Educational Philosophy and Theory

ISSN: 0013-1857 (Print) 1469-5812 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20

‘These Happen To Be My Own’: The loss of

childhood identity and the idea of a self

James Stillwaggon

To cite this article: James Stillwaggon (2014) ‘These Happen To Be My Own’: The loss of
childhood identity and the idea of a self, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46:8, 833-844, DOI:
10.1080/00131857.2013.781493

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.781493

Published online: 27 Mar 2013.

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Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2014
Vol. 46, No. 8, 833–844, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.781493

‘These Happen To Be My Own’: The loss

of childhood identity and the idea of a self
JAMES STILLWAGGON
Department of Education, Iona College

Abstract

Scholars of childhood and child-centered education draw attention to the multiple accounts of
the child that have attended its brief history. In this article I read George Orwell’s ‘Such,
such were the joys’ as a demonstration of the contradictions inherent in our notions of child-
hood, but also as a possible model for understanding how conflicted definitions of childhood
contribute to the modern subject’s sense of identity. Following Orwell’s claim that he can hold
two contradictory accounts of his childhood because ‘these happen to be my own memories’, I
demonstrate his reliance on well-established ideas about childhood that are clearly not his
own, but that nonetheless shape the way he understands his own childhood. Developing the
inherent opposition between these two strands of thought on the child, I argue that holding
both at once allows the modern subject to maintain a sense of self against the othering forces
of formal education.

Keywords: Orwell, childhood, melancholia, Postman, Kristeva, Ariès

Introduction
Theorists of childhood locate its historical emergence as an effect of social complexity,
necessitating education as a preparation for adulthood (Ariès, 1960/1962; Postman,
1994; Britzman, 1998; Baker, 2001; Heywood, 2001; Vanobbergen, 2004; Mintz,
2006). While this functional definition accounts for the child as the pliable raw mate-
rial of education, it opposes a Romantic ideal of childhood as something in-itself,
prior to its inscription within social discourses. In practice, these two conflicted ideals
of childhood find a convenient dividing line in relation to institutions of formal
schooling. But as parental anxieties and government programs extend various forms
of intentional education for early childhood, the line dividing the modern vision of
the educated child and its Romantic counterpart shifts, begging the question of how
these ideals of childhood are related.
In this article, I draw upon a highly personal account of education in which
Modernist and Romantic visions of childhood appear as a contradiction resolved in

Ó 2013 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

834 James Stillwaggon

their constitution of the singular individual. George Orwell’s ‘Such, such were the
joys’ describes his transformation by the cruel practices of his school and the corre-
sponding loss of his early childhood identity. While most of Orwell’s essay details the
particular pains of his own schooling, he closes with a general statement about the
suffering of childhood in relation to the world of adults. Realizing the conflict between
his sentimental beliefs and rational understanding of childhood, Orwell explains the
contradiction as a matter of his own idiosyncrasy: ‘The two sets of facts can lie side
by side in my mind, because these happen to be my own memories’ (Orwell, 1968b,
pp. 367–368).
While Orwell’s two conflicting accounts of his childhood happen to be his own,
they also happen to correspond to two equally conflicted strands of thinking com-
prised by our popular understanding of childhood. Taking Orwell’s willingness to
reside within the conflict of his narrative as indicative of the broader phenomenon of
childhood and its place in the popular imaginary, I trace the significance of maintain-
ing memories of oneself against the loss of personal identity. Based on Julia Kristeva’s
understanding of melancholia as a refusal of subjectification in language, I argue that
Orwell’s memory of his early childhood serves as a personal guarantor of his integrity
as an identity that is more than the sum of its educational influences. I suggest that
Orwell’s melancholic relationship to his early childhood identity might be a model for
rearticulating the relationship between modern and Romantic ideals of childhood,
insofar as these ideals impose conflicting aims on the subject: a product of one’s envi-
ronment without being reducible to its influences. I close by employing this model to
speculate on the intensification of society’s commitment to children’s innocence,
uniqueness and freedom in relation to the expansion of various forms of intentional
early childhood education.

Suffer Little Children …1

Orwell’s ‘Such, such were the joys’ is at once a vivid and critical rejection of his class-
mate Cyril Connolly’s school memoir Enemies of promise, an indictment of middle-
class English sensibilities in the years leading up to World War I, and a valuable
description of the schooling practices that made those sensibilities possible (Connolly,
1948; see also Hitchens, 2008). Significant to the present article, Orwell’s account
also proposes two distinct and contradictory claims about children’s suffering in rela-
tion to education: one which connects to the outrage we are accustomed to feeling in
response to the suffering of a child or the loss of its innocence, and another which
opposes our compassionate reflex with the idea that education consists in subjecting
children to the rules and views imposed by adults. From this latter perspective, the
pain, confusion and loss of innocence children suffer in their interactions with the
world are essential aspects of their education.
The first of these positions——that of moral outrage at children’s suffering——Orwell
does not state directly, but relies upon it as a popular sentiment. Orwell appeals to
his readers’ sentimental views of childhood through a catalogue of abuses he suffered
at the hands of administrators, teachers and students at Crossgates, ‘an expensive and
snobbish school’ populated by the ‘unaristocratic rich’ (Orwell, 1968b, p. 335). The
 ‘These Happen To Be My Own’ 835

abuses and sufferings Orwell details throughout the essay include persistent hunger,
regular illness and frequent cold, hard mattresses, greasy baths, and porridge that
‘contained more lumps, hairs and unexplained black things than one would have
thought possible, unless someone were putting them there on purpose’ (Orwell,
1968b, p. 348). While Orwell’s primary aim in describing these sufferings is to illus-
trate his own sense of hopelessness and his school administrators’ neglect of students’
well-being, he also reminds us through these dramatic images of the absolute priority
of the school over the student: that even in his most basic physical relations to his
own body a child was governed by the interests of the school rather than by anything
that might be called his own.
Orwell demonstrates the school’s priority over student bodies most poignantly in
the first sentence of his essay: ‘Soon after I arrived at Crossgates … I began wetting
my bed’ (Orwell, 1968b, p. 330). He devotes the first section of his essay to the con-
sequences of his loss of control, using this event as an exemplary moment through
which his experiences at school might be understood. Unable to regain control of the
problem himself, despite warnings and public humiliation from his headmistress and
desperate prayers for divine intervention, Orwell is brought to the headmaster, who
beats him with a riding crop. Amazed that he survives the beating, Orwell is over-
heard telling another boy that ‘it didn’t hurt much’, and finds himself subjected to a
far more violent beating in which both the riding crop and his spirit are broken
(Orwell, 1968b, p. 333). Orwell leaves the headmaster’s office crying, not because of
the physical pain but
because of a deeper grief which is particular to childhood and not easy to
convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up
not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules
were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them. (Orwell,
1968b, p. 334)
As Orwell’s reaction to his beating emphasizes, physical punishment alienates the
child from his sense of control over his own body, and consequently from his sense of
identity. In place of the child’s sense of security in his own skin is a self-understanding
defined by laws that originate from outside and that may claim him, find him guilty,
and proceed to right his body for him when his own will cannot. Orwell remarks that
the ‘barbarous remedy’ to his bedwetting in the administration’s violent claim over his
body achieved its aim, ‘though at a heavy price, I have no doubt.’ (Orwell, 1968b, p.
335).
Accompanying the school’s ordering of student bodies through physical suffering,
Orwell describes the school’s claim on students’ identities in compliance with the
acquisitive social order of the day, according to which he was to be transformed from
the child of a ‘lower upper-middle class’ family into a member of a social stratum to
which his family had no access (Orwell, 1937/1958, p. 121). His headmaster and
headmistress rehearse the ultimatum that hangs over his future at times when his
work does not live up to his promise as a scholarship student:
836 James Stillwaggon

Do you want to throw all your chances away? You know your people aren’t
rich, don’t you? … How are they to send you to a public school if you don’t
win a scholarship?
… I think he’s given up that idea. He wants to be a little office-boy at forty
pounds a year. (Orwell, 1968b, p. 340)
Perhaps the most damaging form of suffering Orwell describes, however, is that which
is not imposed from without, but caused by a response from within that seeks
self-preservation according to the rules of the school. The result of his school
administrator’s positioning Orwell and his fellow classmates according to the rigid
class distinctions of the time takes hold in the form of their desires to be claimed ‘in
good favour’ with the authorities who maintained social norms. ‘I think it would be
true to say that every boy in the school hated and feared [the headmistress]. Yet we
all fawned on her in the most abject way, and the top layer of our feelings towards
her was a sort of guilt-stricken loyalty’ (Orwell, 1968b, p. 350).
Orwell counts himself a sometimes willing participant among those who played
their part in imposing the social order of the school, through comparisons of social
rank and snobbery that constituted the social game in which he knew he was
already marked to fail. The greatest suffering Orwell expresses in his essay is in
his awareness of himself as a subject transformed by the practices of his school
and his corresponding loss of a more innocent, complete and happy preschool
childhood identity:
At five or six, like many children, I had passed through a phase of sexuality.
… About the same time I fell deeply in love, a far more worshipping kind
of love than I have ever felt for anyone since. (Orwell, 1968b, p. 352)
Yet just when we might categorize Orwell as a late crusader for child welfare, he
places his own account at a critical distance, bringing about a second, distinct reading
of his painful childhood experiences. Redescribing his suffering as an essential aspect
of childhood rather than as an accident of his brutal schooling conditions, Orwell
questions whether the child-centered reforms that have brought an end to the horrors
of his own childhood are capable of ameliorating the condition of childhood as such.
‘Take away God, Latin, the cane, class distinctions and sexual taboos, and the fear,
the hatred, the snobbery and the misunderstanding might still all be there’ (Orwell,
1968b, p. 368)
Orwell backs his speculation regarding suffering as a mark of childhood with a cor-
responding belief in childhood’s transitory nature, subject to adult purposes. The
child’s identity as a child depends upon its relation to the adult world and must lose
itself to this social order for the child to progress towards adulthood:
The weakness of the child is that it starts with a blank sheet. It neither
understands nor questions the society in which it lives, and because of its
credulity other people can work upon it, infecting it with the sense of inferi-
ority and the dread of offending against mysterious, terrible laws. (Orwell,
1968b, p. 368)
 ‘These Happen To Be My Own’ 837

Commenting on school reforms instituted since his school years, Orwell recognizes
‘that the present-day attitude towards education is enormously more humane and sen-
sible than that of the past’, but notes that school reforms have been made by
adults——those subjects who have successfully separated themselves from their primor-
dial childhood identities through their own educational sufferings (Orwell, 1968b,
p. 365). As a result of this loss of identity that accompanies adulthood, ‘[t]he child
and the adult live in different worlds’——a divide that prevents adults from knowing
the sufferings a child endures merely by virtue of its childhood (Orwell, 1968b, p.
368).
With this turn at the end of his essay, Orwell broadens his account of suffering to
comment on childhood generally, providing a vision of the child as a belated member
of a community whose lack of preparedness for the world makes him educable as it
makes him susceptible to loss: the two are one and the same. The problem with
Orwell’s definition, arriving as it does in the last pages of a lengthy personal essay, is
that it diminishes the force of the narrative that precedes it. If all childhood is merely
a period of education, necessarily involving suffering, why should Orwell’s catalogue
of his particular sufferings inspire pity? And if this suffering is rooted in the loss of a
preschool identity that exists only to be overcome, why does the lost identity of early
childhood deserve consideration?
Orwell recognizes the contradiction in his views, but reconciles the conflict with an
offhand comment: ‘The two sets of facts can lie side by side in my mind, because
these happen to be my own memories’ (Orwell, 1968b, p. 368). His acknowledgment
locates the contradiction within himself, recognizing the conflicted nature of his
subjectivity, but the ‘two sets of facts’ he claims as his own are clearly shaped by
established views of childhood that are noticeably not his own: Orwell’s view of child-
hood as a period of educational suffering belongs to a modernist vision of childhood
exemplified in Locke’s pedagogical writings, whereas his outrage at children’s
suffering and sentimental attachment to an identity lost in education follows a tradi-
tion beginning with Rousseau and widely available in his own time through Charles
Dickens, Mark Twain and J. M. Barrie. 2
Orwell’s essay demonstrates that human subjects, in narrativizing childhood memo-
ries, draw upon ideal frameworks of childhood available in common discourses. In
addition, Orwell suggests that subjects internalize contradictions inherent in cultural
ideals of childhood, and may derive a sense of selfhood——the ‘my own’ that Orwell
claims——as much from feelings of contradiction as from any positive account of
childhood identity. To examine the import of these contradictions and their contribu-
tion to the cultural phenomenon of childhood, in the next section I consider the two
contradictory accounts of childhood that Orwell draws upon in claiming his own.

Three Concepts of Childhood

In summarizing Part I of Centuries of childhood, Philippe Ariès claims that cultural
history reveals two concepts of childhood in European culture from the Middle Ages
through the twentieth century (Ariès, 1960/1962). The first of these concepts assigns
a broad, diffuse meaning to childhood, unrecognizable by contemporary social
838 James Stillwaggon

standards, allowing for a great variation in the age of those labeled ‘children’ and a
corresponding inclusion of young and old in all aspects of social life: ‘as soon as the
child could live without the constant solicitude of his mother, his nanny or his cradle-
rocker, he belonged to adult society’ (Ariès, p. 128).
Ariès’ second concept of childhood, which gradually replaced the first during the
modern period and continues to influence our views of youth, establishes strong cate-
gorial divisions between children and adults. The separate time and place of child-
hood, distinct from ‘adult’ concerns, provides an environment in which teachers
prepare children for later inclusion in complex adult social interactions. According to
this second concept, childhood is a transitional period shaped by the goal of adult-
hood, subject to the norms of a given society. The telos of Ariès’ second concept
requires its loss: schools and other institutions designed to preserve the child’s inno-
cence are equally charged with helping children to overcome their inexperience and
end their childhood.
The modern child, maintained in ignorance and abiding by laws it cannot yet
understand, remains constantly aware of its unfinished nature. Orwell’s claims regard-
ing the universality of childhood pain and his reconsideration of his own suffering
echo modern childhood’s incompleteness insofar as he identifies the child with that
which remains constant through its changes: the child’s struggling under adult norms
it can neither dismiss nor yet fully embody. Orwell’s ability to dismiss his own suffer-
ings as the result of being a child demonstrates the influence of Ariès’ second, modern
concept of childhood because of the conceptual wedge driven between Orwell and his
memories of childhood pain.
Yet if Ariès’ second concept of childhood diminishes the sentimental remainder that
informs most of Orwell’s essay, that diminishment is anything but total. Orwell’s nos-
talgic attachment towards his childhood identity lost in schooling has no place within
Ariès’ second concept, and equally has no place in Ariès’ first, premodern concept of
childhood, in which the identity of the child is simply never lost. Orwell’s wistful
treatment of childhood, adapted from popular authors such as William Blake and
Charles Dickens, not only withstands diminishment by its modern counterpart, it
gains distinction and clarity by persisting in the popular imaginary that informs con-
temporary childhood, despite being grounded in nothing but the slippery shades of
memory. Beyond Ariès’ historical distinction, Orwell and the Romantic tradition offer
a third concept of the child, opposed to the idea that the meaning of childhood lies in
its routine obsolescence by pedagogical means. The child is not merely a potential
adult but an individual independent of society’s interests. According to this view,
adulthood may arrive, but any attempt to bring it about through force or persuasion
corrupts the nature that precedes it.
Ariès mentions Romantic ideals of childhood as a source of confusion in under-
standing the historical emergence of modern childhood, bracketing them as relatively
recent intellectual rather than cultural interests, citing their emergence in Rousseau’s
writings and psychoanalytic study (Ariès, 1960/1962, p. 119). Yet even if Ariès is
correct regarding the late emergence of Romantic ideals of childhood, the instant
recognizability of the child as a creature closer to its ‘true’ nature than the adult it is
bound to become, suggests that Romantic ideals are no mere aberration or intellectual
 ‘These Happen To Be My Own’ 839

problem, but suggest a third concept of childhood, contributing to our current

conceptions by contradicting some of modern childhood’s most basic commitments.
Neil Postman affords a more substantial place for the Romantic concept alongside
Ariès’ second concept in his study of childhood’s historical emergence, claiming that
‘[t]he difference between these two views can be seen most vividly by attending to the
contrasting metaphors of childhood put forward by Locke and Rousseau’ (Postman,
1994, p. 59). Locke’s metaphor of the child as a tabula rasa emphasizes childhood’s
freedom from any predetermined nature, its time of development towards adulthood,
as well as its dependence upon authority figures charged with inscribing an identity
upon its impressionable surface.
Contrasting Locke’s vision of childhood, Postman points to Rousseau’s metaphor
of the child as a sapling: a fragile living thing with a nature that precedes its use or
influence by another. In Postman’s Rousseau, childhood stands entirely outside the
influence of human culture: ‘Here is the child as a wild plant, which can hardly be
improved by book learning. Its growth is organic and natural; childhood requires only
that it not be suffocated by civilization’s diseased outpourings’ (Postman, 1994,
p. 60). Postman’s interpretation caricatures Rousseau’s ideas, but his exaggeration
highlights Rousseau’s emphasis on the child’s character before schooling, as well as
the possibility that this original character might be damaged by its education.
While Postman provides for greater exploration of the Romantic concept than Ariès,
his interest in locating the emergence of childhood in literacy practices following the
invention of the printing press aligns his idea of childhood with Locke’s. While Post-
man’s focus on literacy illuminates the historical foundations of Locke’s thinking on
childhood, his account of childhood as a product of literate culture cannot account for
the Romantic concept of childhood associated with Rousseau. Rather than refute
Romantic ideals of childhood or explore Rousseau’s ideas as an aberration in an other-
wise unified history, Postman exaggerates Rousseau’s idea of negative education while
claiming that Rousseau’s ideas are ‘not entirely original’ (Postman, 1994, p. 58).
Rather than recognizing Rousseau’s emphasis on a childhood that pre-exists its
education as a conscious response to Locke, Postman opposes Rousseau’s and
Locke’s views while neglecting their connections. Specifically, Postman ignores the
fact that Locke’s view of childhood begs the question of what, if anything, is prior to
educational influence. If the child, as a blank slate, adapts to our purposes depending
on how and what we write upon it, we might inquire about the nature of this slate
that permits this process of inscription. Furthermore, if as a result of Locke’s ideas of
childhood we come to understand ourselves as radically inscribed, we might ask how
our inscription fits with an equally modern notion of authentic, original selfhood.
Just as Rousseau responds to Locke’s radical inscription by affirming childhood
prior to educational influence, the Romantic vision of childhood and its corresponding
critique of education may originate in a similar rejection. As Locke’s concept of child-
hood emerges from literate, rule-bound social practices, Rousseau’s ideas about the
child reflect a rejection of the social and an affirmation of what might have been.
Tied to two currents of child-centered thought without favoring either one, Orwell
offers insight into the relation between the two. Orwell’s claim that suffering and loss
define childhood supports Locke’s vision of childhood, advancing our understanding
840 James Stillwaggon

of how children take on adult characteristics while leaving us, as products of our
education, with an empty space where the self should be. By reporting his suffering as
a critique of schooling despite his belief that all children suffer, Orwell implies some
aspect of himself that precedes educational influence. By recounting his loss, he main-
tains faith in recapturing an original self. While neither his modernist nor his Roman-
tic account is his own, his mediation of these irreconcilable narratives produces
something he can call his own.

My Own
The same conflicted ideals of childhood that inform Orwell’s attachment to and dis-
missal of his lost childhood identity beg the question of whether childhood can be
studied at all. Bernadette Baker highlights a paradox in our inability to confidently
define or deconstruct childhood as a result of its historical contingency: ‘To note ‘dif-
ficulties’ in translation, nomenclature, and variability in usage already suggests that
one has a preconceived idea of what to look for’ (Baker, 2001, p. 25). Without a sta-
ble starting point, Baker (p. 28) posits instead a ‘ghostly presence’ of childhood, sug-
gesting neither a pre-existing nature nor a simple historical contingency, but a
persistence over time consisting in childhood’s ability to haunt subjectivity with an
uncanny familiarity through historical variations.
Baker is not alone in conceiving childhood’s unstable formulation as a ghost, haunt-
ing the adult subject and its discourses. Julia Kristeva describes childhood as a specter
standing at the fringes of discourse:
Twice during the past few centuries Western reason perceived that its role
of being a servant to meaning was imprisoning. Wishing to escape, it turned
toward and became haunted by childhood … what within the speaker is not
yet spoken, or will always remain unsaid, unnamable within the gaps of
speech. (Kristeva, 1980, pp. 271–272)
Kristeva frames childhood as a haunting promise of escape, reinforcing a modern,
negative definition of the child while acknowledging the persistence of loss suggested
by both Orwell and Baker. Beyond Baker, however, Kristeva’s abbreviated historical
overview indicates a theme across varied manifestations——innocence in Romantic
childhood and the raw drives of psychoanalytic childhood——by positing both as
movements rejecting positive discourses of selfhood that appear periodically through-
out history. Kristeva’s examples portray childhood as the recognizably human but
extradiscursive position from which educated subjectivity might be questioned.
Kristeva interprets Freud’s ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich warden’ to describe the relation
between adult discourse and the prediscursive ‘jungle of the drives’ that adults see in
children: ‘there where it (id) was shall I (ego) come to be. The ‘child’ is what remains
of such a becoming, the result of subtracting the utterance of guilt from the utterance
of mastery’ (Kristeva, 1980, p. 275). Like Orwell, Kristeva maintains ambivalence
toward the achievement of adulthood, defining childhood negatively as that aspect of
selfhood that remains unknown because the subject inhabits a world of discourse
(p. 277).3 But while the child exists as the unknown excess, buried as the subject
 ‘These Happen To Be My Own’ 841

pursues discursive self-mastery, Kristeva suggests that our accounts of childhood are
seldom left simply unknown because vestiges of childhood remain, or are produced,
in memory. Seeking meaning, these remains tend to take on characteristics convenient
to the adult’s sense of wholeness, authenticity or completion:
Projected into the supposed place of childhood, and therefore universalized,
one finds the features that are particular to adult discourse; the child is
endowed with what is dictated by adult memory, always distorted to begin
with; the myth of human continuity persists (from child to parent, Same-
ness prevails). (Kristeva, 1980, p. 276)
Kristeva’s idea of childhood as a placeholder in relation to language supplements
Baker’s paradox in theorizing childhood, demonstrating that the ghostly characteristic
of childhood——that which wavers as a candidate for definition across historical
manifestations——is that childhood’s nature consists in its haunting of subjectivity with
something lost as a result of becoming an adult. Kristeva’s understanding of
childhood as an unknowable informed by its relation to adult feelings of loss also
enlightens Orwell’s commitment to Romantic childhood despite his reasonable under-
standing of childhood suffering. In both cases the subject and society maintain child-
hood’s substantial existence as a counterweight to the notion that identity might be
reduced to the accidents of history or experience, particularly when experience has
been painful.
In focusing on absence and loss, Kristeva’s comments on childhood resonate with
her work on melancholia. Drawing on Freud’s ‘Mourning and melancholia’ and ‘The
ego and the id’, in which Freud describes the subject’s identification with a lost,
beloved object that cannot be outwardly mourned, Kristeva claims that inexpressible
grief gives birth to ‘another life. A life that is unlivable’ but that nonetheless shapes
the subject’s interaction with the world. The melancholic subject expresses her attach-
ment to loss as a matter of fidelity: ‘I am faithful to those bygone days, I am nailed
down to them’ (Kristeva, 1987/1989, pp. 4, 60). Following Freud’s reconsideration of
melancholia as constitutive of the subject, Kristeva asserts ‘Without a bent for melan-
cholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action’ (Kristeva, 1987/1989, p. 4). For
both Freud and Kristeva, irrational identification with an irretrievable object is part of
what makes us human.
While Kristeva demonstrates that connections between the pathological inwardness
of melancholia and distinctiveness in human personalities are mentioned as early as
Aristotle, her exposition of melancholia as commitment to inexpressible loss illumi-
nates the study of early childhood as a time that must be lost before it can be articu-
lated. In relation to Orwell’s, ‘these happen to be my own memories’, the significance
of maintaining his identity as more than the sum of educational effects becomes expli-
cit. It is the ‘my own’, the self that can hold contradictory positions together without
losing itself, that Orwell asserts through his refusal to abandon Romantic notions of
childhood in the light of his rational self-understanding as a subject produced through
suffering.
While in many cases memories of childhood and loss may not be as vivid, nor
commitments to lost identities as emphatic, Orwell’s conflicting accounts nonetheless
842 James Stillwaggon

provide a model by which modern and Romantic concepts of childhood might be

understood in relation to one another. According to this model, Ariès and Postman are
correct that the complexity of the modern world gives birth to our current ideas about
childhood, but not in the way that either theorist posits. If the child that the modern,
literate world produced were limited to the pedagogical concept that Ariès and Post-
man support, Orwell’s conflicted sentimentality and our sympathy for his suffering
would be impossible: nothing would be lost. Modernity certainly produces childhood
as a way of explaining the multiple influences that construct human subjectivity. But
the modern account of the self as the product of its accidents in the world, as opposed
to its place in the cosmos or the grace of God, also creates anxieties about the persis-
tence of human character over time and the meaning of identity. Romantic childhood
seems like a feeble response to the productive power of discourse: an unspeakable fic-
tion of a self that no longer exists. But the power of the invented identity projected
backward by the modern subject lies in its ineffable character. Without the ability to
articulate, mourn and move beyond childhood, the modern subject ensures that its
humanity does not become a function of its multiple external influences.

Earlier Childhood Education

From a theoretical perspective, Kristeva’s and Ariès’ ideas reveal order in Orwell’s
conflicted commitments by demonstrating a positive relationship between two sets of
memories that initially seem contradictory. Romantic and modern ideas of childhood,
as much as they appear opposed, also support one another in their opposition. Mod-
ern pedagogy cannot reshape children according to social norms without Romantic
ideals of childhood guaranteeing each person’s authenticity and uniqueness. Con-
versely, the Romantic ideal would never have existed if the othering force of pedagogy
were not a necessary function of modern life.
Practically, the institution of schooling orders our conflicted commitments to mod-
ern and Romantic ideas of childhood by creating times and places for each based on
children’s physical and cognitive development. As Orwell demonstrates, formal
schooling serves as the primary means by which contradictory views of childhood are
produced, creating nostalgia for a preschool identity by enforcing students’ subjection
to adult social norms.
As Postman emphasizes in describing the conditions that produced modern child-
hood, however, childhood’s historically contingent birth from the literacy practices
which give it shape entails an ever-shifting relationship between pedagogies and the
childhoods they engender. While the opposition of preschool and schooled identities
Orwell describes may be familiar to those who grew up under similar circumstances,
we can also imagine that the emerging use of educational techniques on younger audi-
ences might alter the experience of childhood as adults remember it in the future. As
the economic necessity of a two-income family coincides with a social ethos that pro-
motes school-readiness as a form of competition, memories of a preschool self like
Orwell’s might become impossible to imagine.
If our Romantic ideal of childhood——that prediscursive fantasy experienced most
profoundly in its loss——requires a memory to which the subject can attach in order
 ‘These Happen To Be My Own’ 843

to substantialize itself amidst the vagaries of educational experience, what happens

when the very possibility of a preschool self, lost through schooling, disappears? On
the one hand, we might imagine that introducing children into educational discourses
at earlier ages might pose a limit to individuality as the celebrated and critiqued char-
acteristic of the modern age. Perhaps with fewer memories of a preschool self, and
less evidence of a prediscursive self, the subject will feel less impelled to insist on its
individuality. As Orwell’s story clearly illustrates, the loss of some subjects’ insistence
on their individuality, as a source of difference from discursive norms, might be a gen-
uine loss for society, insofar as any democratic society depends on refusals of the
norm for its continued renewal.
On the other hand, the recent growth of schooling as a norm for childhood might
produce an even greater insistence on the essential characteristics of the unschooled
child, as individual subjects seek to find their identity in something that can be
claimed as their own against the othering effects of schooling. The expansion of chil-
dren’s entertainment in recent years might be seen as a means by which adults
attempt to found their own identities in preschool childhoods that never existed, but
that require even more category maintenance because of their uncertain ontology.
While the present theoretical outline offers no forecast of how the changing nature of
early childhood education will determine the production of childhood, it does suggest
a relationship of opposed priorities around which the future of childhood will
coalesce, and a means by which we can make sense of what the future brings. Beyond
Postman’s prophecy of childhood’s disappearance, which depends upon an exclusively
pedagogical account of the child, the idea that childhood also entails a rejection of
pedagogical purposes means that the child may be maintained as a placeholder
of authentic identity even as its claim to authenticity is eroded by the expansion of
schooling. From this perspective, the greater question is not whether childhood will
continue as a social category, but how adult subjects will use this category as a means
to making sense of their own divided nature.

Acknowledgments
An earlier draft of this article was read at the OVPES 2009 Annual Meeting with support from
Iona College’s School of Arts & Sciences. Thanks to Natasha Levinson, Doris Santoro and
Brian Murray for letting me work through these ideas in their classrooms, to Sandy Farquhar
and Jayne White for their magnificent editorial support, and to Ben Waltzer and Deidre Fovos
for their insight.

Notes
1. The Biblical passage misquoted here plays an important role in Ariès’ study of childhood,
as Jesus’ command to allow children to approach him takes on special meaning in the per-
iod in which the idea of the child flourishes (Ariès, 1960/1962, p. 123). The popular song
that draws its title from the Biblical misquotation belongs to the same tradition as Orwell’s
essay, insofar as it focuses on the physical suffering of children as a means of highlighting
their innocence.
2. ‘No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens …
Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside the child’s mind, in such a way that
844 James Stillwaggon

the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at which one
reads it’ (Orwell, 1968a, pp. 423–424).
3. Kristeva (1980) equates childhood here with the Lacanian real, the ‘jungle of the drives’ in
which the ego makes its relatively minor claim of order. Kristeva’s use of the real to
describe childhood draws strong parallels between Rousseau and the later Lacan, as both
recognize a largely unknown presence within which human subjectivity must contend for its
happiness.

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