Thinking: The journal of Philosoph.\'/or Child"", liJ/III1U 1-1, ,Vl1mb,,.

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Volume 14, Number I }~,bI,,),n

J O;lIlIlC ~1J1 ko\\'"li

T/il7lkmg" publIShed hv The lnvuuuc for Ihe Advancement of I'lltlmophl' for Chiidrt-n .. 1 non-profit insuuuc that is dl'VOfc:d 10 educational purpole, and LI pJrt of Montclair State Universirv

Eduonal Sw/J fdllur

Matthew Llp"IJI. Di'"llg'JlSheri l ln I\'er" tv SeI,O);,r.

Professor of Plltlo'''l'hv.

Montclair State (1IIin·r,,,Y. alld Director, IAPC ,~s.sonlJtt Editors

AIlIl Margaret Sharp. Professor of ,:dU(;1I10ll, Montclair S,ate UlliversIIY .. llid

David Kennedy. Axsocia«: Prllf""or of [dllLII"'" Montclair Stall' I)IIiv<T'IIY

Editorial :ltiU1.HJT

Adrian Dul'uis, Srhool of Edllc;Itioll Marqueu« (Jnivcl'-'lty (:outTlbutll1g fditun

Caredl Il. Matthew,

Dcparuncnr of Plulosophy

Ulllversity of Massachuscurs at Amherst Ty/,ugmlJily aTIII Production

Rocco] . Caponigro. Sr.

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Content, copyright © 1998 The Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

Thinking in Stories

Caret}, .\/ull/"'ll'.I, rCI'LC\\, of I~r()ck Cole, The King :1I lIte Door.

What it Means to Educate Through Discussion David 13011111, "On Dialogue" .

Reading the Word and the World

PIIU/O Freire a nil f)ollil/do Mu((',jo. "The Importance of the Act of Re:l!ling" H

'J

Eulalia Boscli and /rPIII' rldJlIIg, "Philosophy anrl Narrauun" .11

C. Roule» and Ni.l';I'L "lu),,' , "Whose Agenda;' An Invcsugauon

of Philosophy for Children and the New Pro!-,'Tcssivislll" .1,$

The Pedagogies of Reflective Communities

./1'11 (;L(lSI'T, "Thinking 'I()gclllCr: Arelldl's Visilillg IIlI:lgin<lll()1l and NtlSS!J:lIlIll'S .Jlldicial SpeCl<llOl'sllip :1.'> Models for a Con n m mi ry

of IIlC[tLiry" . . .. I 7

Mary h'(/'IJ!I,,_~-,)'(/'lIrl('1; "Care .uu l the Force of tile i\q-\,ILlIlClll ill

Respect illg Diffcrcur«:" . . 2'l

The Philosophy of Childhood

/)([111(1 ;"",'/lIU·ri_'l, .. Rccousuuctmc; Childhood"

.. 29

UNESCO's Offer to Assist Pre-Adult Philosophy

Ron /?(wl, "Philosophy and Children: i\ Perspective 011 the

UNESCO Meeting" . . . .

.38

The Mysterious Convergence-Point of Felinity and Philosophy

/ulaui 1''111nto//', "Felosophy" . .46

The Use of Philosophy as a Counseling Procedure

Chi.stojJIU?r Phillips, "Philosophical Counseling: An Ancient

Practice is Being Rejuvenated" ....

,48

Credits

COVI'T painting: "Marguerite" by Henri Matisse. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modem A'rt, New hn-k. Page 2: Yolwyama Taikan, "Mountain Stream," Ink on sdk. (detail). Page 8: Maeda Seison, 'Journey 10 the West" (detail), ink and color on paper. Pages 12, 13 and 46: Illustrations, by Marcelo Dematei, of What is Philosophy for Children? by Walter Kohan and vera Waksman, reproduced here with the kind permissian of the CBC Office of Publication, University of Buenos Aires. Page 15: Auguste Rodin, "Thought," Marble. Page 16: Painting by Renoir: "Children's Afternoon ". Page 18: Thea Proctor, "The Shell," pencil and wash. Page 20: Oil on Canvas, "Two Children" by Russell Drysdale. Page 21: "Nomad Women Carpet-Weaving," by Turgut Zam. Page 24: Wate7ColoT, "F7-ight of a Girl," by Paul Klee. Guggenheim Museum, New Y07k. Page 27: Oil on canvas by Elif Naci, "Gir-l hiding behind the door." Page 31:

"Child's Dinner;" by Henri Euenepoel. Page 44: "Girl with a Doll," by Paul Klee. Page 46: Pablo Picasso, drawing: "Philosopher Cat. "

Thinking: The jOUTTUJl of Philo$ophy fOT Children, Inlurnt 14, Numb" 1

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Pagr 29

Reconstructing Childhood

David Kennedy

Is Childhood Disappearing?

The "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 assumes, 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 "adult." If everyone were born and remained as "children," we would no longer have any use for

the term. and the same is true if we were all born and remained "adults." So 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, cognitive, 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-

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

tencc, responsibili ty, 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 replacement 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

Pag' )0

. '--~-~-""~.~.'.

David Krnnedv, Reconstrucuns. Childhood

moment for historical action on the part of those concerned. not only with children and cit ildhcod. bu t 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 structure of that mutuality, it is necessary to take account of the child's actual position in the social world.

Child as Marginalized Subject From what we can find of children 111 the historical record, they appear from earliest times to have been subjected La 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 find 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. The extent to which children are still construed as the material property of their parents 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 parents when it is clearlv not in her best interests, sometimes resulting in her death. To the extent that children are property, they arc like slaves, and, until fairly recently in the West. like women.

Child as economically disenfranchised

Traditionally, children have no rights to property and meaningful work, except at the discretion of their parents or i:,'1.larciians. 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 nnportant part 111 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, ill the sense that anything not fully human in the adult, male, free-born sense of the word is a kind of monster, 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 YOllr primary concern must be for that part of his character which

distinguishes him from the animals and comes closest to reflecting the <llnlle.. So what are We to expect of I1I::n; He will most cerrainlv turn alit 10 be all unproductive brute uIlle" at alice and without delav he is subjected 10 a process of intensive instruction."

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 criminal, 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 modern 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."

The child as ontological other can also be positively construed--for example lh. 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, art, 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 epistemicaIly incomplete

Whether we understand the child's episternic "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

Th"'/c;"g.· Til, Jo,m,d of Philosoph» for C;rrUm" f OIIlIllP 1-1 . .v'III'"" I

the same: the child is the irrational other, the magical thinker, the "native." Again, there is both a positive and a negative side (0 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 episternic 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. et.c., of yielding significanr information about the world. For the epistemological counterculture, Piaget's notion of the adult "decentered" epistemic subject, which "has found in logicornathematical structures an instrument of integration increasingly independent of expc-

-

ricncc" hv which if "conquers" the

"cx pciicnccd cuvironmcnt'" represents a form of wcsrcru objectivist bias, a hvpcrrrophv or the Cartesian subjectobject split, ciublcmauc of the alicnatcr l SI dlje(i rvi 1\' of modcmism.

Child as cultural outsider

It is characteristic of that form of childhood which is said to be disapp<.:arillg that children are assiduously kept from adult knowledge, chiefly of sex and death, but abo of harsh social anr! economic realities, and the darker aspects of the human psyche. Parents and educationalists frequently voice fears that for children to know "too IJlIJCh" about, [or example. the realities of poli tical and economic exploitation and oppression. classism. racism and ctlmoccnrrisrn, );cnocide. interpersonal violence aud sexual predation. widesprc.ulahusc of political .uuhority, etc. IS 100 grc;lt ;j burden for (hem to hear. ;\Ild can IC;1C1 to cynicism, hopelessness or dcprcssiou. Many .ulultx arc even skeptical or illtroducillg' "critical thinking" into education, ill expectation of an erosion of right authority relations between child and adult which. they think. could 1'0 II ow 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 addition, they are objectified by the scientific establishment as units of study, subjected to a barrage of normative classifications, and assigned various semi-medical statuses when they depart from the norm ("learning disabled," "hyperactive," etc.).

The child as special case of the marginalized other

It is much easier to make the case for the existence of these forms of marginalization and objectifiction 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

.... "-~~

!)avid Kennedy, Reconstructino Childhood

is. after all, a life-cycle of organisms. human or otherwise. The human life cycle does have certain distinctive patterns, apparent stages, with limitations and possibilities appropriate to each one. There is a developmental trajectory which can be emp irically and biologically described, a process of "formation" or "orthogenesis," which most typ ically can be understood as a movement from "immature" to "mature," or in Werner's classic formulation. from "a state of relative globality and lack of differentiation LO a state of increasing differentiation. articulation, and hierarchic integration.'?" 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 he 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 still be defined as marginalized subjects to the extent to which the precautions taken by adults to protect children from the potentially harmful results of this sta- 1I1S 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 institutions-s-schools and child care centcrs=-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 ongoin.g construal of the child by the state 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 adultsin the marginalization of workers by corporate capitalism, of persons of color by racist and ethnocentric polities. and of women by patriarchal and rnasculinist 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?" 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-child 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-

Thmking' The [ournal of Philosophy for Chiidrm. I·alum. J -I. Numb" 1

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Pag,3J

scious, irrational, under socialized other whom the adult carries within himself. The child is the adult's "earlier self," present in the latter both as a trace and a potential.

In societies in which the ratio of instinctual expression to repression favors expression, the child and the adult are less differentiated, and are construed as representing differences of kind rather than degree. So for example in the medieval period, during which aggressive and libidinal expression were less inhibited in the general population, there was, according to Philippe Aries," no concept of "child" such as we have today; as soon as children had the language and the mobility, they shared in the lives of adults. Correlatively, adults were more "childlike" as understood today. They lived with little concept of privacy compared to our time. The modal adult of the times carried less sense of himself as an individual, and more as member of a collective. What Elias refers to as the "shame threshold" was higher. Bodily functions, for example, were less sheltered from public view; nudity was not understood as embarassing or shameful [Q the same extent as it is today; sleeping arrangments were casual, very often involving two or more non-intimates sleeping in the same bed. '" And children, who shared in what Aries refers [Q as "polymorphous" social environment, were found in all the places adults were, engaging in the same sorts of activities, playing the same games and listening to the same stories.

The economic, political, technological, demographic, and religious changes which gave rise to the shifting of instinctual economy towards repression are too numerous and complex to enumerate here. Combining the psychohistorical interpretations of Elias and Foucault, we find the spread, initiated by the "courtly" class, and coterminous with the rise of centralized monarchies in early modern Europe, of a classical ideal of introspection referred to by Foucault as the "care" or "technology" of the self." The self of the emergent modern period, universalized by the rising middle class, is an individual before she is a member of a community. She is private, self-con-

--,. __ .- ,----------

scious. lonely in the new decentered Copernican cosmos. and the Baconian epistemology of empirical. instrumental science. She is what Elias calls "homo clausus":

his core. his being. hi.' true self ap· pears ... a, something divided within him by an invisible wall from everything outside, including every other human being. '"

TIle reorganization of the polymorphously social medieval world results both in increasing social interdependence and psycho-social separation-an historical paradox which it should not be difficult for those of us living in late 20th century industrialized societies [Q understand. A newly articulated separation of classes accompanies increasing state centralization and control of populations, and results in separate but related loci-the home, the school, the adult workplace, the prison, the insane asylum, the military establishment. Relations of power and constraint within society are reflected in power relationships within the self, revolving around the balance between repression and impulsive and instinctual life. TIle modern self becomes a "subject" in two ways: in the sense of the formation of more sharply drawn, less permeable boundaries between herself and her social and natural environment, leading to a more private, introspective "subjectivity"; and in the sense of being "subjected to" a new discipline of personal and interpersonal circumspection by society.

This early modern subject watches himself carefully, and writes etiquette manuals which read today like manuals addressed to undersocialized children. Attitudes and behaviors common among medieval adults come to be seen as vulgar and childlike. Above all the new adult is a "reader." He reads himself, others, and situations, and rather than going to the marketplace to find his information through verbal intercourse, he distances himself in the silent, abstract symbol system of print, which can place language and thought outside of time and beyond the everyday communicative world. I!'

The result of the coming of age of the modern "subject" is that the child is left behind, and becomes our modern "child." Whereas adults and children

had shared to a greater extent the same both inner and outer worlds, now bo~h have experienced separation. Differences between adults and children have become differences of kind rather than of degree: henceforth children have to be made into adults through education. As Elias savs:

The standard emergmg [in the 'early modern period) is characterized by profound discrepancy between th~ behavior of so called adults and children. But precisely by this increased social proscription of any impulse. by their repression from the surface of social life and of conscrousuess. the distance between the personality structure and behavior of adults and children is necessarily increased.

The children have in the space of a few years to attain to the advanced level of shame and revulsion that has developed over many centuries. Their instinctual life must be rapidly subjected to the strict control and specific molding that gives our societies their 'tamp, and which developed very slowly over centu ries .,"

The chief characteristic of this "strict control and specific molding" is summed up in Foucault's term "discipline." or "formulas of domination," imposed in the interests of the formation of a "docile body," or (in Rousseau's terms) a "citizen." The docile body has ben "subjected," i.e. readjusted for the purposes of modern economy and polity through "the harnessing. intensification, and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies.':"

In a culture balanced toward 'repression, the child is the "wild body" par excellence, even more so than women, the insane or the criminal, because she represents nature and origin, and each of her instinctual expressions is living reminder of the adult's own repressed impulses. The child has become a transgressive other, a source of emotional danger, analagous to the epistemological danger of the insane. the social danger of the poor, the sexual danger of the female. I quote Elias at length:

The more "natural" the standard of delicacy and shame appears [0 adults and the more civilized restraint of instinctual urges is taken for granted. [he more incomprehensible it becomes to adults that children do not have this delicacy and shame by "nature." ... The children necessarily touch again and again on the adult

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David Mmwl)'. Reconstructing Childhood

threshold of delicacy. and-vsince rhev are not yet adapted .. thev infringe the taboos of socicry. cross the adult shauie frontier. and penetrate emotional danger zones which the adult huuself can only control with difficulty. . Anxicry IS aroused in adults when the structure of their own instinctual life as defined by the social order IS threatened. Anv other behavior means danger. TIllS leads to the emotional undertone associated with moral demands and the aggressive and threatening sevcrity of upholding them. because rhe breach of prohibitions places III an unstable balance of repression all those for whom the standard of socrety has become "second Ilature.""

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 ideal of human nature. Lloyd deMause refers to the two child rearing modes which predominated in the early modern period as "ambivalent" and "intrusive." For the former. the child is still "a container for dangerous projections" of one's own instinctual life, leading parents to feci the need to forcefully "mold," most Iypically through beating, children "into shape." With the onset of the intrusive mocle, 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 will .'r"

deMause's formulation of the child rearing modes, of which he theorizes six," rests on what he describes as the "psychogenic theory of history," which posits an evolutionary advance" of parents' capacity to 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 manner 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.'?"

The success of this "regression in the service of the child" revolves. 111 turn, around the adult's awareness of his own projective relationship with

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 unconSCiOLIS material (projective reacuon): as a substitute for all 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}."

de Mausc's theory lends 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 identify with the child's instinctual needs, and a separation. as represented in the notion of withdrawal 0[' 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 dcMause'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 it. U'!K

This would seem to indicate a dialectical movement. The possibility of closer approaches to children 011 the pan of adults is only created as a result of 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 the modern adult. It is through this new balance that the modern adult becomes a hermeneutic being-he is now a "reader" of life and the other, and the reader is by definition an interpreter. The interpreter must interpret because he is removed from the situation, or "text"-it has become foreign through the transformation of time. But it is only this situation of removal, or relative disentanglement. which makes dialogue possible; and dialogue results in a "fusion of horizons." followed by, in Ricouer's words, "appropriation." or reconstitution of

the text ill the reader's understanding. which he characterizes as "understanding at and through distance.'?' Applied 10 the adult-child relation. the hermeneutic process is what de Mause 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 point that the adult awakens to the voice 0[' the child.

Children's episternic privilege Awakening to the voice of the child means that the latter is understood as the bearer of new information for adult self-understanding. As distanced other, the child's status is analogous to what tenunist standpoint theorists describe as "valuable 'strangers' to the social order." or "outsiders within.'?" Like women. persons of color. or others marginalized by Eurocentric and patriarchal personal. interpersonal and social constructs. the child's location ill 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.'?' she sees things which

natives don't. .

What this does for the adult who listens for the voice of the child is that. through his relationship with the child, he rediscovers his own childhood by becoming conscious of the boundaries of instinct and repression which were a result 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. The process of making the unconscious concious is, as we have learned from both Freud and lung, the inherent goal of psychic development, whether formulated as "where id was. there ego shall be" (Freud) or as the increasing openness of conscious to unconscious contents (lung). From a Ricoeurian perspective, the outcome of the hermeneutic process is a "metamorphosis of the ego," whereby, through "a moment of distanciation in

Thinking: TIlt Journal oj Philosophy JOT CIIlIdTnJ. l"/um. U. Numb" 1

Pag. 3)

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

Once children are allowed to be more than bearers of parental projections. they can become an inexhaustible source for their parents of undistortcd knowledge about human nature. Sensualiry, pleasure in one's own body, pleasure III the affection shown by another person. the need to express oneself. to be heard, seen. understood, ami respected, not 10 have to suppress anger and rage and to be allowed to voice other feelings as well, such as grief, fear, envy, and jealousy ... "

As entering into dialogue with the voice of the child results in greater psychological integration on the part of the adult, this is then reflected in a form of child-rearing which recognizes the importance of meeting the "narcissistic needs" of children "such as respect, mirroring, being understood and taken seriously.'?' This. in turn, leads to the development of adults who

. experience a healthier. more creative relationship between conscious and unconscious elements of the self, and are therefore more capable of "inquiry and creative transformation."

Breaking Out: Elements of an Emergent Child-Adult Reconstruction

TIle possibility of a positive shifting of the boundaries between "child" and "adult" appears to be especially -dependent on the material conditions of civilization. deMause insists that what he calls the "generational pressure for psychic change" which drives (and is driven by) the evolution of the child rearing modes "occurs independent of social and technological change'?": but findings from the study of the history of childhood continue to confirm the importance to improved adult-chid relations of economic and political growth and stability, relatively sophisticated medical and epidemiological knowledge, practice, and accessibiity, and the formation and maintenance of an information environment which produces "readers" (or "herrneneuts") in the broad sense.

In addition, any argument for historical change modeled on Hegelian dialectics is slightly suspect. TI1e shifting interplay between conscious and unconscious levels in the modal personality of any culture is too complex

to be consigned to a linear. "progressive" historical movement. and appears to be characterized in everyday lives by assymetry spiraling, regression. pathology, failure, accident. good or bad "fortune," & etc.," as well as being influenced by countless unique but relatively predictable local. regional. and epochal varrablcs. It can be avowed at least that the project of "withdrawal of project ion" leading to the "empathic relation." appears to be a key element in the capacity of humans to live with difference, and so is connected to the overcoming of sexism, racism. ethnocentrism. classisrn, homophobia. religIOus intolerance, and aggressive nationalism. It would seem to follow from the arguments presented above that the adult-child relation is the interpersonal hotbed in which any given individual's instinctual economy is produced; and that it is the character of that economy which configures the human capacity to tolerate difference, value the narcissistic needs of others. and to develop psychologically and in the quality called "reasonableness." which. as our century has shown, does not depend 011 rationality alone.

What would a culture which has internalized the empathic ideal look like? There are indications that this change has already begun to at least suggest itself in the postmodern West. The preoccupation with the "inner child" in contemporary psychotherapy seems to be one of them. The latter is an index of the withdrawal of projection, in the sense that the adult who recognizes her "inner child" recognizes her ontological unity with the child, and is aware that the adult-child continuum is present in each epoch of the life cycle. This is related to the tendency in recent psychoanalytic theory, implicit in Freud but stated clearly in post-Freudian ego psychology, to construe the developmental process as life-long. To that extent, the adult is always still a child. Dieter Misgeld has put this eloquently:

... rather than locating children and adults as being at differing stages in a developmental sequence, with a fixed end point as an immutable standard available for the appraisal of the sequence, a properly self-reflective orientation calls into question the definitely locatable entities of adults and

chikiren. It is a questioning in which I he communiry of adult and child, their belonging together, is brought forth. This onlv comes about in reco gnizmg that as an adult, one is not beyond the movement back to the child, and from there forward to the pOint where one began the movement. Having been a child is still a possibility one lives, something one has to return 10 in order to establish oneself as an adult. One generates in reflection a conununiry of adults and children in which principles and rules are a I issue 011 both s ides. in which being bound 10 convention as an adult lIlay be questioned by making reference LO children as more principled than adults. For children. at times. may appear to be less convention- bound than adults, thereby appearing more adult-like than adults .... An interest til 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 lor education. in that it lays the groundwork for a pedagogy based on adult-child 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 episr.emic subject--becomes problematic. So 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-sa 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 pr~vIlege to the child involves bracketlll!5 adult epistemological norms, an~ POSItioning oneself to notice what children can know, not only because of their position as "outsiders wi~i~," ~ut also because of their undersocLahzation of a received stock of knowledge, i.e., the absence of a crystallized world picture. or received ontology and epistem?l~gy.". AJ1 example might be the child s openness to other species and other

Pug,36

David Mnn,dy. R'C01UIT1JCling Childhood

forms of life; or what Dewey refers to as a "marvelous power to enlist the cooperative auenuon of others" through a "flexible and sensitive ability ... to vibrate sympathetically with' the attitudes and doings ~f those about them. "") And Coleridge identified the young child with what he called "intuitive reason." which he described as "that intuition of things which which arises when we possess ourselves as ant: 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" of childhood on its head. It also introduces another fissure into the mainstream. objectivist Western cpisternological 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 something 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 problernatizes the notion of a unified· knowledge, at least apart from infinite 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 peoples, and their respecuve relations to white patriarchal colonialism. He says:

The culture of the adult world interseas, and sometimes confronts, the world of the child. Ideally, this shar- 109 of space should take place on the basis of mutual respect. That it does not is a measure of our fear of losing our own selfhood through our close contacts with cultures which dare to represent our other selves, as well as a measure of our fear of the liminaliry between the adult and the child which many of us carry within ourselves. This is the liminaliry Freud worked through in his interpretation of psychopathology. This is also the liminaliry Gandhi had to face openly while battling the ideology of colonialism ...

The final (est of our skill (0 live a bicultural or multicultural existence may still be our ability (0 live with our children in mutualiry."

No matter how isolated and marginalized it might become, the primary arena for the intersection and confrontation to which Nandv refers will always be the immediate 'family. The potential role of the school, however, 1I1 that "sharing of space ... on the basis of mutual respect" cannot be underesti~llated. TIlat potential can only be realized through a reorientation on the part of the educational establishment, which at present is-like the majority of 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 bonds can be with om undersocialized children,":" would appear to mean changes so profound as to be almost unimaginable in our present situation. It would mean at least a dismantling of the adult hierarchical power structure of schools, which acts to hold the production model of education in place; a complete reformulation of the objectilying system of assessment and evaluation which drives the curricular and pedagogical "banking" system which serves it; and a reconstrual of the child as su~ject:-as active, competent protagorust In her own learning and developmental process. In an even broa.der sense, it would imply reintegratmg the lived worlds of children and adults, and overcoming the ghettoizauon of the former in schools and child car~ centers, both through restructuring the work place and through reclaiming public space for children's play and socialization.

The importance of critical thinkin?", or philo~ophy, in redefining the chll~ as knowing subject is particularly crucial to the transformation of both the adult-child relationship and of the school, because its characteristic activity is at .the heart of dialogical, problem-p~slllg . education. Philosophy is the discipline which emerges most directly from the fundamental human sense of wonder, and which turns on questioning both reality and our knowledge of that reality. As the prac-

tice, of questioning knowledge--both one s own and others'-it promises to be the epistermc and curricular wedge which opens the experience of childhood to reflection, both on the part of children and of 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 of children, from Aristotle to Pia get. What this means from the child's point of view is that the adult cannot "hear" her form of reason either in its similarities to or differences from her own, which makes of childhood a culture of silence. The child's becomes a voice from the margins, associated with "essential" nature, a~lIna~!ty, madness, criminality, the chvllle-I.e., WIth the speechless. The kind of reflection which philosophyand especially philosophy done in communal dialogue, or community of inquiry=-evokcs. offers an ideal location for adults to make good on the child's epistemic privilege, to recogmze a speech other than their own, to face a culture which "represents our other selves," to live the other side.

The Manner of Change

Whatever the formal or efficient cause which brings it about, it is probably safe (and perhaps comforting) to say that the positive transformation of the adult-child relation is not really under our control. The vicissitudes of the historical dialectic which I have sketched in this paper are no doubt oversimplified, and, as retrospective knowledge, have no necessary predictive value. In fact our age is haunted by the spectre of what Postman calls the "adult-child," i.e., a modal personality, ~roduced and maintained by televiSIOn, WIth the "mental age of thirteen" whether she be ei ght or thirty years old, who smirks at the same sexual jokes on sitcoms and thrills to the same ~i~lence (whether real or represented It IS no longer always clear), who wears the same clothes and attends the same sporting events. From the point of view of the rebalancing of instinctual economy, this appears to be analogous to what students of bilingual cultures call "semi-lingual ism," erosion of competence in the languages one speaks.

Thinking' Tilt [ournal of PllIlosoph] for Children, Ib/umt 14. Numb" J

Page 37

renee 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 or the adult-child relation.

ENDNOTES

I. The DUapptaranct oj Childhood (New Yurk:

Dclacortc, 1981).

2. Paulo Freire. Ptdagogy oj II" OppmJed (New York: Seabury, 1968).

3. Lloyd cle Mause, "The Evolution of Childhood." in Lloyd de Mause, ed .. The Historv of Childhood (New York: Harper. 1974).

4. Aristotle. Physics II vi 197b; Nieomachean Ethics I ix I I a.

5. "On Education for Children." from The 'Erasmus Reader; Erika Rummel. ed. (Toronto:

Univer. of Toronto Press. 1990), pp. 67.69.

6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 198.

7. C.C. Jung & Karl Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of th. Divine Child and the MysttrUs of Eleusis (Princeton: Princeton U niversiry Press. 1963).

8. This particular deficit interpretation is more characteristic of interpretations of Piaget by child psychologists and educationalists through the 1980's, than of Piaget's work itself. which presents a more nuanced picture.

9. Jean Piaget, "Biology and Cognition." in Barbara Inhelder & H.H. Chipman, eds .. Piage! and His School (New York: Springer Verlag, 1976), p. 52.

10. Heinz Werner, "The concept of Development from a Comparative and Organismic Point of View," in Dale B. Harris, ed .. The Concept of Development (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press. 1957). P: 126.

11. "Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood," in Tradition.!,

I:,ra,,,.), and UtOPIas: Essay" ill tI .. Politics o[ .. lira",,,,, (Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1987). p. G I The most flagrant-and prominc nt-e-rc ce nt expression of this set of avsuinpuons is perhaps the report of the National Couunission on Excellence in Educatiou.vl Nation at Risk: The lmperauue for Edncational R'foTTII (Washington D.C.: U.S Covcrumcnt Priming Office. 1983). which beguis: "Our nation is at risk. Our once uuchalleugcd preeminence ill commerce. industry, science and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world."

12. Pedagogy o[ the Oppressed, p. G I. 1:1. Ibid. p. 71.

1'1. Norbert Elias. Tlie Civilizing Process: Stale Formation and Civiliwlion, Edmund J cphcott, rraus. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 [19391), p. '175

15. Crnturies of Childhood: II Social !lutory of Family Lift. R. Baldick trans. (New York:

Knopf. 19(2).

16. Norbert Elias. The Civilizing Process: Till !-/L,tOlY of Manners, Edmund J ephcou, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell. 199'1 [1939)), pp. I :H- 178. And sec Shulamuh Shahar, Childhood in tl .. "I"ldle Ilg-s (Loudon: Routledge. 1990).

17. L. Martin. II. Cuunau, & PH. Hutton. eds ..

TecJmologlts of the Self If Seminar with Michael Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1988).

18. Elias. The !lutory of Marmers. p. 201. And sec pp. 20,,·215.

19. See Walter Ong, Orality and Literacs: The Tecll7lologlzing of II.. Word (Ncw York:

Methuen. 1982).

20. Elias. The Hutory of Mannen, p. 115.

21. Michel Foucault, Tilt History oj Sexuality, Volume I, excerpted in Paul Rabinow, ed .. Tilt Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon. 1984), p. 267.

22. Elias, The History oJlHannen, p. 137.

23. deMause, "The Evolution of Childhood," p. 153.

24. In "The Evolution of Childhood." P: 53. de Mause identifies the following modes, which he claims follow an evolutionary progress through history: Infanticidal (Antiquity to 4th Century A.D.), Abandonment (4th to l Sth Century), Ambivalent (14th to 17th Centuries), Intrusive (18th Century), Socialization (19th to mid-20th Century), and Helping (begins mid-20th Century).

25. deMause's theory need not be read as evolutionary in order to work. In fact, Peter Peschauer has suggested tha t all six modes are present in any given human society, expressed in practices that may vary across history and culture. He saves the cultural evolutionary appearances by suggesting that one particular mode is predominant in each period, and that the direction or progression of the modes is from those in which the child is a complete projection of the adult's own

instinctual material, towards modes in which there is increasing separation between the two See his "111e Childrearing Modes rn Flux: An Historian'.' Reflections." The [ournal of Psychohistory Ii (I), 1989: 1·-11

26. "The Evolution of Childhood." p. 3. 27 Ibid. P 6.

28. Ibid. pp. 6- i.

29. See Hans-Georg Gad mer. Truth. and Method (New York Crossroad, 1975); and Paul Ricocur, "The Hermeneutical Function of Disranciation," in Hermeneutics and th« Human SCllnces. J .B. Thompson, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 19Si), p. 143.

30. Sandra Harding. Whose Science' WlwS' KlloII.ledge' ThinRmg from Women's Lives (Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press. 1991). 1'1" 121. 131.

31. Ibid. I' 307.

:12. Ricocur. "The Hermeneutical Function of Distancintion." p. I'H.

33. Thou Shall Not Be /I"""t: Society's Betrayal of tilt Child. Hildegarde & Hunter Hannum. trans. (New York: Meridian. I 98(i). p. 15'1.

3'1. Ibid. p. 144.

35. "The Evolution of Childhood." p. 3.

:lu. Sec Kenneth Keniston. "Psycholigical Development and Historical Change." in TK. Rabb & R.1. Rotberg, The Family in HUlory: Iruerdiscipiinarv Essays (New York:

Farrar. Straus & Girous, 1976). He characterizes psychological development as "a very rough mad. pitted with obstructions. interspersed with blind alleys. and dotted with seductive stopping places." (p. 149).

37. Dieter Misgeld, "Self-Reflection and Adult Maturity: Adult and Child in Hermeneutical and Critical Reflection." Phenomtnology + Pedagogy 3,3 (1985) : 199.

38. For an account of the young child as an involuntary prophet against the ontological reduction of nature implicit in philosophical materialism. see David Kennedy. "Fools. Young Children. Animism and the Scientific World Picture." Philosophy Today 33.4 (1989) : 374-381.

39. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan. 1916), p. 43.

40. Quoted in David Kennedy, "The

Hermeneutics of Childhood." Philosophy Today 36, 1 (Spring 1992) : 44-58.

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

42. Ibid. p: 75.

43. So Jacques Derrida says, "Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature. of animality. primitivism. childhood, madness, divinity. The approach to these limits is at once feared as a threat of death. and desired as access to a life without difference." Of Grammatologf, G.C. Spivak. trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976). p. 245.