suggests that there
is by nature a complex projective rela-
tion between adults and children,
which revolves around the economy of
instinct and repression, or, as the cul-
tural historian Norbert Elias has char-
acterized it, a changing "interplay"
between the conscious and uncon-
scious Levels of personality." It seems
characteristic of the life cycle in gener-
al that "child" represents the uncon-
 Pagl34
threshold of delicacy. and--sincc they
are not yet adapted.-rney infringe the
taboos ofsociety, cross the adult shame
frontier, and penetrate emotional dan·
ger zones which the adult himself can
onJy control with difficulty.... Anxicty
is aroused in adults when the stNcCUre
of their own insUnClllaJ life as defmed
by the social order is threatened. My
other behavior means danger. This
leads to the emotional undertone
associated with moraJ demands and
the aggressive and Ihreatening severi-
ty of upholding them, because the
breach of prohibitions places in an
unstable balance of repression all
11 those for whom the standard of society
has become "second nature...••
This explains the severity of early
modern child rearing modes, at home
but especially in schools, when we
understand that the project is actually
to correct human nature in the service
of what presents itself as a higher,
evolved idea] of human nature. Uoyd
deMause refers to the two child rearing
modes which predominated in the
early modem period as "ambivalen t"
and "intrusive." For the former, the
child is still "a container for dangerous
projections" of one's own instinctual
life, leading parents to feel the need to
forcefully "mold," most typically
through beating, children "into shape."
With the onset of the intrusive mode,
parents have withdrawn their projec-
tion further: the child is less threaten-
ing, but parents still need to "to con-
quer its mind, in order to control its
I, insides, its anger, its needs, its mastur-
bation, its very wiU.'02'
deMause's formulation of the child
'I
"
rearing modes, of which he theorizes
six,2~ rests on what he describes as the
"psychogenic theory of history," which
"
posits an evolutionary advance2~ of
parents' capacity (Q nurture and affirm
their children. This advance, accord-
ing to deMause, turns on the capacity
of adults "to regress to the psychic age
of their children and work through the
III I anxieties of that age in a better man·
,,! I ner the second time they encounter
them than they did during their own
childhood. The process is similar to
psychoanalysis, which also involves
regression and a second chance to face
childhood anxieties."2G
I which makes dialogue possible; and Ricoeurian perspeClive, the outcome
II I ,
The success of this "regression in
the service of the child" revolves, in
II turn, around the adult's awareness of
his own projective relationship with
I
David Kennedy, Reconstruding Childhood
children. The adult, when "face to face the text in the reader's understanding,
with a child who needs something," which he characterizes as "understand-
either approaches the child as a screen ing at and through distance."2g Applied
for the projection of his own uncon- to the adult-child relation, the her-
scious material (projective reaction); as meneutic process is what deMause
a substitute for an adult in his past with refers to as withdrawal of projection
whom his relationship is as yet unre- through psychological distance, fol-
solved (reversal reaction); or is able to lowed by identification, or the ability to
empathize with the child's instinctual "regress to the level of the child's need
needs, and do something in order to and correctly identify it without an
satisfy them (empathic reaction)!' admixture of the adult's own projec-
deMause's theory tends to confirm tions." It is at this poim that the adult
both Elias' and Foucault's analysis of awakens to the voice of the child.
the early modern adult-child relation.
What is particularly interesting about Children's epistemic privilege
his formulation is an assumption which Awakening to the voice of the child
appears to be paradoxical: the central means that the latter is understood as
dynamic of the evolution of the adult- the beaTer of new information for adult
child relation involves both a closer self-understanding. As distanced other,
approach to children, i.e. the ability to the child's status is analogous to what
identif)' with the child's instinctual feminist standpoint theorists describe
needs, and a separation, as represented as "valuable 'strangers' to the social or-
in the notion of withdrawal of projec- der," or "outsiders within.")(1 Like wo-
tion. The empathic reaction is made men, persons of color, or others mar-
possible because the adult is able to ginalized by Eurocentric and
separate herself from the anxiety pro- patriarchal personal, interpersonal
duced by the "emotional danger zone" and social constructs. the child's loca-
which children trigger through their tion in the social and natural world
relative lack of instinctual repression. affords her an "epistemic privilege."
That is, she can, in deMause's words, Since she lives before, or at the mar-
"regress to the level of the child's need gins of the adult instinctual economy,
and correctly identifY it without an her relationship to that economy is
admixture of [her] own projections," inherently transgressive. Given that
then "maintain enough distance from she is not, as Sandra Harding describes
the need in order to be able to satisfY it, a "native,"S' she sees things which
i l."!8 natives don't.
This would seem to indicate a What this does for the adult who
dialectical movement. The possibility listens for the voice of the child is that.
of closer approaches to children on the through his relationship with the child,
part of adults is only created as a result he rediscovers his own childhood by
of an initial separation. which is repre- becoming conscious of the boundaries
sented by the rise of the "shame fron- of instinct and repression which were a
tier" traced by Elias, i.e., the new bal- result of his own childhood formation.
ance of instinct and repression in the Through becoming aware of his own
modern adult. It is through this new "child," he recovers himself on a high-
balance that the modern adult er level-through incorporating un-
becomes a hermeneutic being-he is conscious contents into consciousness.
now a "reader" of life and the other, he process of making the uncon-
and the reader is by definition an scious concious is, as we have learned
interpreter. The interpreter must from bOth Freud and Jung, the inher-
interpret because he is removed from ent goal of psychic development,
the situation, or "text"-it has become whether formulated as "where id was,
foreign through the transformation of there ego shall be" (Freud) or as the
lime. But it is only this situation of increasing openness of conscious to
removal, or relative disentanglement, unconscious contents Oung). From a
dialogue results in a "fusion of hori- of the hermeneutic process is a "meta-
ons," followed by, in Ricouer's words, morphosis of the ego," whereby,
"appropriation." or reconstitution of through "a moment of distanciation in
Thinking: The Journal oj PhiUJs~hyJOT Children. Volume 14. Number 1 Page 35

recovers itself in a new balance. Alice to be consigned to a linear, "progres- children. It is a questioning in which
sive" historical movement, and appears the community of adult and child,
Miller has put it in more concrete
their belonging together, is brought
form: to be characterized in everyday lives by forth. This onJy comes abom in rec-
Once children are allowed to be more assymetry, spiraling, regression, path- ognizing that as an adult, one is not
than bearers of parental projections,
ology. failure. accident, good or bad beyond the movement back to the
they can become an inexhaustible child. and from there fOIWard to the
source for their parents ofundistorted
"fortune," & etc.,~6 as well as being
influenced by countless unique but rel- point where one began the movemenL
knowledge about human nature.
Having been a chi Id is still a possibili-
Sensuality, pleasure in one's own body, atively predictable local, regional, and ty one lives, something one has to
pleasure in the affection shown by epochal variables. It can be avowed at return to in order to establish oneself
another person, the need to express least that the project of "withdrawal of as an adulL. One generates in reflec-
oneself, to be heard, seen. understood. tion a community of adults and chil-
and respeCled. nOl to have to suppress projection" leading to the "empathic
relation." appears to be a key element dren in which principles and rules are
anger and rage and to be allowed to
at issue on both sides. in which being
voice other feelings as well, such as in the capacity of humans to live with bound to convention as an adult may
grief, fear, envy, and jealousy ... 33 difference, and so is connected to the be questioned by making reference to
As entering into dialogue with the overcoming of sexism, racism, ethno- children as more principled than
voice of the child results in greater psy- centrism, classism, homophobia, reli- adulL.~. For children, at times. may
chological integration on the part of gious intolerance, and aggressive appear to be less convenlion-bound
the adult, this is then reflected in a nationalism. It would seem to follow than adults, thereby appearing more
adult-like than adults.... An interest
form of child-rearing which recognizes from the arguments presented above in children is not independent from
the importance of meeting the "narcis- that the adult-child relation is the an interest in establishing for our-
sistic needs" of children "such as interpersonal hotbed in which any selves who we are. as adults. and what
respecl, mirroring, being understood given individual's instinctual economy we must orient to in order to live our
and taken seriously."" This. in tum. is produced; and that it is the character adulthood."
leads to the development of adults who of that economy which configures the Such a changed perspective has
experience a healthier. more creative human capacity to tolerate difference. obvious implications for education. in
relationship between conscious and value the narcissistic needs of others, that it lays the groundwork for a peda-
unconscious elements of the self, and and to develop psychologically and in gogy based on adult-ehild dialogue. It
are therefore more capable of "inquiry the quality called "reasonableness," also has implications for child psychol-
and creative transformation." ogy. in that the direction of develop-
which, as our century has shown. does
ment on which all adultist stage theo-
not depend on rationality alone.
Breaking Out: Elements of an ries is based--the idea of "fixed
What would a culture which has
Emergent Child-Adult Reconstruction endpoint" of a Cartesian rational self-
internalized the empathic ideal look
The possibility of a positive shift- like? There are indications that this possession. or Piaget's decentered epis-
ing of the boundaries between "child" change has already begun to at least ternic subject--becomes problematic.
and "adult" appears to be especiaUy suggest itself in the postmodern West. $0 it points to the possibility of a dia-
dependent on the material conditions The preoccupation with the "inner logical, rather than objectifying meth-
of civilization. deMause insists that child" in contemporary psychotherapy odology in the human sciences.
what he calls the "generational pres- seems to be one of them. TIle latter is Recognizing unity also involves
sure for psychic change" which drives an index of the withdrawal of projec- recognizing difference. Decentering
(and is driven by) the evolution of the tion. in the sense that the adult who from adultism implies the understand-
child rearing modes "occurs indepen- recognizes her "inner child" recognizes ing that the child occupies a perspec-
dent of social and technological her ontological unity with the child, tive through her placement viz a viz
change"~~; but findings from the study
others which is not completely accessi-
and is aware that the adult-child con-
of the history of childhood continue to tinuum is present in each epoch of the ble to adults--a perspective informed,
confirm the importance to improved life cycle. This is related to the ten- not only by organismic difference, but
adult-chld relations of economic and dency in recent psychoanalytic theory, by positioning in the social world and
political growth and stability. relatively implicit in Freud but stated clearly in its relations of power. and in the natur-
sophisticated medical and epidemio- post-Freudian ego psychology, to con- al world. Extending episternic privi-
logical knowledge, practice, and acces- strue the developmental process as lege to the child involves bracketing
sibiity. and the formation and mainte- life-long. To that extent. the adult is adult epistemological norms, and posi-
nance of an information environment always stiU a child. Dieter Misgeld has tioning oneself to notice what children
which produces "readers" (or "herme- put this eloquently: can know, not only because of their
nems") in the broad sense. . .. rather than locating children and position as "outsiders within:' but also
In addition, any argument for his- adults as being at differing stages in a because of their undersocialization of a
torical change modeled on Hegelian developmental sequence. with a fixed received stock of knowledge. i.e., the
end point as an immutable standard absence of a crystallized world picture,
dialectics is slightly suspect. The shift- available for the appraisal of the
ing interplay between conscious and or received ontology and epistemolo-
sequence, a properly self-reflective
unconscious levels in the modal per- orientation calls into question the def·
gy.3K An example might be the child's
sonality of any culture is too complex initely locatable enlilie.~ of adults and openness to other species and other
 Page 36
forms of life; or what Dewey refers to as
a "marvelous power to enlist the coop-
erative attention of others" through a
"flexible and sensitive ability . . . to
vibrate sympathetically with the atti-
tudes and doings of those about
them.",g And Coleridge identified the
young child with what he called "intu-
itive reason," which he described as
"that intuition Df things which which
arises when we possess ourselves as on<:
with the whole," in contrast to "that
which presents itself when ... we think
of ourselves as separated beings, and
I
I place nature in antithesis to the mind,
,I as object to subject, thing to thought,
death to life."~
The recognition that there are
I' many things the child doesn't know
which the adult does, but that there are
also things which children know that
adults don't, turns the "deficit theory"
Df childhood Dn its head. It also intro-
duces another fissure into the main-
stream, objectivist Western epistemo-
logical edifice, to add to those
introduced by feminist and multicul-
tural epistemologies. It would seem to
indicate that what the marginalized
subject knows, she knows because she
does not know sDmething else, i.e. the
tacit knowledge of the dominant. or
"native" structure. If this principle is
true, it operates in the other direction
as well, and problematizes the notion
of a unified knowledge, at least apart
from infmite dialogue as a fundamen-
tal epistemic principle. Nandy brings
this home to the problem of the with-
drawal of projection in making the
connection between the culture of
childhood and the culture of
oppressed peDples, and their respec-
tive relations to white patriarchal colo-
nialism. He says:
The culture of the adult world inter-
sects, and sometimes confronts, the
world of the child. Ideally, this shar-
~I ing of space should Lake place on lbe
basis of murual respecl. That il does
II not is a measure of our fear of losing
I! our own selfhood through our close
contacls with cultures which dare to
I,
represent our other selves, as well as a
I measure of our fear of the liminality
I berween the adult and the child which
many of us carry within ourselves.
This is the liminality Freud worked
through in his interpreUltion of psy-
chopathology. This is also the Liminal-
ity Gandhi had to face openly while
bauling the ideology of colonialism...
David Kmnedy, RWmJlnuling Childhood
. The final test of our skill to live a tice of questioning knowledge--both
bicultural or multicullural existence one's own and others'-it promises to
may still be our ability to live with our
children in muruality."
be the epistemic and curricular wedge
ND matter how isolated and mar- which opens the experience of child-
ginalized it might become, the prima- hood tD reflection, both on the part of
ry arena fDr the intersection and con- children and Df adults.
frontation to which Nandy refers will It seems more than just coinciden-
always be the immediate family. The tal that the negative evaluation of the
potential rDle of the school, however, child's powers of judgment, reasoning,
in that "sharing of space ... on the and reflection have legitimized the
basis of mutual respect" cannot be un- marginalization Df children, from Aris-
derestimated. That potential can only totle to Piaget. What this means from
be realized through a reorientation on the child's pDint of view is that the
the part of the educational establish- adult cannot "hear" her fDrm of reason,
ment, which at present is-like the either in its similarities to or differ-
majDrity Df the parent population it ences from her own, which makes of
serves-oriented, if only by default, to childhDod a culture Df silence. The
child's becomes a voice from the mar-
a child-as-raw-material, deficit model.
gins. assDciated with "essential" nature,
To understand the school as a
locus of mutual socialization, where, to animality, madness, criminality, the
quote Nandy, "our most liberating divine 4'-i.e., with the speechless. The
bDnds can be with Dur undersocialized kind of reflection which philosophy-
children,"" would appear to mean and especially philosDphy done in
changes SD prDfound as to be almost communal dialogue, or community of
unimaginable in our present situation. inquiry-evokes, Dffers an ideal loca-
It would mean at least a dismantling Df tion fDr adults tD make gODd on the
the adult hierarchical power structure child's epistemic privilege, to recog-
of schools, which acts to hold the pro- nize a speech other than their Dwn, tD
ductiDn mDdel of educatiDn in place; a face a culture which "represents our
complete refDrmulation of the objecti- Dther selves," to live the other side.
fying system of assessment and evalua-
tiDn which drives the curricular and The Manner of Change
pedagogical "banking" system which Whatever the formal Dr efficient
serves it; and a recDnscrual of the child cause which brings it about, it is prob-
as subject-as active, competent pro- ably safe (and perhaps cDmforting) tD
tagonist in her own learning and say that the positive transfDrmation of
developmental process. In an even the adult-child relation is not really
broader sense, it would imply reinte- under Dur control. The vicissitudes of
grating the lived wDrlds of children the historical dialectic which [ have
and adults, and Dvercoming the ghet- sketched in this paper are no doubt
tDization of the former in schDols and oversimplified, and, as retrospective
child care centers, both through knowledge. have nD necessary predic-
restructuring the workplace and tive value. In fact our age is haunted by
through reclaiming public space for the spectre of what Postman calls the
children's play and socialization. "adult-child," i.e., a modal pe;sonality,
The importance of critical think- produced and maintained by televi-
ing, Dr philosophy, in redefining the sion, with the "mental age of thirteen"
child as knowing subject is particularly whether she be eight or thirty years
crucial to the transformation of both Did, whD smirks at the same sexual
the adult-child relationship and of the jokes on sitcoms and thrills to the same
school, because its characteristic activi- viDlence (whether real or represented
ty is at the heart of dialogical, prob- it is no longer always clear), who wears
lem-posing education. Philosophy is the same clothes and attends the same
the discipline which emerges most sporling events. From the point of view
directly from the fundamental human Df the rebalancing of instinctual econo-
sense Df wonder, and which turns on my, this appears tD be analogous to
questioning both reality and our what students Df bilingual cultures call
knowledge of thal reality. As the prac- "semi-lingualism," erDsion of compe-
tence in the languages one speaks.
Thinking: Tlu JcruT1Ul1 oj Philosaphy for Children, Volume 14. Number I
tence in the languages one speaks.
Historical change of the kind dis-
cussed here appears to happen in a
piecemeal fashion, and is character-
ized by periods, possibly very long, of
plateau, retreat, suppression, reaction,
and sudden, unpredictable leaps. The
only real control we have over it is
probably in the realm of education; but
the colonizing character of state-pro-
vided education appears to be as yet
deeply entrenched in the mainstream.
Meanwhile, efforts at school decentral-
ization, dominated as they are by eco-
nomic, class, and religious self-inter-
ests, tend to reproduce the hegemonic
model. Be that as it may, the emer-
gence over the last two centuries of
child-centered, dialogical educational
theory and practice appears to offer
the most concrete hope for the possi-
bility of social reconstruction through
the dialectical reconstruction of the
adult-child relation.
ENDNOTES
I. The Disappearance or Childhood (New York:
Delacone, 1984).
2. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of IJu Oppressed (New
York: Seabury, 1968).
3. Uoyd de Mause, "The Evolulion of Child-
hood," in Uoyd deMause, ed., The History of
Childhood (New York: Harper, 1974).
4. Aristotle, PhyJia Jl vi 197b; Nicomnchean
Ethics I ix Ila.
5. "On Education for Children," from The Eras-
mtLf Reatkr, Erika Rummel, ed. (Toronto:
Univer. ofToronlo Press, 1990), pp. 67, 69.
6. Michel Foucaull, Discipline and Punish (New
York: VLDlage. 1979), p. 198.
7. C.G. Jung & Karl Kerenyi, Essays on a Science
or Mythology: The Myth oj the Divim Child and
lhe Mysleries or Eleu.sis (Princeton: Princelon
University Press, 1963).
8. This particular deficil imerprelalion is more
characterislic of interpretations of Piagel by
child psychologists and educationalisls
through lhe 1980's, lhan of Piagel's work
itself, which presents a more nuanced pic-
t:ure.
9. Jean Piagel, "Biology and Cognition," in
Barbara Inhelder & H.H. Chipman, cds.,
PWget and His School (New York: Springer
Verlag, 1976), p. 52.
10. Heinz Werner, "The concepl of Develop-
ment from a Comparative and Organism ic
Point of View," in Dale B. Harris, ed., The
Concept of Delielop~nt (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1957), p. 126.
II. "ReconslrUCling Childhood: A Crilique of
Lhe Ideology of Adullhood," in Tradil;onJ.
Tyranny and UtopitJJ: EJsays in the PrJlitia oJ
Awarenes.l (Delhi: Oxford University Press.
1987), p. 61. The mosl flagrant-and promi-
nem-recem expression of Lhis set of
assumptions is perhaps the report of lhe
Nalional Commission on Excellence in
Education. A Nation al Risk: The Imperalive Jor
Educalional ReJonll (Washinglon D.C.: U.S.
Governmem Prinling Office, 1983), which
begins: "Our nalion is at risk. Our once
unchallenged preeminence in commerce.
industry, science and technological innova-
tion is being overLaken by competitors
throughout the world."
12. Pedagogy of the OppreJStd, p. 61.
13. Ibid, p. 71.
14. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: State
FOTtTUJhon and Civilization, Edmund J ephcolt,
trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 [I939)}, p.
475.
15. Centuries or Childhood: A Social Hislary of
Family liJe, R. Baldick lrans. (New York:
Knopf, 1962).
16. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The
History or Mannus, Edmund Jephcolt. trans.
(Oxford: Blackwell. 1994 (1939)), pp. 134-
178. And see ShulamiLh Shahar, Childhood in
the MidJile Ages (London: Rour..lcdge, 1990).
17. L. Martin, H. Gutman, & P.H. Hutton, eds.,
Technologies oJ the Self A Seminar with Michael
Foucault (Arnhersl: University of Massachu-
selts Press, 1988).
18. Elias, The History oJManners, p. 204. And see
pp. 205-215.
19. See Waller Ong, Oralily and Wnacy: The
Technologizing or lhe Word (New York:
Melhuen. 1982).
20. Elias, The History of Manners, p. 115.
2 I. Michel Foucault, The History or Sexuality,
Volume I, excerpted in Paul Rabinow, ed.,
The Foucaull Reader (New York: PanLheon,
198-4), p. 267.
22. Elias, The History oJManners, p. 137.
23. deMause, "The Evolution of Childhood," p.
153.
24. In "The Evolution of Childhood," p. 53,
deMause idemifies lhe following modes.
which he claims follow an evolulionary pro-
gress through hisLOry: Infanticidal (Antiquity
lo 4t.b Century A.D.). Abandonment (4lh lO
13th Cenrury), Ambivalent (14th lo 17lh
CenNries), Inttusive (l8th Century), Social-
ization (l9th to mid-20lh Century), and
Helping (begins mid-20Lh Century).
25. deMause's lheory need not be read as evolu-
lionary in order to work. In fact, Peter
Peschauer has suggested thal all six modes
are present in any given human society,
expressed in praclices thal may vary across
history and culture. He saves the cultural
evolulionary appearances by suggesling lhal
one particular mode is predominant in each
period, and Lhatlhe direClion or progression
of the modes is from those in which the child
is a complete projection of lhe adult's own
Page 37
inslinct:ual malerial, lowards modes in which
there is increasing separation between the
two. See his "The Childrearing Modes in
Flux: An Historian's Reflenions," The
JoumaloJPsychohistory 17(1), 1989: 1-41.
26. "The Evolution of Childhood," p. 3.
27. Ibid, p. 6.
28. Ibid, pp. 6-7.
29. See Hans-Georg Gadmer, Truth and Method
(New York: Crossroad, 1975); and Paul
Ricoeur. "The Henneneutical Funclion of
Dislallcialion," in Hermeneulia and lhe
Human Scitllces. J.B. Thompson, trans.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987),p,143.
30. Sandra Harding. Who.le Science? Whose
Knou,[edge? Thinking fTom Women:S Lives
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991),
pp. 124, 131
3 I. Ibid, p. 307.
32. Ricoeur. "The Hermeneulical Function of
Dislancialion," p. 144.
33. Thou Shall Nol Be Aware: Society's Betrayal or
/he Child, Hildegarde & Hunter Hannum.
lrans. (New York: Meridian, 1986), p. 154.
34. Ibid, p. 144.
35. "The Evolution of Childhood." p. 3.
36. See Kenneth Keniston, "Psycholigical
Development and Historical Change," in
T.K. Rabb & R.I. Rolberg. The Family in
History: Interdisciplinary Essays (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Girous. 1976). He charac-
terizes psychological developmem as "a very
rough road. pitled with obstructions, inter-
spersed with blind alleys, and dOlted wiLh
seduclive Slopping places." (p. 149).
37. Dieler Misgeld. "Self-Reflection and Adull
Maturity: Adull and Child in Hermeneutical
and Critical Reflenion." Phenomenology +
Pedagogy 3, 3 (1985) : 199.
38. For an aCCOUnl of the young child as an
involuntary prophel against Lhe ontological
reduction of nature implicit in philosophical
materialism, see David Kennedy, "fools,
Young Children, Animism and the Scientific
World Pict:ure," Philosophy Today 33.4 (I 989) :
374-381.
39. John Dewey, Democracy alld Educalion (New ,.
York: Macmillan. 1916), p. 43.
40. Quoted in David Kennedy, "The
Hermeneutics of Childhood." Philosophy
Today 36, I (Spring 1992) : 4-4-58.
41. "Reconslrucling Childhood," pp. 73, 75.
42. Ibid, p. 75.
43. So Jacques Derrida says, "Man calls himself
man only by drawing IimiLS excluding his
olher from the play of supplementarity: the
purity of narure. of animality, primilivism.
childhood, madness, divinity. The approach
lO rnese limits is at once feared as a threat of
death, and desired as access to a life without
difference." OJ Gram1lUJlology, G,C. Spivak,
Irans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1976). p. 245.