the government of chidhood: towards a historical ontology of child development and the delimitation of ways of being a child
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12957/childphilo.2023.76362Abstract
In the socio-historical context of European modernity, this text aims to question how a life in stages has been forged within a “new sense of childhood” that imposes on young people the urgency of an existence in permanent development. Problematizing the idea of development, specifically child development and its implications for the production of ways of being a child, provides clues as to how the developmental narrative became hegemonic and unquestioned in the educational contexts for which it was intended. To this end, historical ontology is used as a methodological tool for initiating a dialogue with educators and psychologists from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, a dialogue that seeks to establish an understanding of how the idea of child development arose in association with the need to hierarchize and normalize the child population. We explore how the historical assemblages that link childhood understood as a period of chronological time to a certain idea of development are closely linked to political projects. This exercise is not possible without recognizing the Eurocentric and adult-centric viewpoint that has been assumed in the way we typically look at this subject, and given this, we express the importance of considering the multiplicity of other ways of being a child based on what non-Eurocentric epistemologies have shown us.
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