Images of ideal childhood from primary schools

History of Education, 2007

This text was delivered as a plenary lecture at the conference Barndom och ungdom i förändring (Childhood and Youth in Transition: Discipline and unrest in the modern welfare state) on October 29, 2010 at Malmo University, Sweden. It offers a diagram for visualizing modern childhood as a product of the discursive tensions between four dominant figures: the conditioned child, the authentic child, the developing child, and the political child. The lecture focuses on the creative dynamics between conditioning and authenticity as they appeared in the 17th through the 19th-centuries in Anglo-American discourse. It argues that a search for the conditions of authenticity through childhood became manifest in the disciplinary practices of institutions for children’s education and care. The resulting generative tensions were important for constructing the landscape of modern childhood as a whole. Finally, it suggests that the tensions between romantic authenticity and rational conditioning continue to provide a significant discursive framework for contemporary child rights talk.

Proceedings InSEA 2012 European Regional Conference-Cyprus Society for Education through Arts, 2012

The aim of the research was the investigation of the position students take to the social discourses of childhood. The theoretical context consisted of (a) the theory of Cultural Studies concerning to viewer's potential positions while decoding the meaning of cultural artifacts, (b) the considerations of Childhood Studies about the social discourses of childhood and their visual representations, (c) the Visual Culture Art Education Pedagogy's aim to develop students' critical literacy skills to deconstruct visual imagery's ideology and the need to investigate children's notions and positions concerning various discourses.The sample was 112 Greek students in Grade 6 of five primary urban schools. Data had been collected through anonymous questionnaires and paintings and processed by ATLAS ti program. The methodological tools were critical discourse analysis and semiotics of their verbal statements, their paintings, and their responses to visual representations of children. We found that most students' notions refer to the characteristics like child's nature, the sentiments. The interpersonal relations, the type and place of children's action, which correspond to the dominant romantic discourse of childhood. Negotiated position to this discourse took few students, through their visual artwork mainly. Oppositional position took a minus number of students through their painting only, representing forms and actions that oppose the discourse of the "romantic child". We propose the development of students critical literacy skills in order to be able to improve their understanding of how they interact with visual culture and how visual culture influences their perceptions of various discourses including the discourses of childhood.

Childhood and Youth Studies, 2012

Each of us has experienced not one, but two childhoods: the first as a biological state of growth and development and a second as a social construction, which is to say as an institution that has been socially created. If this is true then it follows that childhood is dependent on the nature of a society into which an individual is born and will vary from place to place and time to time. In the last half of the twentieth century a number of thinkers and writers in a variety of fields began to consider the ways in which this process of constructing childhood has been carried out, both in the past and today, and what the implications are for our experience of childhood and for current and future generations of children. If we accept this thesis then it follows that we can only understand childhood if we comprehend how it has been formed and how it varies and changes.

Center for Educational Policy Studies Journal

The fact that children are greatly puzzled about the world around them is no news. However, the idea that children can, due to their naturally conditioned philosophical openness, pose philosophical questions that are relevant and very valuable to us all has only recently been embraced by scholars. This and, for example, children's rights to their sexuality as well as to work instead of going to school are just a few of the triggering points evoking further interest in reading this much-needed collection of essays, which finally provides in one place an introductory insight into the state-of-the-art contemporary debate surrounding the philosophy of children. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children comprises thirty-six essays collected by three editors. Anca Gheaus, a political philosopher interested in justice and the normative significance of personal relationships, has published numerous journal articles and book chapters and is currently writing a monograph on child-centred childrearing. Gideon Calder, a social and political philosopher, has authored or edited ten books, including How Inequality Runs in Families, and is a co-editor of the Routledge journal Ethics and Social Welfare. Jurgen De Wispelaere, whose research interests are at the intersection of political theory and public policy, is a Political Economy Research Fellow with the ISRF and a Policy Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. With well-distributed topics that have been largely set aside for most of the history of philosophy, the editors have structured a handbook that provides timely guidance to the world of neglected questions that have only recently

The ideology of childhood is a conceptual category with many diverse positions to research and analyse. It is apparent that childhood is of a constructed and reconstructed essence, due to the irregularity in the concepts of childhood in previous historical periods and within different cultures and societies (Schaffer, 2010). However, historically in medieval society the notion of childhood did not exist, Philippe Aries and Neil Postman both suggest that the known concept of childhood is a recently modern phenomenon (Clark McDowall, 2015). In previous historical periods children were viewed as miniature adults, Aries (1962) states that the awareness and knowledge around the distinguished differences between adults and children was lacking, hence why children were treated the same as adults. Through a political lens the concept of childhood is constructed through institutions and the government, both of which have high control over the political body of childhood. This sense of construction is the most apparent in laws and policies surrounding childhood (Millei, 2014), these policies do however treat childhood as one universal experience which is considered to be inaccurate as the notion of childhood is individual to each particular culture and society. Adding to the ongoing

2010

Photographs, as Elizabeth Edwards noted in her essay on the photography of Susan Meiselas, are «cultural objects», made to «project certain meanings and elicit certain affects». Traditionally, historians, when they have worked with photographs, have been generally concerned with extracting evidence about the materiality of the past. This is done by looking at what is made present in an image. However, the meaning[s] we take from photographs are always framed by the context in which we come upon them and looking always has a subjective quality which shapes the ideas that are formed in dialogue with an image and the meanings that are then constructed. Using a 1920s school photographic album of Floodgate Street Infant School from 1920s Birmingham, England this small essay will explore the nature of images, their hidden meanings and the importance of contextualizing the visual. This exploration of

2016

This article is based on the study of the forms of the sexualisation of children as constructed by the French authorities between 2000 and 2013. It shows that approaches addressing the transition from childhood to adulthood have combined two types of discourse. The first of these traces the contours of the nature of the child who is to be protected from the disorders related to gender and to growing up more generally; the second draws on the sexualisation of children in disadvantaged urban areas to designate 'foreigners from within' and reinforces an ethnocultural conception of the nation. The article concludes with reflections on how the issue of age-related child development is addressed in globalised capitalist societies

Edition Kulturwissenschaft, 2016

CEPS Journal, 2021

The fact that children are greatly puzzled about the world around them is no news. However, the idea that children can, due to their naturally conditioned philosophical openness, pose philosophical questions that are relevant and very valuable to us all has only recently been embraced by scholars. This and, for example, children's rights to their sexuality as well as to work instead of going to school are just a few of the triggering points evoking further interest in reading this much-needed collection of essays, which finally provides in one place an introductory insight into the state-of-the-art contemporary debate surrounding the philosophy of children. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children comprises thirty-six essays collected by three editors. Anca Gheaus, a political philosopher interested in justice and the normative significance of personal relationships, has published numerous journal articles and book chapters and is currently writing a monograph on child-centred childrearing. Gideon Calder, a social and political philosopher, has authored or edited ten books, including How Inequality Runs in Families, and is a co-editor of the Routledge journal Ethics and Social Welfare. Jurgen De Wispelaere, whose research interests are at the intersection of political theory and public policy, is a Political Economy Research Fellow with the ISRF and a Policy Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. With well-distributed topics that have been largely set aside for most of the history of philosophy, the editors have structured a handbook that provides timely guidance to the world of neglected questions that have only recently