The Human Experience

The Early Years

Cedric Cullingford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138350960
• eBook ISBN: 9780429788369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1999, the focus of this ground-breaking study is on representing the mental world of the child with unprecedented clarity. Cedric Cullingford aims to show that this world, in its normal experience by children, is significantly unlike what we typically assume it to be, and significantly unlike anything exposed by the most prominent research programs. Querying common assumptions about children's thinking, Cullingford begins with an outline of children's understanding which emphasizes its range and complexity, along with an address of the mythology of children's intellectual incapacity and preparation for the approach to be taken in detailing children's construction of a sense of their world. The following four chapters combine to construct a description of how children approach their world, exploring theory of mind, the self, the family, the school and then the wider social and physical worlds. Cullingford achieves a vividness, immediacy and intensity not seen elsewhere, using the constant medium of the child's gaze and demonstrating that the youngest child is not simply responsive but is active and critical in interrogating the world.

1 Through a glass darkly? The abilities of young children

In many ways we take ourselves for granted. Fixing a gaze at all that happens around us, curious about all that is being communicated, we seem to lack a curiosity about the way we are and the way we came about. This is not to suggest that we are not interested in ourselves. On the contrary, we are each of us the only real subjects of interest in the Universe. Our senses, our gratifications, our understandings and how they are received by others are of such intense concern that we almost forget how peripheral we might be in other people’s schemes of things. Self-absorption is not the same as self study, or rather the study of the human experience, the analysis of how individuals come to consciousness and become as we are. In fact the subject of the greatest fascination for all - the essential human experience that we have in common rather than seeking to define differences according to gender, ‘race’ or socio-economic circumstances - is the subject of comparatively little academic investigation.

There are many books which seek to give comfort to the individual’s sense of worth, books which explain what to do, as well as courses in self-assertion and regimens to promote happiness. There are religions, psychologies, astrology and sects who seek to explain everything. But these are all concerned with the individual self, from the self s point of view. The subject of human growth and development, of learning and education does not elicit the same curiosity or wonder. Whilst there is an abundance of literature on how to teach, and what to teach, there is relatively little even on the learning process, and almost nothing at all about the experience of those who undergo it. The energy of endeavour is put into finding solutions rather than exploring the need for them, in measuring activity rather than exploring its reasons.

If people do stop to marvel, or accept surprise, about human development, it is as likely to be about the progress made in the field of communications as in any other matter. Every day seems to accelerate the pace of change, with new systems and new facilities that mean that all kinds of manner of things can be learned, and infinitely more ignored. Excitement at the development of neural circuits in computers, and the application of chaos theories to technology seem to replace curiosity about the most sophisticated intelligence system of all, the brain. But then technologies, however complicated, are much easier to study. They do not have the same arbitrary inspirations, the emotional drives, the moral senses and the self-awareness that makes the individual being what he or she is.

The rapid development of communication systems is symbolic of two important insights into the human condition. The first is the acknowledgement of ability and power. The means to control the environment, no longer to have a sense of physical frailty or loneliness suggests an application of intelligence that is always outward looking and which should suggest not only power but growing responsibility. The mastery over information technology symbolises the capacity and the potential of thought about ourselves.

The development of communication systems, however, also begs a question. What is it that we are so busy communicating? Does the quality of our dialogues match the means by which we can extend them? In so far as there is concern with the quality of what is being communicated by electronic means, it focuses on the misuse of the system, on appropriate or disturbing messages. There is, indeed, a rift between the means of communication and what is being communicated.

If the proper study of mankind is “man”, turning from self-absorption to an analysis of the human condition, then it is perhaps surprising how ‘improper’ we have been. For every empirical study of people as they are how they are affected by their conditions and how they react with them there are any number of research projects and policies concerned with how people should be and either how to make them so or how to punish them for not being so. The human gaze is outwards, at what is immediately visible rather than what appears hidden. We argue about what should be learned, and about teaching styles, about the management of the education system and about the assessment of skills. But how often do we explore the effects of all these on the learner? We discuss different personality inventories and create new psychological categories to see how people fit into them. But how often do we explore the individual experiences of learners?

Just as strong as the capacity to learn is the refusal to do so. Not knowing is part of the defence mechanism of everyday life. For it is well understood that to change someone’s style or habit of thought and action is very difficult. Most of the individual energy devoted to learning is devoted to fitting anything new into the structures of attitude which already exist. It is as if people would be afraid of what they might find out.

The lack of curiosity about evidence derives partly from fear. People seek evidence to support them in their set of beliefs, even if they are contradictory. They do not want them - at a personal or at an academic level - challenged. If politicians, for example, actually listened to the many studies consistent with each other about the importance of early learning, they would need to act quite differently. But the fear of responsibility and the burden of dealing with it is only part of the explanation. In itself such awareness of what is being avoided would itself be a burden so it remains unacknowledged. The other symptom of avoiding such curiosity is that people feel they already know all the answers.

The explanations given are always simple. It is as if all the conflicts of human nature were already accounted for. Explanations are simple and also complex defence mechanisms. Do we really understand the deepest motivations for love and hate? Do we really understand the ways in which people create prejudices against and stereotypes of each other? If we look at a typical ‘tribal’ conflict such as that in the former Yugoslavia, can we really say that we understand why people think and act as they do? Explanations are simple and dismissive; they centre on religion and on language, on history and culture or on atavistic anthropologies or genes. But they do not answer the simple question. What is an individual’s ‘culture’? Why do religious beliefs sometimes lend themselves to kindness and virtue and sometimes to hatred and bigotry? What is there about other people’s language and culture that makes people angry and threatened? These are the kinds of straightforward questions that tend not to be asked, let alone answered. The simplest, even the most naive questions are always the most difficult to answer.

The problem is that the more the excesses of human behaviour are reported the more the sense of the inevitable accumulates. The capacity to be shocked and horrified never leaves us, but it is confined to rare events when we should be disturbed every day. It is only the most extremes of behaviour that causes anguish in those distant from it, and, tellingly, the arbitrary murder of the innocent in places where it is unexpected, rather than the continual horrors of war. All these acts have explanations, and these are not the explanations of the abnormal or the exception. Explanations lie within the shared human experience. The problem then is that when things generally go wrong, when people misbehave, it is almost accepted as inevitable. It might seem inevitable but it is not necessary.

To assert the comparative lack of curiosity in exploring human nature does not mean the same thing as there being a dearth of explanations. There are many assumptions made about genetics or about the environment, that suggest that people know the answers even before they have looked for them. To take the pathology of crime as an example, there are many longstanding debates about whether the causes of criminality lie in the individual or in the environment. The difficulty in this debate is the fact that there is the assumption of inevitability, that things could not be otherwise, whatever the argument - “it’s the way he is” or “it’s the way he was brought up”. And then one way of escaping rather than confronting this dualism is to redefine the problem in a constitutive criminology, seeing crime as a cultural artefact in the interpretation of the beholder. Such relativity can be the avoidance of seeking real understanding.

As the next chapter outlines, the studies of the human experience have rested heavily on what seems to be a given, that all rests on stages of development, that people move from innocence to experience, from childish limitations to the sophistication of adulthood. Furthermore there are assumptions made that there are regular patterns, through which stages follow one another. Thus the interest is partly directed towards the ways in which these stages of development are expressed, or on the influences that come to bear on them. The human experience is seen as a series of rational steps, in which it is normal to grow into some kind of wisdom, and abnormal to escape into the pathology of wrong doing.

Suppose we have got this wrong? Suppose these assumptions are misplaced? Suppose the experience people undergo in their early years is far more dramatic and complex? We like to comfort ourselves with notions of childhood innocence and infant incapacity despite the evidence to the contrary. That means we can create an atavistic dream world for ourselves and that we do not feel ourselves and at the same time avoid the feeling that we are being closely scrutinised or judged by those closest to us. Oscar Wilde sums up in his own way a widely held belief:

We begin by loving our parents, after a while we judge them, rarely, if ever, do we forgive them..¹

But even his is a developmental view. It does not consider the possibility that judgement and forgiveness might lie alongside rather than after the loving. Nostalgia or sentimentality about childhood is a form of self-protection. Pets are unthreatening. We would like to think that young children are equally unjudgemental.

One of the most important understandings that have been gained over the last few years is about young children’s capacities. In study after study it is discovered that young children are able to discriminate, make judgements, analyse social situations and the complexity of human relationships by the time they are four. It is, of course, possible that they do so far earlier and it is only the difficulties of communication that keep this hidden. We are easily deceived into making judgements about ability according to the mastery over language. As children adapt themselves to the world in which they find themselves so they adapt their means of expression to the vocabulary of those around them. But long before they have linguistic mastery over self-expression, children are able to analyse and understand what they see and hear, as many of the following references will demonstrate.

Suppose we acknowledge the real ability of young children and see them not as unformed or half-formed creatures only gradually able to understand? Suppose we look at them more as alien beings suddenly plunged into a strange new world and looking at it askance.² If children have the ability to analyse what they see what do they make of it? If we realise that they come into the world with an intelligent critical gaze we might think differently about what they experience. We might also think differently about the circumstances we present to them.

The distinction between the capacity and potential of children and the actual realisation of this capacity is widely acknowledged. Whilst the ‘exceptionally gifted’ child is celebrated and a subject of some curiosity, it is acknowledged that such abilities should not be the exception but the norm. The capacity is there in every human being; it is the rule rather than the exception. But the capacity to think, feel and analyse remains for the most part unfulfilled. This book seeks to explain why.

An analysis of the literature of experiments that demonstrate children’s capacities reveals three underlying characteristics. The first is the sheer complexity of any ‘description’ of human thinking, even abstract reasoning, let alone all the moral, emotional and social dimensions without which thinking cannot be understood.³ The second is that to uncover and ‘explain’ the thinking process is a very difficult task, and time and again what is uncovered is limited by, and interpreted by, the methodology used. The third is the amount of interest shown in young children up to the age of five or six. Until that time the ability to respond, or categorise, to articulate or demonstrate examples of rational thinking gain all the undivided attention of re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Kieran Egan
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Through a glass darkly? The abilities of young children
• 2 Instant epistemologies: the myths of child development
• 3 The first academic discipline: evidence
• 4 The life of the world to come: the identity of the self
• 5 Home life: the significance of others
• 6 ‘Lives of quiet desperation?’ The world of the school
• 7 Shared insecurities: the context of place
• 8 Face to face: understanding the human condition
• Conclusions