Childhood

Second edition

David Bohm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134294596
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this book Chris Jenks looks at what the ways in which we construct our image of childhood can tell us about ourselves. After a general discussion of the social construction of childhood, the book is structured around three examples of the way the image of the child is played out in society:

• the history of childhood from medieval times through the enlightenment 'discovery' of childhood to the present
• the mythology and reality of child abuse and society's response to it
• the 'death' of childhood in cases such as the James Bulger murder in which the child itself becomes the perpetrator of evil.

Part of the highly successful Key Ideas series, this book gives students a concise, provocative insight into some of the controlling concepts of our culture.

1: CONSTITUTING CHILDHOOD

We would not have our Guardians grow up among representations of moral deformity, as in some foul pasture where, day after day, feeding on every poisonous weed they would, little by little, gather insensibly a mass of corruption in their very souls. Rather we must seek out those craftsmen whose instinct guides them to whatsoever is lovely and gracious; so that our young men, dwelling in a wholesome climate, may drink in good from every quarter, whence, like a breeze bearing health from happy regions, some influence from noble works constantly falls upon eye and ear from childhood upward, and imperceptibly draws them into sympathy and harmony with the beauty of reason, whose impress they take. Hence . . . the decisive importance of education in poetry and music; rhythm and harmony sink deep into the recesses of the soul and take the strongest hold there, bringing that grace of body and mind which is only to be found in one who is brought up in the right way. Moreover, a proper training in this kind makes a man quick to perceive any defects or ugliness in art or in nature. Such deformity will rightly disgust him. Approving all that is lovely, he will welcome it home with joy into his soul and, nourished thereby, grow into a man of noble spirit. All that is ugly and disgraceful he will rightly condemn and abhor while he is still too young to understand the reason; and when reason comes, he will greet her as a friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.

(Plato, The Republic)

In what ways can we possibly begin to make sense of children? This is by no means a novel question. Since humankind first achieved parenthood the problem has stalked the adult condition. But at a different level we might rightly suppose that, from the earliest Socratic dialogue onwards through the history of ideas, moral, social and political theorists have systematically endeavoured to constitute a view of the child that is compatible with their particular visions of social life and continuous with their speculations concerning the future. Beginning from that initial Hellenic desire to seek out the origins of virtue in order to instil rhythm and harmony into the very souls of the young, and extending up until our contemporary pragmatic concerns with the efficacy of specific and fashionable childrearing practices, after centuries of debate and practice we have still not achieved any consensus over the issue of childhood. Despite a long cultural commitment to the good of the child and a more recent intellectual engagement with the topic of childhood, what remains perpetually diffuse and ambiguous is the basic conceptualization of childhood as a social practice. Childhood remains largely unrealized as an emergent patterning of action. As Rousseau stated in the Preface to Émile:

We know nothing of childhood: and with our mistaken notions the further we advance the further we go astray. The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man.

What do we bring to mind when we contemplate the child? Whether to regard children as pure, bestial, innocent, corrupt, charged with potential, tabula rasa, or even as we view our adult selves; whether they think and reason as we do, are immersed in a receding tide of inadequacy, or are possessors of a clarity of vision which we have through experience lost; whether their forms of language, games and conventions are alternatives to our own, imitations or crude precursors of our own now outgrown, or simply transitory impenetrable trivia which are amusing to witness and recollect; whether they are constrained and we have achieved freedom, or we have assumed constraint and they are truly free – all these considerations, and more, continue to exercise our theorizing about the child in social life.

Any review of the multiplicity of perspectives that are emerging in relation to childhood and also those that have previously been adopted in this area of study reveal, at one level, a continuous paradox, albeit expressed in a variety of forms. Simply stated, the child is familiar to us and yet strange; he or she inhabits our world and yet seems to answer to another; he or she is essentially of ourselves and yet appears to display a systematically different order of being. The child’s serious purpose and our intentions towards him or her are dedicated to a resolution of that initial paradox by transforming him or her into an adult, like ourselves. The reflexive recognition of this sustained, and sustaining, commitment opens up the whole related set of questions concerning the necessity and contingency of the relationship between the child and the adult, both in theory and in everyday life. The ‘known’ difference between these two social locations directs us towards an understanding of the identity contained within each; the contents are marked by the boundaries. The child, therefore, cannot be imagined except in relation to a conception of the adult, but essentially it becomes impossible to generate a well-defined sense of the adult, and indeed adult society, without first positing the child. The relationship child–adult appears locked within the binary reasoning which, for so long, both contained and constrained critical thought in relation to issues of gender and ethnicity. The child, it would seem, has not escaped or deconstructed into the post-structuralist space of multiple and self-presentational identity sets.

From this formulation we may distil two elements that appear common to the mainstream of approaches to the study of childhood: first, a foundational belief that the child instances difference and particularity (a belief that we shall later explore); and second, following from the former, a universal cultural desire to both achieve and account for the integration of that difference into a more broadly conceived sense of order and generality that comprises adult society. This is an integration predicted and condemned by Rousseau:

Nature wants children to be children before they are men. If we deliberately pervert this order, we shall get premature fruits which are neither ripe nor well-flavoured, and which soon decay. . . . Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling peculiar to itself; nothing can be more foolish than to substitute our ways for them.

Typically, however, the overwhelming irony of this manner of thinking is that it signally fails to attend to, or even acknowledge, its own paradoxical character. Inevitably the child side of the relationship within analysis of this genre is uniformly recovered in a negative fashion. Such theories, which tend to be hegemonic within their specific disciplines, such as socialization theory and developmental psychology, are predicated upon a strong but unexplicated knowledge of the difference of childhood and they proceed rapidly to an over-attentive elaboration of the compulsive processes of integration. It is as if the basic ontological questions ‘What is a child?’ and ‘How is the child possible as such?’ were, so to speak, satisfactorily answered in advance of the theorizing and then summarily dismissed.

THE CHILD AS ‘SAVAGE’

In many ways this constitutes a reprise of nineteenth-century social thought. Just as the early ‘evolutionist’ anthropologist, a self-styled civilized person, simply ‘knew’ the savage to be different to himself, on a scale of advancement, and thus worthy of study, so we also, as rational adults, recognize the child as different, less developed, and in need of explanation. Both of these positions proceed from a pre-established but tacit ontological theory, a theory of what makes up the being of the other, be it savage or child. It is these unspoken forms of knowledge, these tacit commitments to difference, that routinely give rise to the accepted definition of the savage or the child as a ‘natural’ meaningful order of object. Such implicit theories serve to render the child–adult continuum as utterly conventional and thus taken for granted for the modern social theorist as the distinction between primitive thought and rational thought was for the early anthropologist. Such social hierarchies are taken for granted in our cognitions because we do not examine the assumptions on which they are based. These assumptions embody the values and interests of the theorist and the contemporary culture, which in turn generate normative expectations within the wider society. However, the history of the social sciences has attested to a sequential critical address and debunking of the dominant ideologies of capitalism in relation to social class, colonialism in relation to race, and patriarchy in relation to gender; but as yet the ideology of development in relation to childhood has remained relatively intact. The politics of this situation warrant further exploration; its consequences are that the child, like the savage of an earlier epoch, is either excluded from our analysis or reimported as an afterthought. A major concern of this book is to encourage the reader to make a critical reconstruction of such sets of assumptions as they may be available, and to different degrees, in the literature concerning childhood that we shall explore together. In this way the child might be reinvented or at least recovered positively. Cunningham contributes to this question when he states that: ‘Analogies between children and savages do not exist in a social or political vacuum’. He seeks to relate such analogies precisely to their contexts or, to use his own terms, ‘to identify discourses about 4 constit childhood, and the power relationships which they embody’ (Cunningham 1991: 6).

At risk of exhausting the previously developed analogy it may be suggested that, whereas the early anthropologist had to voyage to his chosen phenomena, like an explorer, across social space, the child as a contemporary topic has been most vividly brought into recognition through the passage of social time. Both of these journeys symbolize a questing after control through understanding but neither is appropriately exclusive in as much as both the synchronic and diachronic dimensions are pertinent to our knowledge of any socio-cultural form. What we should recognize, however, is that both such processes are significant in fashioning their object; that is to say, comparative and historical analyses, in different ways, succeeded in establishing different classifications and boundaries around their phenomena. The manner of our assembling and the character of our distancing are significant in the constitution of either savage or child. A range of histories of childhood that we shall examine later demonstrate the erratic evolution of the image of childhood and its changing modes of recognition and reception. We will note that the child emerges in contemporary European culture as a formal category and as a social status embedded in programmes of care, routines of surveillance and schemes of education and assessment. Such accounts ensure that the child is realized as the social construction of a particular historical context and this provides a major platform for much contemporary theorizing about childhood; however, it is the child’s identity as a social status that determines its difference and recognition in the everyday world. The status of childhood has its boundaries maintained through the crystallization of conventions and discourses into lasting institutional forms like families, nurseries, schools and clinics, all agencies specifically designed and established to process the child as a uniform entity. Comparative material drawn from cross-cultural contexts reveals divergent sets of conventions and discourses, and thus institutional forms, some utterly different from our own but others bearing strong resemblances, all bound together through homology. The comparative material, as we shall see, instructs us to think more profitably of childhood(s) rather than of a singular and mono-dimensional status.

In the same way that the ‘savage’ served as the anthropologist’s referent for humankind’s elementary forms of organization and primitive classifications, thus providing a speculative sense of the primal condition of human being within the socio-cultural process, so also the child is taken to display for adults their own state of once untutored difference, but in a more collapsed form: a spectrum reduced from ‘human history’ to one of generations. It will be suggested that within the child humanity sees its immediate past but also contemplates the immortality of its immanent future.

In the everyday world the category of childhood is a totalizing concept; it concretely describes a community that at some time has everybody as its member. This is a community which is therefore relatively stable and wholly predictable in its structure but by definition only fleeting in its particular membership. Beyond this the category signifies a primary experience in the existential biography of each individual and thus inescapably derives its common-sense meanings, relevance and relation not only from what it might currently be as a social status but also from how each and every individual, at some time, must have been. It is the only truly common experience of being human; infant mortality is no disqualification.

THE ‘NATURAL’ CHILD

Perhaps because of this seemingly all-encompassing character of the phenomenon as a social status and because of the essentially personal character of its particular articulation, common-sense thinking and everyday language in contemporary society are rife with notions concerning childhood. Being a child, having been a child, having children and having continuously to relate to children are all experiences which contrive to render the category as ‘normal’ and readily transform our attribution of it to the realm of the ‘natural’ (as used to be the case with sex and race). Such understandings, within the collective awareness, are organized around the single most compelling metaphor of contemporary culture, that of ‘growth’. Stemming from this, the physical signs of anatomical change that accompany childhood are taken to be indicators of a social transition, so that the conflation of the realms of the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’ is perpetually reinforced.

All contemporary approaches to the study of childhood are clearly committed to the view that childhood is not a natural phenomenon and cannot properly be understood as such. The social transformation from child to adult does not follow directly from physical growth and the recognition of children by adults, and vice versa, is not singularly contingent upon physical difference. Furthermore, physical morphology may constitute a form of difference between people in certain circumstances but it is not an adequately intelligible basis for the relationship between the adult and the child. Childhood is to be understood as a social construct; it makes reference to a social status delineated by boundaries that vary through time and from society to society but which are incorporated within the social structure and thus manifested through and formative of certain typical forms of conduct. Childhood then always relates to a particular cultural setting.

Our early anthropologist would readily recognize the significance of such concepts within the social life of his ‘savage’; he would demonstrate that the variety and hierarchy of social statuses within the tribe are plainly prescribed by boundaries which are, in turn, maintained through conventional practices deeply bound within ritual. Any transposition from one status location to another is never simply a matter of physical growth or indeed physical change. Such movements require a transformatory process such as valediction, rites of passage and initiation ceremonies, all of which are disruptive and painful and have an impact not just upon the individual but also upon the collectivity. The recognition that we are addressing the somewhat more diffuse and volatile boundaries that mark off childhood today, and the fact that we are considering such a transition from within the mores and folkways of a modern secular society, is no guarantee that the ritualism will be any less present. Rather, perhaps, the rituals will have become more deep-seated and ideological in their justification. Whatever, the experience of change through ritual will continue to exercise a violent and turbulent constraint on the individual’s consciousness. We might argue, in fact, that since the turn of the twentieth century we have developed a psychoanalytic vocabulary of motives that ascribe all pathological conduct to the dysfunctional integration of the effects of the culturally based rituals that are instrumental in our becoming adult.

The widespread tendency to routinize and ‘naturalize’ childhood, both in common sense and in theory, serves to conceal its analytic importance behind a cloak of the mundane; its significance and ‘strangeness’ as a social phenomenon is obscured. Within everyday rhetoric and many discourses of theory childhood is taken for granted; it is regarded as necessary and inevitable, and thus part of normal life – its utter ‘thereness’ seems to foster a complacent attitude. This naturalism has, up until fairly recently, extended to the social sciences, particularly psychology, where childhood is apprehended largely in terms of biological and cognitive development through concepts such as ‘maturation’. Sociology, in search of explanations through structural causality, has independently sought to understand the problem of the child’s acquisition of specific cultural repertoires through the largely one-sided theories of socialization. All of these ways of proceeding, though predominant within the academy, leave the actual child untheorized; they all contrive to gloss over the social experience that is childhood. We might here concur with Hillman who, albeit writing in the context of pastoral psychology, states that much of what is said about children and childhood is not really about children and childhood at all:

What is this ‘child’ – that is surely the first question. Whatever we say about children and childhood is not altogether about children and childhood. What is this peculiar realm we call ‘childhood’ and what are we doing by establishing a special world with children’s rooms and children’s toys, children’s clothes, and children’s books. Clearly, some realm of the psyche called ‘childhood’ is being personified by the child and carried by the child for the adult.

(Hillman 1975: 8)

THE ‘SOCIAL’ CHILD

I will suggest throughout this book that, in significant ways, the child, as conceptualized within both the spectrum of everyday attitudes and the professional discourses of the social sciences, is employed, consciously though often unconsciously, as a device to propound versions of sociality and social cohesion.

Understood from within a variety of disciplines and perspectives, and also across a range of different sets of interests, childhood receives treatment as a stage, a structured process of becoming, but rarely as a course of action or a coherent social practice. The type of ‘growth’ metaphors that are readily adopted in discussions about childhood all pertain to the character of what is yet to be and yet which is also presupposed. Thus childhood is spoken about as: a ‘becoming’; tabula rasa; laying down the foundations; shaping the individual; taking on; growing up; preparation; inadequacy; inexperience; immaturity, and so on. Such metaphoricity all speaks of an essential and magnetic relation to an unexplicated, but nevertheless firmly established, rational adult world. This adult world is assumed to be not only complete, recognizable and in stasis, but also, and perhaps most significantly, desirable. It is a benevolent and coherent totality which extends a welcome to the child, invites him to cast off the qualities that ensure his differences, and encourages his acquiescence to the preponderance of the induction procedures that will guarantee his corporate identity.

For the anthropologist to proceed from such a stance would be for him to invite the charge of ethnocentrism, and deservedly so! If he were to suggest that the ‘savage’ was in some way in his shadow, acting through delusion, stupidity or intellectual inadequacy, or operating with a proto- typical form of his own ‘advanced’, ‘developed’ or ‘civilized’ cultural devices then ...