David Kennedy opens his philosophical study of evolving notions of childhood in the West with the somewhat counterintuitive claim that "preoccupation with childhood is a staple of Western modernism" (Kennedy, 1). At a glance, childhood seems to fall into the background of philosophical inquiry, but Kennedy proceeds in this fascinating study to demonstrate the centrality of definitions of childhood in determining the self-understandings, daily behaviors, institutional practices, and punishment rituals practiced across the West.

 Kennedy explains that modernism is distinguished from earlier historical periods by its "altered understanding of change." Since change becomes a pivotal aspect of modern lives, childhood becomes a central locus for exploring what change is. Kennedy argues that the modern era has undergone revolutionary transformations in its accepted economic, socio-political, technological, and demographic truths. These changes have caused people to further challenge accepted understandings of knowledge, self, subjectivity, and the social and human world. Moderns have had to rethink their individual and social worlds as sites of change. Since children inhabit the most changeable sector of the human life cycle, childhood too, during the modern period, has fallen under the analytical gaze of thinking persons.

Kennedy uses the philosophers, from the ancient Greeks through Western modernity to postmodernity, to sketch out the landscape of conceptions about childhood as a central site of inquiry into contestable questions of central significance to an understanding of the human condition. What questions would a philosophy of childhood address? Kennedy proceeds to flesh out his investigative field:

What is it to be a child? Just what kind of difference is the difference between children and adults? To what extent is childhood as we know it a historical and cultural construct? What are the hidden assumptions underlying the explanatory constructs that adults apply to children? How does the construct "childhood" function in adult self-understanding and in the history of culture and thought? What are the similarities and differences between the ways children and adults know the world? (Kennedy, 18)

The final philosophical question about childhood Kennedy finds richest and most compelling since it gestures toward the status of children as marginal inhabitants of the human world, whose voice might offer insights into the very nature of marginality and exclusion, throwing into relief adult assumptions about discourse per se and knowledge per se.

With these guiding philosophical questions in mind, Kennedy proceeds to trace the history of Western philosophical treatments of childhood, in order to set the stage for the reader's appreciation of modern developments in attitudes toward philosophy. The reader soon learns that the Greek cradle of Western philosophy is hardly sympathetic toward the young: Plato depicts children as exemplary of intemperance, driven by uncontrolled will and appetite. Boys fare worst in Plato's account as the "craftiest, most mischievous, and unruliest of brutes" (Republic, Cornford, 1941; 1379). Children fare little better with Aristotle, symbolizing for him both deficit and danger, suggesting "an implicit theory of monsters" (Kennedy, 20).

Children are redeemed of their earlier darkened portraits with Jean Jacques Rousseau (1763) and later with the Romantics. In his Emile, Rousseau decisively challenges the deficit theories of childhood. An advocate of new educational practices, Rousseau emphasizes the natural development of children's abilities, all the more ironic for the fact that he placed all of his own children in a foundling home when he could not support them. The theory of children as deficit and danger is fully overturned with the Romantics of the early 19^th century, who reformulate the child as a kind of genius, that is, "a unified or integrated human being" superior to the adult because she has "not yet fallen into the psychological division that is characteristic of adulthood" (Kennedy, 21). For the Romantics, explains Kennedy, the life cycle is envisioned as proceeding from a state of unity into disunity and self-division. Romanticism redeems the child as more naturally and freely spiritual and whole, and in touch with a deeper reality than adults, who remain confused and spiritually disordered.

The dualistic conceptions of childhood, between deficit/danger and genius/ideal of wholeness, provide Kennedy with a framework for considering representations of children and childhood through modernity and beyond. He proceeds to show how ancient models, momentarily overturned by Romantic reinterpretations, were adopted once again in modernity due to psychosocial revolutions in the modernist lifeworld. Modern attitudes to childhood, argues Kennedy, reflected the "modal or culturally-conditioned personality structure" peculiar to middle-class moderns. By comparison to medieval people, modern middle-class persons underwent a "psychosocial shift"–indeed, says Kennedy, not unlike the shift that characterizes the process of growing up from child to adult (Kennedy, 26).

To understand this shift, it is necessary to appreciate the degree to which the medieval personality was shaped within an integrated psychosocial world of common spaces–home, street, marketplace, and village. Medieval personalities evolved through a process of "polymorphous sociability" where cultural learning was largely oral, empathetic, and participatory (Kennedy, 26). Middle class moderns, on the other hand, became closed off and separated from their social worlds, each discovering herself anew as a radically individuated "I." The reason for this dramatic shift in self-orientation, explains Kennedy, is the "psychodynamics of literacy" that restructured the modern lifeworld (Kennedy, 28). With the invention of movable print in 1450, learning shifted from shared, communal oral discursive activity to a silent relation of a separated individual with the written words of a text. This crucial change, Kennedy explains, redrew the boundaries of self-relation and of social intercourse.

The psychosocial shift of the middle-class modern to a rigorously isolated individualism demanded a new orientation of self-detachment and objectivity toward one's own thoughts and actions, epitomized in the Meditiations of the "Father" of Modern Philosophy, René Descartes, who, sitting alone by the fireplace of his solitary cottage, fondles wax and wonders "What am I?" and "What can I truly know?" People began to study every aspect of their lifeworld in solitary reflections upon their behaviors and attitudes.

From the 16^th century onwards, social relations came under scrutiny by the inquiring subject, and we find a burgeoning of publication of manuals of etiquette. Rulebooks of social behaviors analyzed every facet of human life and emphasized a new modesty and a rigorous self-restraint in the most mundane of daily habits including eating, sleeping, and other basic human functions. An aesthetics of self-discipline, discretion, and privacy came to be demanded in every aspect of one's social dealings, as well as in one's most private, interior state.

It was the new modernist attention to self-detachment and self-restraint, explains Kennedy, that brought into relief for the modern thinker the child as non-adult–that is, as (relatively) undersocialized, and instinctively unrestrained. Deficit again became the symbolics of adult understandings of childhood, a deficit that demanded great care and objective study of how children might be properly schooled to overcome their natural pathological excessiveness. The school was accordingly transformed into one of the sites of "the great confinement" (along with prisons and insane asylums) created for the purpose of reshaping the characters of children (and other deviants) and instilling in them "moral reform and constraint" (Foucault, 1979).

The "experts" were called in to study and analyze, and new disciplinary technologies of description and classification were applied to children in schools, as they were to the criminals in the prisons and the mad in institutions. Children became subjects of rigid, objectifying psychologies and pedagogies; harsh and systematic punishments and constant surveillance schemes were put in place to manipulate and control the minutest details of the environment with the object of reshaping the dangerous, instinctual, unreflective, unrestrained child into an acceptable, normalized adult with socially acceptable habits and ideas. 

Kennedy's study of childhood climaxes in a rather Romantic-cum-postmodern redemption of the child. He recounts extended conversations among children, which undercut the harsh ancient/modernist Western tradition that sees childhood as lack and children under moral deficit. Rather, Kennedy demonstrates that children are naturally philosophical. We all feel more hopeful for the fate of the world when we witness his depictions of children in intellectual community, struggling with vital practical questions such as What causes conflict? Are all conflicts solvable? and Are there rules for avoiding conflicts? as well as meta-level philosophical questions such as Is conflict natural? Can conflict be good? Is conflict real? Do non-humans have conflict?  

Kennedy's Changing Conceptions of Childhood is well worth the read. Parents will identify traces of their prejudices about children in both the deficit theory and in the Romantic idealizations of childhood innocence and wholeness. Even scarier, we may see our own reflections in modernist "scientific" technologies of knowledge. Though we would no longer allow pedagogues to apply rigorous punitive procedures in our schools and though most homes have long abandoned the practice of teaching moral lessons through corporal punishments, we may yet recognize a few flaws in our most benign childrearing practices in the Foucaultian challenge to modern education as just another institution directed toward the pacification of deviants. Do schools today–and do we as parents–foster our children's creative blossoming and encourage the development of the critical thinking abilities that will enable them to challenge the tired truths of their world? Or are our educating practices designed to shape our children into docile citizens who uncritically take up their stations in the factories, their cushy offices in the corporate tower, and their positions on the battlefields of the brave new industrial world? Kennedy exposes a telling truth–that our educating practices are intimately entwined with our deepest assumptions about childhood and children.

© 2007 Wendy C. Hamblet

Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D., C.C.C. Reg., S.A.C. (Dip.), Assistant Professor, Division of University Studies, North Carolina A&T State University

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Categories: Philosophical