Reconstructing Childhood

Thinking 7heJoumai of Philosophy for Children, Volume 14, Number J

Page 29 David Kennedy is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University, and the author 01 numerous articles on the philosophy 01 childhood.

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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 cultural 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 phenomenon 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 problematic is that "child" and "adult" are a contrastive pair: as there is no notion of "old" without a corresponding notion of "young," so "child" is unthinkable apart from "adull." If everyone were born and remained as "children," we would no longer have any use for

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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 historical and cultural appearance. "Child" is also a hard biological category, determined 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 biological 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 typically 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-

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 environment 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 information 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 childadult relation at the end of the second millenium offers the possibility of a shifting of the boundaries within this contrastive pair, and therefore a

David KtIllledy, RecOIu/mcting Childhood

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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 mutuality, 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 subjected to the same marginalization and cultural outsider status that we find so often as well when we explore the status of woman, slaves, ethnic or racial minorities, the insane, or the economically oppressed. Children are, to be sure. a special case of this marginalized other, closest to women, in that their subjugation by patriarchal power centers 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 simply 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 unmitigated 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 resulting 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 exploited 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 subspeciation, or the attribution of ontological difference to members of outgroups, or cultural outsiders. It might even be called a sort of proto-teratology, 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 dangerous is not so much that she is a monster as that she has every chance of turning into a monster without shaping 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

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 associated with the rise of the modernism of which Erasmus is one cultural founder, evidence of the emergence of a disciplinary technology applied to the riminal, the insane and to the child in the form of confinement in institutions, harsh and systematic punishment, constant surveillance, and "treatment" 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 example in the high Romantic notion of childhood as a natural state of "genius," like the "primitive," apart from the corrupt and vain consciousness of society; or the "divine child" of myth and religion, whether represented 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 archetype 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 projection, 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

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rience" by which it "conquers" the "experienced environment"· represents a form of Western objectivist bias, a hypenrophy of the Cartesian subjectobject split, emblematic of the alienated subjectivity of modernism.

Cbild as cultural outsider It is characteristic of that form of childhood which is said to be disappearing 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, interpersonal violence and sexual predation, widespread 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 thinking" 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 normative classifications, and assigned vari- •. ous semi-medical statuses when they depart from the norm ("learning disabled," "hyperactive," etc.). 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 overcome. From the point of view of the Romantic protest against the rationalized 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 logicomathematical strucLUres an instrument of integration increasingly indcpendem of expe-

The child as speciaJ case of the marginalized other It is much easier to make the case for the existence of these forms of marginalization and objeetifiction for outsider 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

Davtd &nnedy. Reconstrucbng Ch,lJihood

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is. after all, a life-cycle of organisms, human or othernrise. The human life cycle does have certain distincti~e patterns, apparent stages, with limitations and possibilities appropriate to each one. There is a developmental trajectory which can be empirically and bioLogicaUy described, a process of "formation" or "orthogenesis," which most typically can be understood as a movement 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 hierarchic integration." lo The child is chronologically based at the lower end of this continuum. Given these biologically determined constraints, we notice at least the following regularities, some of which may be thought either to justify at least in principle the forms of marginalization cited above, or at least to expLain why they occur with such regularity: The child needs protection because of his--relative to adults and older children-smaller size, lower weight, and relatively weaker musculature, 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 survival. The child needs protection because 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 sustained labor in the interests of survival. Children can and do work, and in pastoral 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 maltreatment by those who controlled their labor. Granting the special developmental 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 status in many cases either do not so protect them, or "overprotect" them, with equally disempowering results. I see no other explanation-except the extent to which all persons in Western societies are, to a greater or less degree, marginaLized-of the following contemporary situations in the lives of children: • The ongoing and increasing "ghettoization" of children in instirntions--schools and child care centers--and the complete exclusion of the child from the adult workplace. • The ever-increasing disappearance of public space for children's sociability and play, except those created specifically for that purpose, i.e. play "reservations." • The ongoing construal of the child by the slate and powerful educational 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 productive, 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 rationalization. A normative form of "banking" education that, abundant disconfirming evidence to the contrary, continues to ignore children's developmental potential, and to make them the object of a pseudo-scientific and dehumanizing 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 witness children being neglected and/or abused in public places.

The century-old discipline of developmental psychology, which in a preponderance 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 colonization are also imposed on adults-in the marginalization of workers by corporate capitalism, of persons of color by racist and ethnocentric polities, 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 "normalization" 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. corporate, scientific, and educational establishment, is in the area of childrearing, 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 selfunderstanding takes place: where the balance between conscious and unconscious, instinct and repression, socialized 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 relation between adults and children, which revolves around the economy of instinct and repression, or, as the cultural historian Norbert Elias has characterized it, a changing "interplay" between the conscious and unconscious Levels of personality." It seems characteristic of the life cycle in general that "child" represents the uncon-

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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 severity of upholding them, because the breach of prohibitions places in an unstable balance of repression all 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 projection further: the child is less threatening, but parents still need to "to conquer its mind, in order to control its insides, its anger, its needs, its masturbation, its very wiU.'02' deMause's formulation of the child 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, according to deMause, turns on the capacity of adults "to regress to the psychic age of their children and work through the anxieties of that age in a better man· 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 The success of this "regression in the service of the child" revolves, in turn, around the adult's awareness of his own projective relationship with

David Kennedy, Reconstruding Childhood

children. The adult, when "face to face with a child who needs something," either approaches the child as a screen for the projection of his own unconscious material (projective reaction); as a substitute for an adult in his past with whom his relationship is as yet unresolved (reversal reaction); or is able to empathize with the child's instinctual needs, and do something in order to satisfy them (empathic reaction)!' deMause's theory tends to confirm both Elias' and Foucault's analysis of the early modern adult-child relation. What is particularly interesting about his formulation is an assumption which appears to be paradoxical: the central dynamic of the evolution of the adultchild relation involves both a closer approach to children, i.e. the ability to identif)' with the child's instinctual needs, and a separation, as represented in the notion of withdrawal of projection. The empathic reaction is made possible because the adult is able to separate herself from the anxiety produced by the "emotional danger zone" which children trigger through their relative lack of instinctual repression. That is, she can, in deMause's words, "regress to the level of the child's need and correctly identifY it without an admixture of [her] own projections," then "maintain enough distance from the need in order to be able to satisfY

the text in the reader's understanding, which he characterizes as "understanding at and through distance."2g Applied to the adult-child relation, the hermeneutic process is what deMause refers to as withdrawal of projection through psychological distance, followed by identification, or the ability to "regress to the level of the child's need and correctly identify it without an admixture of the adult's own projections." It is at this poim that the adult awakens to the voice of the child.

Children's epistemic privilege Awakening to the voice of the child means that the latter is understood as the beaTer of new information for adult self-understanding. As distanced other, the child's status is analogous to what feminist standpoint theorists describe as "valuable 'strangers' to the social order," or "outsiders within.")(1 Like women, persons of color, or others marginalized by Eurocentric and patriarchal personal, interpersonal and social constructs. the child's location in the social and natural world affords her an "epistemic privilege." Since she lives before, or at the margins of the adult instinctual economy, her relationship to that economy is inherently transgressive. Given that she is not, as Sandra Harding describes it, a "native,"S' she sees things which i l."!8 natives don't. What this does for the adult who This would seem to indicate a 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 highbalance that the modern adult er level-through incorporating unbecomes a hermeneutic being-he is conscious contents into consciousness. now a "reader" of life and the other, he process of making the unconand the reader is by definition an scious concious is, as we have learned interpreter. The interpreter must from bOth Freud and Jung, the inherinterpret 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 which makes dialogue possible; and Ricoeurian perspeClive, the outcome dialogue results in a "fusion of hori- of the hermeneutic process is a "metaons," 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

recovers itself in a new balance. Alice Miller has put it in more concrete form:

to be consigned to a linear, "progressive" historical movement, and appears to be characterized in everyday lives by Once children are allowed to be more assymetry, spiraling, regression, paththan bearers of parental projections, ology. failure. accident, good or bad they can become an inexhaustible "fortune," & etc.,~6 as well as being source for their parents ofundistorted influenced by countless unique but relknowledge about human nature. Sensuality, pleasure in one's own body, atively predictable local, regional, and pleasure in the affection shown by epochal variables. It can be avowed at another person, the need to express least that the project of "withdrawal of oneself, to be heard, seen. understood. projection" leading to the "empathic and respeCled. nOl to have to suppress relation." appears to be a key element anger and rage and to be allowed to voice other feelings as well, such as in the capacity of humans to live with grief, fear, envy, and jealousy ... 33 difference, and so is connected to the As entering into dialogue with the overcoming of sexism, racism, ethnovoice of the child results in greater psy- centrism, classism, homophobia, relichological integration on the part of gious intolerance, and aggressive the adult, this is then reflected in a nationalism. It would seem to follow form of child-rearing which recognizes from the arguments presented above the importance of meeting the "narcis- that the adult-child relation is the sistic needs" of children "such as interpersonal hotbed in which any respecl, mirroring, being understood given individual's instinctual economy and taken seriously."" This. in tum. is produced; and that it is the character leads to the development of adults who of that economy which configures the experience a healthier. more creative human capacity to tolerate difference. relationship between conscious and value the narcissistic needs of others, unconscious elements of the self, and and to develop psychologically and in are therefore more capable of "inquiry the quality called "reasonableness," and creative transformation." which, as our century has shown. does not depend on rationality alone. Breaking Out: Elements of an What would a culture which has Emergent Child-Adult Reconstruction internalized the empathic ideal look The possibility of a positive shift- like? There are indications that this ing of the boundaries between "child" change has already begun to at least and "adult" appears to be especiaUy suggest itself in the postmodern West. dependent on the material conditions The preoccupation with the "inner of civilization. deMause insists that child" in contemporary psychotherapy what he calls the "generational pres- seems to be one of them. TIle latter is sure for psychic change" which drives an index of the withdrawal of projec(and is driven by) the evolution of the tion. in the sense that the adult who child rearing modes "occurs indepen- recognizes her "inner child" recognizes dent of social and technological her ontological unity with the child, change"~~; but findings from the study and is aware that the adult-child conof the history of childhood continue to tinuum is present in each epoch of the confirm the importance to improved life cycle. This is related to the tenadult-chld relations of economic and dency in recent psychoanalytic theory, political growth and stability. relatively implicit in Freud but stated clearly in sophisticated medical and epidemio- post-Freudian ego psychology, to conlogical knowledge, practice, and acces- strue the developmental process as sibiity. and the formation and mainte- life-long. To that extent. the adult is nance of an information environment always stiU a child. Dieter Misgeld has which produces "readers" (or "herme- put this eloquently: nems") in the broad sense. . .. rather than locating children and adults as being at differing stages in a In addition, any argument for hisdevelopmental sequence. with a fixed torical change modeled on Hegelian end point as an immutable standard dialectics is slightly suspect. The shiftavailable for the appraisal of the ing interplay between conscious and sequence, a properly self-reflective orientation calls into question the def· unconscious levels in the modal perinitely locatable enlilie.~ of adults and sonality of any culture is too complex

Page 35 children. It is a questioning in which the community of adult and child, their belonging together, is brought forth. This onJy comes abom in recognizing that as an adult, one is not beyond the movement back to the child. and from there fOIWard to the point where one began the movemenL Having been a chi Id is still a possibility one lives, something one has to return to in order to establish oneself as an adulL. One generates in reflection a community of adults and children in which principles and rules are at issue on both sides. in which being bound to convention as an adult may be questioned by making reference to children as more principled than adulL.~. For children, at times. may appear to be less convenlion-bound than adults, thereby appearing more adult-like than adults.... An interest in children is not independent from an interest in establishing for ourselves who we are. as adults. and what we must orient to in order to live our adulthood."

Such a changed perspective has obvious implications for education. in that it lays the groundwork for a pedagogy based on adult-ehild dialogue. It also has implications for child psychology. in that the direction of development on which all adultist stage theories is based--the idea of "fixed endpoint" of a Cartesian rational selfpossession. or Piaget's decentered episternic subject--becomes problematic. $0 it points to the possibility of a dialogical, rather than objectifying methodology in the human sciences. Recognizing unity also involves recognizing difference. Decentering from adultism implies the understanding that the child occupies a perspective through her placement viz a viz others which is not completely accessible to adults--a perspective informed, not only by organismic difference, but by positioning in the social world and its relations of power. and in the natural world. Extending episternic privilege to the child involves bracketing adult epistemological norms, and positioning oneself to notice what children can know, not only because of their position as "outsiders within:' but also because of their undersocialization of a received stock of knowledge. i.e., the absence of a crystallized world picture, or received ontology and epistemology.3K An example might be the child's openness to other species and other

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forms of life; or what Dewey refers to as a "marvelous power to enlist the cooperative attention of others" through a "flexible and sensitive ability . . . to vibrate sympathetically with the attitudes and doings of those about them.",g And Coleridge identified the young child with what he called "intuitive 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 place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life."~ The recognition that there are 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 introduces another fissure into the mainstream, objectivist Western epistemological edifice, to add to those introduced by feminist and multicultural 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 fundamental epistemic principle. Nandy brings this home to the problem of the withdrawal of projection in making the connection between the culture of childhood and the culture of oppressed peDples, and their respective relations to white patriarchal colonialism. He says: The culture of the adult world intersects, and sometimes confronts, the world of the child. Ideally, this sharing of space should Lake place on lbe basis of murual respecl. That il does not is a measure of our fear of losing our own selfhood through our close contacls with cultures which dare to represent our other selves, as well as a measure of our fear of the liminality berween the adult and the child which many of us carry within ourselves. This is the liminality Freud worked through in his interpreUltion of psychopathology. This is also the Liminality Gandhi had to face openly while bauling the ideology of colonialism...

. The final test of our skill to live a bicultural or multicullural existence may still be our ability to live with our children in muruality."

tice of questioning knowledge--both one's own and others'-it promises to be the epistemic and curricular wedge which opens the experience of childhood tD reflection, both on the part of children and Df adults. It seems more than just coincidental that the negative evaluation of the child's powers of judgment, reasoning, and reflection have legitimized the marginalization Df children, from Aristotle to Piaget. What this means from the child's pDint of view is that the adult cannot "hear" her fDrm of reason, either in its similarities to or differences from her own, which makes of childhDod a culture Df silence. The child's becomes a voice from the margins. assDciated with "essential" nature, animality, madness, criminality, the divine 4'-i.e., with the speechless. The kind of reflection which philosophyand especially philosDphy done in communal dialogue, or community of inquiry-evokes, Dffers an ideal location fDr adults tD make gODd on the child's epistemic privilege, to recognize a speech other than their Dwn, tD face a culture which "represents our Dther selves," to live the other side.

ND matter how isolated and marginalized it might become, the primary arena fDr the intersection and confrontation to which Nandy refers will always be the immediate family. The potential rDle of the school, however, in that "sharing of space ... on the basis of mutual respect" cannot be underestimated. That potential can only be realized through a reorientation on the part of the educational establishment, which at present is-like the majDrity Df the parent population it serves-oriented, if only by default, to a child-as-raw-material, deficit model. To understand the school as a locus of mutual socialization, where, to quote Nandy, "our most liberating bDnds can be with Dur undersocialized children,"" would appear to mean changes SD prDfound as to be almost unimaginable in our present situation. It would mean at least a dismantling Df the adult hierarchical power structure of schools, which acts to hold the productiDn mDdel of educatiDn in place; a complete refDrmulation of the objectifying system of assessment and evaluaThe Manner of Change tiDn which drives the curricular and Whatever the formal Dr efficient pedagogical "banking" system which cause which brings it about, it is probserves it; and a recDnscrual of the child ably safe (and perhaps cDmforting) tD as subject-as active, competent prosay that the positive transfDrmation of tagonist in her own learning and the adult-child relation is not really developmental process. In an even under Dur control. The vicissitudes of broader sense, it would imply reintegrating 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 predicrestructuring the workplace and tive value. In fact our age is haunted by through reclaiming public space for the spectre of what Postman calls the "adult-child," i.e., a modal pe;sonality, children's play and socialization. The importance of critical think- produced and maintained by televiing, 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 econosense 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 competence in the languages one speaks.

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Thinking: Tlu JcruT1Ul1 oj Philosaphy for Children, Volume 14. Number I

tence in the languages one speaks. Historical change of the kind discussed here appears to happen in a piecemeal fashion, and is characterized 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-provided education appears to be as yet deeply entrenched in the mainstream. Meanwhile, efforts at school decentralization, dominated as they are by economic, class, and religious self-interests, tend to reproduce the hegemonic model. Be that as it may, the emergence over the last two centuries of child-centered, dialogical educational theory and practice appears to offer the most concrete hope for the possibility of social reconstruction through the dialectical reconstruction of the adult-child relation.

Tyranny and UtopitJJ: EJsays in the PrJlitia oJ Awarenes.l (Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1987), p. 61. The mosl flagrant-and prominem-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 innovation 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. 134178. And see ShulamiLh Shahar, Childhood in the MidJile Ages (London: Rour..lcdge, 1990).

I.

The Disappearance or Childhood (New York: Delacone, 1984).

17. L. Martin, H. Gutman, & P.H. Hutton, eds., Technologies oJ the Self A Seminar with Michael Foucault (Arnhersl: University of Massachuselts Press, 1988).

2.

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of IJu Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1968).

18. Elias, The History oJManners, p. 204. And see pp. 205-215.

3.

Uoyd de Mause, "The Evolulion of Childhood," in Uoyd deMause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: Harper, 1974).

19. See Waller Ong, Oralily and Wnacy: The Technologizing or lhe Word (New York: Melhuen. 1982).

ENDNOTES

4. Aristotle, PhyJia Jl vi 197b; Nicomnchean Ethics I ix Ila. 5. "On Education for Children," from The ErasmtLf 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 pict: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 Development 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.

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 progress through hisLOry: Infanticidal (Antiquity lo 4t.b Century A.D.). Abandonment (4lh lO 13th Cenrury), Ambivalent (14th lo 17lh CenNries), Inttusive (l8th Century), Socialization (l9th to mid-20lh Century), and Helping (begins mid-20Lh Century). 25. deMause's lheory need not be read as evolulionary 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

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 characterizes psychological developmem as "a very rough road. pitled with obstructions, interspersed 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.