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

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Reconstructing Childhood

David Kennedy

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David Kennedy is Associate Professor ofEducational Foundations at Montclair StateUniversity, and the author 01 numerous articleson the philosophy 01 childhood.

Is Childhood Disappearing?

~e "disappearance" of childhood

has been an ongoing theme ofcultural speculation in the U.S.

for at least the last 20 years. Thenotion that the child is "disappearing"is both a description of a perceived cul­tural change and an implicit culturalreaction to it. It as~umes, first of all,that there is a normative phenomenoncalled "childhood" which has certainidentifiable characteristics which are atleast potentially evident in all children.It also assumes that such a phenome­non is a cultural-historical one, since itis capable of either no longer beingthere, or else of changing its form--it isnot clear which. If the former, a furtherassumption seems to be that if andwhen the "child" "disappears," what isleft is an "adult."

What makes this assumption prob­lematic is that "child" and "adult" are acontrastive pair: as there is no notionof "old" without a corresponding no­tion of "young," so "child" is unthink­able apart from "adull." If everyonewere born and remained as "children,"we would no longer have any use for

the term, and the same is true if wewere all born and remained "adults."$0 it would seem that if childhood isgoing to disappear, then adulthood isgoing to disappear too. Any change inone necessarily seems to imply achange in the other. Their cultural andhistorically mediated appearances areinseparably linked.

There is something we can knowabout childhood apart from its histori­cal and cultural appearance. "Child" isalso a hard biological category, deter­mined by height, weight, organ sizeand function, hormonal configurationand neurological state, as well as,although in a weaker sense than thelatter, cogllitive, linguistic, affective.and motoric distinctives. The biologi­cal child will never "disappear," in thatshe seems to be a permanent aspect ofhow the species reproduces itself. Whatcan disappear is usually described interms like "innocence," meaning typi­cally ignorance of things that adultsprefer to keep secret even from eachother, like sex, death, madness, andaddiction. What also can appear anddisappear are attributions of compe-

lence, responsibility, or intelligence.Neil Postman, for example, interpretsthe characteristics of what we now call"childhood" as one effect the printingpress had when it replaced the oral,child-accessible information environ­ment of the medieval world with onebased on the printed word, therebyleading to the imposition on childrenof a long apprenticeship in a difficultskill, and hence a new class status ascultural outsider. I

Postman's argument makes basichistorical sense, but in fact the replace,­ment of an oral by a literate informa­tion environment is only one among ahost of factors which have led to therelative marginalization of children inthe modern world. It must also be keptin mind that, given the inseparabilityof the concepts "child" and "adult," allof these changes reflect an alteration inwhat it means to be an adult. I want toargue that, from a dialectical historicalperspective, the condition of the child­adult relation at the end of the secondmillenium offers the possibility of ashifting of the boundaries within thiscontrastive pair, and therefore a

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moment for historical action on thepan of those concerned, not only withchildren and childhood, but with thereconstruction of adulthood as well.The role of education in that historicalaction is a critical one, particularlywhat Freire' calls "problem-posingeducation," or "dialogue," for here thelocus of real mutuality between adultand child is possible. But beforeexploring the strucrure of that mutual­ity, it is necessary to take aCCOUI1l of thechild's actual position in the socialworld.

Child as Marginalized SubjectFrom what we can find of children

in the historical record. they appearfrom earliest times to have been sub­jected to the same marginalization andcultural outsider status that we find sooften as well when we explore the sta­tus of woman, slaves, ethnic or racialminorities, the insane, or the econom­ically oppressed. Children are, to besure. a special case of this marginalizedother, closest to women, in that theirsubjugation by patriarchal power cen­ters is held in place by elements whichare found, then reinscribed in and onthe body. The difficulty in studying thehistory of childhood is that children,like women, are in so many cases sim­ply absent from the record, and so onemust draw conclusions from indirectevidence. This difficulty in itself, incombination with the references we dolind to children, offers us a strong cluethat children have always occupied thefollowing position or status vis a vis themajority of adults.

Children as propertyIn the ancient Greek and Roman

household, the father held the powerof life or death over his children.When Lloyd deMause characterizesthe earliest parent-child relation as"infanticidal,'" he seems to be referingto this fundamental attitude of unmiti­gated possession, such that the child isnot perceived to have any humanityapart from the projected humanitywhich the adult accords it. TIle extentto which children are still construed asthe material property of their parel1lsis indicated today by the ambiguitysurrounding child custody, parentalinfanticide or homicide cases, child

abuse cases. and, arguably, abortion.In the case of abuse. the child is oftenreleased back into the custody of theoffending parel1ls when it is clearly notin her best interests, sometimes result­ing in her death. To the extent thatchildren are property, they are likeslaves, and. until fairly recently in theWest, like women.

Child as economicallydisenfranchised

raditionally, children have norights to property and meaningfulwork, except at the discretion of theirparents or guardians. Children haveno economic means in our societyapart from episodic menial tasks forextremely low pay. In historical epochsin which children were a part of thelabor force, they seem either to haveplayed a relatively important part inpastoral or agrarian economies; or, inindustrialized settings, become ex­ploited wages slaves.

Child as ontological otherAristotle identifies children with

animals, slaves, and women. The child,he tells us, lacks the capacity of choice."moral agency," or will, i.e. the abilityto deliberately engage in an actiontoward a final end, or "some kind ofactivity of the soul in conformity withvirtue." For this reason he cannot becalled "happy"; and if we do call himhappy, "we do so by reason of thehopes 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 mighteven be called a sort of proto-teratol­ogy, in the sense that anything not fullyhuman in the adult, male, free-bornsense of the word is a kind of monsler,i.e. a being that has not attained or isincapable of attaining to the human"substance." In the case of the child it isthe former: what makes the child dan­gerous is not so much that she is amonster as that she has every chance ofturning into a monster without shap­ing by adults. So Erasmus, 1800 yearsafter Aristotle, tells us:

To be a true father, you must takeabsolute control of your son's entirebeing; and your primary concern mustbe for that part of his charaCler which

David KtIllledy, RecOIu/mcting Childhood

distinguishes him from the animalsand comes closes I to reOccting thedivine.... So what are we 10 expect ofman? He will mosl certainly turn outto be an unproduclive brute unless atonce and without delay he is subjectedto a process of intensive instruction. S

The tenor of this passage might beinterpreted as merely a rhetoricalexaggeration, did we not find associat­ed with the rise of the modernism ofwhich Erasmus is one cultural founder,evidence of the emergence of a disci­plinary technology applied to theriminal, 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. objectifyingpsychologies and pedagogies. Thechild of the early modem period isunderstood to be in need of beingforged, as Michel Foucault puts it, intoa "docile body that may be subjected,used, transformed, and improved."6

The child as ontological other canalso be positively constTued--for exam­ple in the high Romantic notion ofchildhood as a natural state of"genius," like the "primitive," apartfrom the corrupt and vain conscious­ness of society; or the "divine child" ofmyth and religion, whether represent­ed in the childhood of the god or heroof the Bronze Age, the hermaphroditiceroti of Hellenistic Greece. or the infantJesus of High Renaissance art. Herethe child acts as screen for projections,not of the sub but of the superhuman, ofan undivided state of consciousnesswhich, for the adult, is projected bothinto 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. atranscultural image that manifests indreams. myth, an, and psychotherapy.'The physical, linguistic and behavioralotherness of the child draws adult pro­jection, whether positive or negative,of their own felt difference.

Child as epistemically incompleteWhether we understand the child's

epistemic "deficit" as structural andontogenetic, which we find inPiagetian formulations,~ or as social inthe sense of not yet having acquiredthe epistemological and ontologicalconvictions of her culture, the result is

Thinking: TheJournal oj Philosophy J!>T Children, J,Vlum,./

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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 outsiderIt is characteristic of that form of

childhood which is said to be disap­pearing that children are assiduouslykept from adult knowledge, chiefly ofsex and death, but also of harsh socialand economic realities, and the darkeraspects of the human psyche. Parentsand educationalists frequentJy voicefears that for children to know "toomuch" about, for example, the realitiesof political and economic exploitationand oppression, classism, racism andethnocentrism, 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, hopelessnessor depression. Many adults are evenskeptical of introducing "critical think­ing" into education, in expectation ofan erosion of right authority relationsbetween child and adult which, theythink, could follow from encouragingchildren to "think for themselves."Thus, the child is an "outsider" to adultculture, a status which in the modernworld is reproduced institutionally, inthat children are segregated in schools(as well as age-segregated withinschools), excluded from the adultworkplace, and forced into engineeredrecreational areas to play and socialize.In addjtion, they are objectified by thescientific establishment as units ofstudy. subjected to a barrage of norma­tive classifications, and assigned vari- •.ous semi-medical statuses when theydepart from the norm ("learning dis­abled," "hyperactive," etc.).

the same: the child is the irrationalother, the magical thinker, rJle "native."Again, there is both a positive and anegative side to this projection: fromthe point of view of educating theyoung child into the convictions of theage, it is an absence to be filled, anignorance, or primitivism to be over­come. From the point of view of theRomantic protest against the rational­ized epistemic universe of the Enlight-

enment, it is a window into anotherform of knowledge, which is capable,like the forms of knowing of mystics,shamans, women. the mad, etc., ofyielding significant information aboutthe world. For the epistemologicalcounterculture. Piaget's notion of theadult "decentered" epistemic subject.which "has found in logicomathemati­cal strucLUres an instrument of integra­tion increasingly indcpendem of expe-

The child as speciaJ caseof the marginalized other

It is much easier to make the casefor the existence of these forms of mar­ginalization and objeetifiction for out­sider adults--whether persons of color,the mentally ill. "primitives," "thepoor," or criminals. The claim that thechild may be grouped among them iscomplicated by the fact that she seemsto be a special case of outsider. There

--0- ,.,. ...

is. after all, a life-cycle of organisms,human or othernrise. The human lifecycle does have certain distincti~e pat­terns, apparent stages, with limitationsand possibilities appropriate to eachone. There is a developmental trajec­tory which can be empirically and bio­LogicaUy described, a process of "for­mation" or "orthogenesis," which mosttypically can be understood as a move­ment from "irrunature" to "mature," orin Werner's classic formulation, from "astate of relative globality and lack ofdifferentiation to a state of increasingdifferentiation, articulation, and hier­archic integration."lo The child ischronologically based at the lower endof this continuum.

Given these biologically deter­mined constraints, we notice at leastthe following regularities, some ofwhich may be thought either to justifyat least in principle the forms of mar­ginalization cited above, or at least toexpLain why they occur with such regu­larity:

The child needs protection be­cause of his--relative to adults andolder children-smaller size, lowerweight, and relatively weaker muscula­ture, which make him potential prey tothose larger and stronger than himself,and less able than adults to performmany kinds of labor necessary for sur­vival.

The child needs protection be­cause of his relative lack of experience,which prevents him from having aninductive base of concrete instancesthrough which to solve problems, or to

make judgments.Many children experience intense

periods of emotional lability which,combined with a comparative lack aninternal locus of control. make themmore liable to behavioral "excess,"whether in the form of "acting out," oremotional upset. Thus, the child couldbe dangerous to himelf or others.

Many children lack the dispositionor the judgmental apparatus for sus­tained labor in the interests of survival.Children can and do work, and in pas­toral or agricultural economies, arequite capable of fulfilling necessaryeconomic functions. But in industrialsocieties, those periods we are aware ofin which children have been treated asadults capable of work have witnessed

dramatic exploitation and maltreat­ment by those who controlled theirlabor.

Granting the special developmen­tal status of chiLdren, they can stiLI bedefined as marginalized subjects to theextent to which the precautions takenby adults to protect children from thepotentially harmful results of this sta­tus in many cases either do not so pro­tect them, or "overprotect" them, withequally disempowering results. I see noother explanation-except the extentto which all persons in Western soci­eties are, to a greater or less degree,marginaLized-of the following con­temporary situations in the lives ofchildren:• The ongoing and increasing "ghet­

toization" of children in instirn­tions--schools and child care cen­ters--and the complete exclusionof the child from the adult work­place.

• The ever-increasing disappear­ance of public space for children'ssociability and play, except thosecreated specifically for that pur­pose, i.e. play "reservations."

• The ongoing construal of the childby the slate and powerful educa­tional institutions as "raw material"for its economic, military, andpolitical uses, or as Ashis Nandyputs it, "an inferior, weak butusable version of of the fully pro­ductive, fully performing. humanbeing who owns the modernworld.""

When the rhetoric of "humanresources" is combined with increasingunderfunding by public institutions ofchildren's education, its very lack ofcoherence identifies it as rationaliza­tion.

A normative form of "banking"education that, abundant disconfirm­ing evidence to the contrary, continuesto ignore children's developmentalpotential, and to make them the objectof a pseudo-scientific and dehumaniz­ing educational technology.

Society's relative insensitivity tochild abuse in all its forms, analagousto its insensitivity to spouse abuse. Thisis evidenced in court decisions, as wellas everyday reactions of adults who wit­ness children being neglected and/orabused in public places.

Davtd &nnedy. Reconstrucbng Ch,lJihood

The century-old discipline of deve­lopmental psychology, which in a pre­ponderance of cases, still construes thechild as "organism," and isolates anddenies her subjectivity in stage theoriesand objectifying taxonomies.

The fact that these forms of colo­nization are also imposed on adults-­in the marginalization of workers bycorporate capitalism, of persons ofcolor by racist and ethnocentric poli­ties, and of women by patriarchal andmasculinist attitudes, policies andpractices-does not mitigate or excusethe situation of children. It could beargued that, in a world of widespreadhuman objectification and "normaliza­tion" by state·run apparatuses, that thestrategic locus for reclaiming whatFreire refers to as our "ontologicalvocation to be more fully human"l!from the "technologies of discipline"perpetuated by the governmental. cor­porate, scientific, and educationalestablishment, is in the area of child­rearing, whether expressed in familyand local community, or in schooling.This is because the adult-child relationis the interpersonal location where themost fundamental formation of self­understanding takes place: where thebalance between conscious and uncon­scious, instinct and repression, social­ized and unsocialized. freedom andself-constraint, are shaped and playedout. The character of this balancedetermines the capacity of humans inany given culture or epoch to followtheir "vocation of persons who areauthentic only when engaged ininquiry and creative transformation,"·!which would appear to be a necessarycondition for resisting colonization.

The rise of the modern formof child colonization:

A psychohistorical explanationA psychohistorical look at the

aduLt-ehild relation suggests that thereis by nature a complex projective rela­tion between adults and children,which revolves around the economy ofinstinct and repression, or, as the cul­tural historian Norbert Elias has char­acterized it, a changing "interplay"between the conscious and uncon­scious Levels of personality." It seemscharacteristic of the life cycle in gener­al that "child" represents the uncon-

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threshold of delicacy. and--sincc theyare not yet adapted.-rney infringe thetaboos ofsociety, cross the adult shamefrontier, and penetrate emotional dan·ger zones which the adult himself canonJy control with difficulty.... Anxictyis aroused in adults when the stNcCUreof their own insUnClllaJ life as defmedby the social order is threatened. Myother behavior means danger. Thisleads to the emotional undertoneassociated with moraJ demands andthe aggressive and Ihreatening severi­ty of upholding them, because thebreach of prohibitions places in anunstable balance of repression allthose for whom the standard of societyhas become "second nature...••

This explains the severity of earlymodern child rearing modes, at homebut especially in schools, when weunderstand that the project is actuallyto correct human nature in the serviceof what presents itself as a higher,evolved idea] of human nature. UoyddeMause refers to the two child rearingmodes which predominated in theearly modem period as "ambivalen t"and "intrusive." For the former, thechild is still "a container for dangerousprojections" of one's own instinctuallife, leading parents to feel the need toforcefully "mold," most typicallythrough 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 itsinsides, its anger, its needs, its mastur­bation, its very wiU.'02'

deMause's formulation of the childrearing modes, of which he theorizessix,2~ rests on what he describes as the"psychogenic theory of history," whichposits an evolutionary advance2~ ofparents' capacity (Q nurture and affirmtheir children. This advance, accord­ing to deMause, turns on the capacityof adults "to regress to the psychic ageof their children and work through theanxieties of that age in a better man·ner the second time they encounterthem than they did during their ownchildhood. The process is similar topsychoanalysis, which also involvesregression and a second chance to facechildhood anxieties."2G

The success of this "regression inthe service of the child" revolves, inturn, around the adult's awareness ofhis own projective relationship with

children. The adult, when "face to facewith a child who needs something,"either approaches the child as a screenfor the projection of his own uncon­scious material (projective reaction); asa substitute for an adult in his past withwhom his relationship is as yet unre­solved (reversal reaction); or is able toempathize with the child's instinctualneeds, and do something in order tosatisfy them (empathic reaction)!'

deMause's theory tends to confirmboth Elias' and Foucault's analysis ofthe early modern adult-child relation.What is particularly interesting abouthis formulation is an assumption whichappears to be paradoxical: the centraldynamic of the evolution of the adult­child relation involves both a closerapproach to children, i.e. the ability toidentif)' with the child's instinctualneeds, and a separation, as representedin the notion of withdrawal of projec­tion. The empathic reaction is madepossible because the adult is able toseparate herself from the anxiety pro­duced by the "emotional danger zone"which children trigger through theirrelative lack of instinctual repression.That is, she can, in deMause's words,"regress to the level of the child's needand correctly identifY it without anadmixture of [her] own projections,"then "maintain enough distance fromthe need in order to be able to satisfYi l."!8

This would seem to indicate adialectical movement. The possibilityof closer approaches to children on thepart of adults is only created as a resultof an initial separation. which is repre­sented by the rise of the "shame fron­tier" traced by Elias, i.e., the new bal­ance of instinct and repression in themodern adult. It is through this newbalance that the modern adultbecomes a hermeneutic being-he isnow a "reader" of life and the other,and the reader is by definition aninterpreter. The interpreter mustinterpret because he is removed fromthe situation, or "text"-it has becomeforeign through the transformation oflime. But it is only this situation ofremoval, or relative disentanglement,which makes dialogue possible; anddialogue results in a "fusion of hori-ons," followed by, in Ricouer's words,

"appropriation." or reconstitution of

David Kennedy, Reconstruding Childhood

the text in the reader's understanding,which he characterizes as "understand­ing at and through distance."2g Appliedto the adult-child relation, the her­meneutic process is what deMauserefers to as withdrawal of projectionthrough psychological distance, fol­lowed by identification, or the ability to"regress to the level of the child's needand correctly identify it without anadmixture of the adult's own projec­tions." It is at this poim that the adultawakens to the voice of the child.

Children's epistemic privilegeAwakening to the voice of the child

means that the latter is understood asthe beaTer of new information for adultself-understanding. As distanced other,the child's status is analogous to whatfeminist standpoint theorists describeas "valuable 'strangers' to the social or­der," or "outsiders within.")(1 Like wo­men, persons of color, or others mar­ginalized by Eurocentric andpatriarchal personal, interpersonaland social constructs. the child's loca­tion in the social and natural worldaffords her an "epistemic privilege."Since she lives before, or at the mar­gins of the adult instinctual economy,her relationship to that economy isinherently transgressive. Given thatshe is not, as Sandra Harding describesit, a "native,"S' she sees things whichnatives don't.

What this does for the adult wholistens for the voice of the child is that.through his relationship with the child,he rediscovers his own childhood bybecoming conscious of the boundariesof instinct and repression which were aresult of his own childhood formation.Through becoming aware of his own"child," he recovers himself on a high­er level-through incorporating un­conscious contents into consciousness.

he process of making the uncon­scious concious is, as we have learnedfrom bOth Freud and Jung, the inher­ent goal of psychic development,whether formulated as "where id was,there ego shall be" (Freud) or as theincreasing openness of conscious tounconscious contents Oung). From aRicoeurian perspeClive, the outcomeof the hermeneutic process is a "meta­morphosis of the ego," whereby,through "a moment of distanciation in

Thinking: The Journal ojPhiUJs~hyJOT Children. Volume 14. Number 1 Page 35

recovers itself in a new balance. AliceMiller has put it in more concreteform:

Once children are allowed to be morethan bearers of parental projections,they can become an inexhaustiblesource for their parents ofundistortedknowledge about human nature.Sensuality, pleasure in one's own body,pleasure in the affection shown byanother person, the need to expressoneself, to be heard, seen. understood.and respeCled. nOl to have to suppressanger and rage and to be allowed tovoice other feelings as well, such asgrief, fear, envy, and jealousy ... 33

As entering into dialogue with thevoice of the child results in greater psy­chological integration on the part ofthe adult, this is then reflected in aform of child-rearing which recognizesthe importance of meeting the "narcis­sistic needs" of children "such asrespecl, mirroring, being understoodand taken seriously."" This. in tum.leads to the development of adults whoexperience a healthier. more creativerelationship between conscious andunconscious elements of the self, andare therefore more capable of "inquiryand creative transformation."

Breaking Out: Elements of anEmergent Child-Adult Reconstruction

The possibility of a positive shift­ing of the boundaries between "child"and "adult" appears to be especiaUydependent on the material conditionsof civilization. deMause insists thatwhat he calls the "generational pres­sure for psychic change" which drives(and is driven by) the evolution of thechild rearing modes "occurs indepen­dent of social and technologicalchange"~~; but findings from the studyof the history of childhood continue toconfirm the importance to improvedadult-chld relations of economic andpolitical growth and stability. relativelysophisticated medical and epidemio­logical knowledge, practice, and acces­sibiity. and the formation and mainte­nance of an information environmentwhich produces "readers" (or "herme­nems") in the broad sense.

In addition, any argument for his­torical change modeled on Hegeliandialectics is slightly suspect. The shift­ing interplay between conscious andunconscious levels in the modal per­sonality of any culture is too complex

to be consigned to a linear, "progres­sive" historical movement, and appearsto be characterized in everyday lives byassymetry, spiraling, regression, path­ology. failure. accident, good or bad"fortune," & etc.,~6 as well as beinginfluenced by countless unique but rel­atively predictable local, regional, andepochal variables. It can be avowed atleast that the project of "withdrawal ofprojection" leading to the "empathicrelation." appears to be a key elementin the capacity of humans to live withdifference, and so is connected to theovercoming of sexism, racism, ethno­centrism, classism, homophobia, reli­gious intolerance, and aggressivenationalism. It would seem to followfrom the arguments presented abovethat the adult-child relation is theinterpersonal hotbed in which anygiven individual's instinctual economyis produced; and that it is the characterof that economy which configures thehuman capacity to tolerate difference.value the narcissistic needs of others,and to develop psychologically and inthe quality called "reasonableness,"which, as our century has shown. doesnot depend on rationality alone.

What would a culture which hasinternalized the empathic ideal looklike? There are indications that thischange has already begun to at leastsuggest itself in the postmodern West.The preoccupation with the "innerchild" in contemporary psychotherapyseems to be one of them. TIle latter isan index of the withdrawal of projec­tion. in the sense that the adult whorecognizes her "inner child" recognizesher ontological unity with the child,and is aware that the adult-child con­tinuum is present in each epoch of thelife cycle. This is related to the ten­dency in recent psychoanalytic theory,implicit in Freud but stated clearly inpost-Freudian ego psychology, to con­strue the developmental process aslife-long. To that extent. the adult isalways stiU a child. Dieter Misgeld hasput this eloquently:

. .. rather than locating children andadults as being at differing stages in adevelopmental sequence. with a fixedend point as an immutable standardavailable for the appraisal of thesequence, a properly self-reflectiveorientation calls into question the def·initely locatable enlilie.~ of adults and

children. It is a questioning in whichthe community of adult and child,their belonging together, is broughtforth. This onJy comes abom in rec­ognizing that as an adult, one is notbeyond the movement back to thechild. and from there fOIWard to thepoint where one began the movemenLHaving been a chi Id is still a possibili­ty one lives, something one has toreturn to in order to establish oneselfas an adulL. One generates in reflec­tion a community of adults and chil­dren in which principles and rules areat issue on both sides. in which beingbound to convention as an adult maybe questioned by making reference tochildren as more principled thanadulL.~. For children, at times. mayappear to be less convenlion-boundthan adults, thereby appearing moreadult-like than adults.... An interestin children is not independent froman interest in establishing for our­selves who we are. as adults. and whatwe must orient to in order to live ouradulthood."

Such a changed perspective hasobvious implications for education. inthat it lays the groundwork for a peda­gogy based on adult-ehild dialogue. Italso has implications for child psychol­ogy. in that the direction of develop­ment on which all adultist stage theo­ries is based--the idea of "fixedendpoint" 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 involvesrecognizing difference. Decenteringfrom adultism implies the understand­ing that the child occupies a perspec­tive through her placement viz a vizothers which is not completely accessi­ble to adults--a perspective informed,not only by organismic difference, butby positioning in the social world andits relations of power. and in the natur­al world. Extending episternic privi­lege to the child involves bracketingadult epistemological norms, and posi­tioning oneself to notice what childrencan know, not only because of theirposition as "outsiders within:' but alsobecause of their undersocialization of areceived stock of knowledge. i.e., theabsence of a crystallized world picture,or received ontology and epistemolo­gy.3K An example might be the child'sopenness to other species and other

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forms of life; or what Dewey refers to asa "marvelous power to enlist the coop­erative attention of others" through a"flexible and sensitive ability ... tovibrate sympathetically with the atti­tudes and doings of those aboutthem.",g And Coleridge identified theyoung child with what he called "intu­itive reason," which he described as"that intuition Df things which whicharises when we possess ourselves as on<:with the whole," in contrast to "thatwhich presents itself when ... we thinkof ourselves as separated beings, andplace nature in antithesis to the mind,as object to subject, thing to thought,death to life."~

The recognition that there aremany things the child doesn't knowwhich the adult does, but that there arealso things which children know thatadults 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 thoseintroduced by feminist and multicul­tural epistemologies. It would seem toindicate that what the marginalizedsubject knows, she knows because shedoes not know sDmething else, i.e. thetacit knowledge of the dominant. or"native" structure. If this principle istrue, it operates in the other directionas well, and problematizes the notionof a unified knowledge, at least apartfrom infmite dialogue as a fundamen­tal epistemic principle. Nandy bringsthis home to the problem of the with­drawal of projection in making theconnection between the culture ofchildhood and the culture ofoppressed peDples, and their respec­tive relations to white patriarchal colo­nialism. He says:

The culture of the adult world inter­sects, and sometimes confronts, theworld of the child. Ideally, this shar­ing of space should Lake place on lbebasis of murual respecl. That il doesnot is a measure of our fear of losingour own selfhood through our closecontacls with cultures which dare torepresent our other selves, as well as ameasure of our fear of the liminalityberween the adult and the child whichmany of us carry within ourselves.This is the liminality Freud workedthrough in his interpreUltion of psy­chopathology. This is also the Liminal­ity Gandhi had to face openly whilebauling the ideology of colonialism...

. The final test of our skill to live abicultural or multicullural existencemay still be our ability to live with ourchildren in muruality."

ND matter how isolated and mar­ginalized it might become, the prima­ry arena fDr the intersection and con­frontation to which Nandy refers willalways be the immediate family. Thepotential rDle of the school, however,in that "sharing of space ... on thebasis of mutual respect" cannot be un­derestimated. That potential can onlybe realized through a reorientation onthe part of the educational establish­ment, which at present is-like themajDrity Df the parent population itserves-oriented, if only by default, toa child-as-raw-material, deficit model.

To understand the school as alocus of mutual socialization, where, toquote Nandy, "our most liberatingbDnds can be with Dur undersocializedchildren,"" would appear to meanchanges SD prDfound as to be almostunimaginable in our present situation.It would mean at least a dismantling Df

the adult hierarchical power structureof schools, which acts to hold the pro­ductiDn mDdel of educatiDn in place; acomplete refDrmulation of the objecti­fying system of assessment and evalua­tiDn which drives the curricular andpedagogical "banking" system whichserves it; and a recDnscrual of the childas subject-as active, competent pro­tagonist in her own learning anddevelopmental process. In an evenbroader sense, it would imply reinte­grating the lived wDrlds of childrenand adults, and Dvercoming the ghet­tDization of the former in schDols andchild care centers, both throughrestructuring the workplace andthrough reclaiming public space forchildren's play and socialization.

The importance of critical think­ing, Dr philosophy, in redefining thechild as knowing subject is particularlycrucial to the transformation of boththe adult-child relationship and of theschool, because its characteristic activi­ty is at the heart of dialogical, prob­lem-posing education. Philosophy isthe discipline which emerges mostdirectly from the fundamental humansense Df wonder, and which turns onquestioning both reality and ourknowledge of thal reality. As the prac-

David Kmnedy, RWmJlnuling Childhood

tice of questioning knowledge--bothone's own and others'-it promises tobe the epistemic and curricular wedgewhich opens the experience of child­hood tD reflection, both on the part ofchildren and Df adults.

It seems more than just coinciden­tal that the negative evaluation of thechild's powers of judgment, reasoning,and reflection have legitimized themarginalization Df children, from Aris­totle to Piaget. What this means fromthe child's pDint of view is that theadult cannot "hear" her fDrm of reason,either in its similarities to or differ­ences from her own, which makes ofchildhDod a culture Df silence. Thechild's becomes a voice from the mar­gins. assDciated with "essential" nature,animality, madness, criminality, thedivine4'-i.e., with the speechless. Thekind of reflection which philosophy­and especially philosDphy done incommunal dialogue, or community ofinquiry-evokes, Dffers an ideal loca­tion fDr adults tD make gODd on thechild's epistemic privilege, to recog­nize a speech other than their Dwn, tDface a culture which "represents ourDther selves," to live the other side.

The Manner of ChangeWhatever the formal Dr efficient

cause which brings it about, it is prob­ably safe (and perhaps cDmforting) tD

say that the positive transfDrmation ofthe adult-child relation is not reallyunder Dur control. The vicissitudes ofthe historical dialectic which [ havesketched in this paper are no doubtoversimplified, and, as retrospectiveknowledge. have nD necessary predic­tive value. In fact our age is haunted bythe spectre of what Postman calls the"adult-child," i.e., a modal pe;sonality,produced and maintained by televi­sion, with the "mental age of thirteen"whether she be eight or thirty yearsDid, whD smirks at the same sexualjokes on sitcoms and thrills to the sameviDlence (whether real or representedit is no longer always clear), who wearsthe same clothes and attends the samesporling events. From the point of viewDf the rebalancing of instinctual econo­my, this appears tD be analogous towhat students Df bilingual cultures call"semi-lingualism," erDsion of compe­tence in the languages one speaks.

Thinking: Tlu JcruT1Ul1 ojPhilosaphy for Children, Volume 14. Number I Page 37

tence in the languages one speaks.Historical change of the kind dis­

cussed here appears to happen in apiecemeal fashion, and is character­ized by periods, possibly very long, ofplateau, retreat, suppression, reaction,and sudden, unpredictable leaps. Theonly real control we have over it isprobably in the realm of education; butthe colonizing character of state-pro­vided education appears to be as yetdeeply entrenched in the mainstream.Meanwhile, efforts at school decentral­ization, dominated as they are by eco­nomic, class, and religious self-inter­ests, tend to reproduce the hegemonicmodel. Be that as it may, the emer­gence over the last two centuries ofchild-centered, dialogical educationaltheory and practice appears to offerthe most concrete hope for the possi­bility of social reconstruction throughthe dialectical reconstruction of theadult-child relation.

ENDNOTESI. The Disappearance or Childhood (New York:

Delacone, 1984).

2. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of IJu Oppressed (NewYork: Seabury, 1968).

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

4. Aristotle, PhyJia Jl vi 197b; NicomncheanEthics 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 (NewYork: VLDlage. 1979), p. 198.

7. C.G. Jung & Karl Kerenyi, Essays on a ScienceorMythology: The Myth oj the Divim Child andlhe Mysleries or Eleu.sis (Princeton: PrincelonUniversity Press, 1963).

8. This particular deficil imerprelalion is morecharacterislic of interpretations of Piagel bychild psychologists and educationalislsthrough lhe 1980's, lhan of Piagel's workitself, which presents a more nuanced pic­t:ure.

9. Jean Piagel, "Biology and Cognition," inBarbara Inhelder & H.H. Chipman, cds.,PWget and His School (New York: SpringerVerlag, 1976), p. 52.

10. Heinz Werner, "The concepl of Develop­ment from a Comparative and Organism icPoint of View," in Dale B. Harris, ed., TheConcept of Delielop~nt (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1957), p. 126.

II. "ReconslrUCling Childhood: A Crilique ofLhe Ideology of Adullhood," in Tradil;onJ.

Tyranny and UtopitJJ: EJsays in the PrJlitia oJAwarenes.l (Delhi: Oxford University Press.1987), p. 61. The mosl flagrant-and promi­nem-recem expression of Lhis set ofassumptions is perhaps the report of lheNalional Commission on Excellence inEducation. A Nation al Risk: The ImperaliveJorEducalional ReJonll (Washinglon D.C.: U.S.Governmem Prinling Office, 1983), whichbegins: "Our nalion is at risk. Our onceunchallenged preeminence in commerce.industry, science and technological innova­tion is being overLaken by competitorsthroughout the world."

12. Pedagogy of the OppreJStd, p. 61.

13. Ibid, p. 71.

14. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: StateFOTtTUJhon and Civilization, Edmund Jephcolt,trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 [I939)}, p.475.

15. Centuries or Childhood: A Social Hislary ofFamily liJe, R. Baldick lrans. (New York:Knopf, 1962).

16. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: TheHistory or Mannus, Edmund Jephcolt. trans.(Oxford: Blackwell. 1994 (1939)), pp. 134­178. And see ShulamiLh Shahar, Childhood inthe MidJile Ages (London: Rour..lcdge, 1990).

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

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

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

20. Elias, The History ofManners, 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 (Antiquitylo 4t.b Century A.D.). Abandonment (4lh lO13th Cenrury), Ambivalent (14th lo 17lhCenNries), Inttusive (l8th Century), Social­ization (l9th to mid-20lh Century), andHelping (begins mid-20Lh Century).

25. deMause's lheory need not be read as evolu­lionary in order to work. In fact, PeterPeschauer has suggested thal all six modesare present in any given human society,expressed in praclices thal may vary acrosshistory and culture. He saves the culturalevolulionary appearances by suggesling lhalone particular mode is predominant in eachperiod, and Lhatlhe direClion or progressionof the modes is from those in which the childis a complete projection of lhe adult's own

inslinct:ual malerial, lowards modes in whichthere is increasing separation between thetwo. See his "The Childrearing Modes inFlux: 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 PaulRicoeur. "The Henneneutical Funclion ofDislallcialion," in Hermeneulia and lheHuman Scitllces. J.B. Thompson, trans.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1987),p,143.

30. Sandra Harding. Who.le Science? WhoseKnou,[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 ofDislancialion," 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, "PsycholigicalDevelopment and Historical Change," inT.K. Rabb & R.I. Rolberg. The Family inHistory: Interdisciplinary Essays (New York:Farrar, Straus & Girous. 1976). He charac­terizes psychological developmem as "a veryrough road. pitled with obstructions, inter­spersed with blind alleys, and dOlted wiLhseduclive Slopping places." (p. 149).

37. Dieler Misgeld. "Self-Reflection and AdullMaturity: Adull and Child in Hermeneuticaland Critical Reflenion." Phenomenology +Pedagogy 3, 3 (1985) : 199.

38. For an aCCOUnl of the young child as aninvoluntary prophel against Lhe ontologicalreduction of nature implicit in philosophicalmaterialism, see David Kennedy, "fools,Young Children, Animism and the ScientificWorld 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, "TheHermeneutics of Childhood." PhilosophyToday 36, I (Spring 1992) : 4-4-58.

41. "Reconslrucling Childhood," pp. 73, 75.

42. Ibid, p. 75.

43. So Jacques Derrida says, "Man calls himselfman only by drawing IimiLS excluding hisolher from the play of supplementarity: thepurity of narure. of animality, primilivism.childhood, madness, divinity. The approachlO rnese limits is at once feared as a threat ofdeath, and desired as access to a life withoutdifference." OJ Gram1lUJlology, G,C. Spivak,Irans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,1976). p. 245.