The Child in Question
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The Child in Question

Childhood Texts, Cultures, and Curricula

Julie C. Garlen, Lisa Farley, Julie C. Garlen, Lisa Farley

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eBook - ePub

The Child in Question

Childhood Texts, Cultures, and Curricula

Julie C. Garlen, Lisa Farley, Julie C. Garlen, Lisa Farley

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About This Book

What is a child? The concept of childhood is so familiar that we tend to assume its universality. However, the meaning of childhood is always being negotiated, not only by the imaginations of adults, but also by nations, markets, history and children themselves. Yet, as much as the question is considered by the social world, the contributions in this book remind readers that children are also active, embodied, and inquiring agents engaged in figuring a relationship with that the world they inherit.

This book's unifying theme, "The child in question, " emerges from an assertation that childhood has boundaries far more elastic than can be held by the familiar notion of the innocent child developing toward a heteronormative future. The title pays homage to the work of sociologist, Diana Gittins, who, over twenty years ago, asked how the shifting meanings of children and childhood impact the lives of children. The contributions of this book examine contemporary educational policy and practice, curriculum material, literary and visual representations, and teacher narratives to further probe how and why it matters that childhood, as a concept and experience, remains as multiple and elusive as ever.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Curriculum Inquiry.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2021
ISBN
9781000191349
Edition
1

The quasi-human child: How normative conceptions of childhood enabled neoliberal school reform in the United States

Debbie Sonu and Jeremy Benson

ABSTRACT
This paper argues that normative conceptions of the child, as a natural quasi-human being in need of guidance, enable current school reforms in the United States to directly link the child to neoliberal aims and objectives. In using Foucault’s concept of governmentality and disciplinary power, we first present how the child is constructed as a subject of the adult world, then trace how such understandings invite school policies and practices that worked on the child, rather than with the child. In order to understand how the child comes to be known and recognized as a learner, both at the intersections of normative conceptions of childhood and material expectations of the student, we use Biesta’s three domains of education: socialization, qualification, and subjectification as an organizing framework and draw primarily from Common Core Learning Standards and related policy reports with the aim of reorienting educational work away from economic and political universals and toward a subjective response to the child as a human being with concerns, rights, and as a subject worthy of recognition.

In his book After the Death of Childhood, David Buckingham (2000) confronts the profound sense of ambiguity that surrounds the meaning of childhood in this new millennium. “The sacred garden of childhood has been increasingly violated,” he claims, as universal definitions of the child become replaced instead by discourses of knowledge1 about the child. While prevailing views may still include a vulnerable mind in need of shelter or Darwinist notions of development recapitulating the development of man, social analyses of the early twentieth century brought forward new patterns of recognition that arose through institutions, such as the school. For many, Phillipe Aries (1962) and others were the first to question the assumption of the natural or universal child by examining the division between public and private spaces that emerged with and within Western bourgeoisie society. As the child became differentiated from the adult, new identities came into existence (from a historical time when the child and adult were not distinguished in such ways) and with it new assumptions, new knowledges, new policies, practices, and institutions. According to Bernadette Baker (1998), it was precisely this discursive condition that made the public school possible.
Kenneth Hultqvist and Gunilla Dahlberg (2001) argue that even though more current studies tend to focus less on nature and more on society, the reification of society as the dominant structure that individuates the child has made the child look just as “natural” as it did in developmental psychology. In psychology, childhood was held in a suspended state of an adulthood-yet-to-come, guided through intervention toward rational self-governance, and in the social sciences, childhood, held in a similarly suspended state, represented the effects of societal demand, guided through intervention toward a desirable, productive adulthood. Yet less visible are investigations of childhood that go beyond representation into the ways that the production of knowledge governs the recognizability of the child, not in deterministic ways but rather as discursive practices that mobilize certain inventions about who and what belongs in this domain of childhood (Baker, 1998; Bloch, Popkewitz, Holmlund, & Moqvist, 2004; Popkewitz, 2000). The aim of this paper, then, is to denaturalize childhood as biologically given or institutionally determined and instead, to interrogate how certain understandings of and about the child are operationalized and used in the managing of society, particularly as they are seen through curricular aims and objectives in United States primary school.
In doing so, we find great assistance with Michel Foucault’s (1977) concept of governmentality, or the “art of governing,” and its disciplinary power. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault elaborates on the invisibility and pervasiveness of power in modern society, not only as it functions within and through institutions, but also how it is evident in the mentalities, rationalities, processes, and practices through which subjects of a population are measured, organized, and developed. This view of sovereignty does more than reduce power to a political function of the state, but rather considers how power carries forward and circulates in ways that govern the subject into a mutual constitution with its disciplinary society. Therefore, Foucault’s theory of power couples totalization with individualization (Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998, p. 21), tracing how the governing power of institutions flows into “capillary” forms of existence, points where power reaches into the very grain of individuals and inserts itself into everyday thoughts and actions. Certainly, as will be discussed, the discursive nature of circulation makes none of this deterministic, but rather possible and productive.
In this paper, these concepts help us to understand how the child comes to be known and recognized as a learner, both at the intersections of normative conceptions of childhood and material expectations of the student. We argue that it is precisely our discursive constructions of childhood, as a natural, quasi-human, adult yet-to-come that lays the foundation for neoliberal educational policies and practices to work on the child, rather than with the child. We use the term quasi-human to acknowledge what Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991) distinguishes as childhood apart from a humanness made of adult consciousness and reason. Here, he questions what we call human, as does the important work of Sylvia Wynter (see McKittrick, 2015), and thus writes, “that it will always remain for the adult to free himself or herself from the savages of childhood by bringing its promise - that is precisely the condition of humankind” (p. 4). While Lyotard takes up the human child as also symbolic of the inhuman qualities often barred from this category, we use the term quasi-human child to signify that which is not yet human, if by human it is meant a reasonable subject, and to this end, we ask: what discursive practices, activities, interactions confirm that the child is indeed a child? How do these broader conceptions of childhood heighten its precariousness to educational objectives, reforms, and policies? We hope such a relational opening will shift focus from skills, strategies, and methods toward an invitation to the child, not as a child, but as a human being with rights and concerns worthy of recognition.
To understand how curricular and pedagogical issues are related to discursive constructions of childhood in the current era of neoliberal capitalism, we use as an analytical framework Gert Biesta’s (2013) three domains of education: socialization, qualification, and subjectification.2 First, we interrogate the language of learning as it attempts to produce dispositions that mirror what is deemed appropriate, manageable, and secure to the adult world. Here, we are mostly concerned with the socialization of the desirable neoliberal subject, similar to Lynn Fender’s (2001) work on “the flexible student,” “the whole child,” and “the active learner.” Second, we consider how qualifications of knowledge in school content and curriculum reflect the kinds of skills and strategies operationalized to eliminate risk, push for effectiveness, and produce the child as a subject of “readiness” to insecure neoliberal futures. Finally, we take up subjectification as one way through which educational practices can recognize the child as a subject emerging from conditions of possibility, rather than measured against neoliberal political economic aims that are external to itself.
As current reforms privatize public education, deskill teachers, close down schools, and induce mental anxiety through a barrage of evaluative measures and tests, the response has been to use our cognitive abilities to rationalize large-scale shifts in governance and political economies. This becomes increasingly problematic as the young child is continually flattened of experience and stripped of sovereignty by virtue of being a child rather than a human being. To illustrate this, we draw primarily from Common Core Learning Standards and related policy reports, as they are grounded in our experiences as former teachers and field supervisors in New York City primary schools, and use such to discuss socialization, qualification, and subjectification at the intersection of childhood and public schooling. This is not an argument about parenting, nor do we propose practical solutions to the mess we have allowed. For us, it is not enough to blame from afar the powerful profit-minded elite for entering into our schools. For us, the path for neoliberalization continues to be cleared by our refusal to recognize the child as co-existing in the world, and it is this fundamental misrecognition that contributes to their dehumanization in the classroom.

The Child in Context

It is no surprise that schooling itself is a disciplinary enterprise that “tightens the body” (Corrigan, 1991). Children walk through its doors and become subject to elaborate techniques of surveillance, normalization, testing, and audit (Gore, 1995). They are divided into grade levels and given materials appropriate to their ability. Such categories of exclusion are generally enforced by the teacher and justified through systems of evaluation, but they are also well known by the students who self-regulate themselves according to the rules of neoliberal governmentality. The content and delivery of knowledge is decided upon, broken into discrete manageable chunks, and designed, planned, and taught according to a schedule that is quite literally broken down by the minute. Bells and signals relay when children must sit, pay attention, work with others, go outside, eat food, drink water, or be alone. While none of this is new, the rules of regulation – what is taught, how and for what purpose – must never become unquestioned normalcy (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998). The educational institution, its space, activities, population, modes of communication, and codes of obedience all serve to reinforce assumptions about childhood that make the child particularly and uniquely vulnerable to changes in school policies and practices.
While the child-to-future narrative has always been historically specific, over the past decade it has taken a dramatic turn with the advent of neoliberal policies both in and out of the school system. In the United States, profit-driven networks of state and local politicians, multi-national corporations, philanthropists, and representatives from the technology industry have taken over large sectors of public education, inventing new structures of governance, creating new guidelines for teacher certification, designing and enforcing new forms of curriculum content, educational language, and pedagogical methods and approaches.
At the same time, cuts to the social wage, disinvestment in social reproduction, and intensified dispossession and hyper-exploitation have rendered the child’s future precarious, if not outright disposable (Katz, 2011). This does not imply that the subject of the child is simply determined as a result of external pressure, but rather speaks to its constant emergence as subjectivities that respond to an external need, force or desire to construct, conduct, and negotiate the self in particular ways and within particular conditions of possibility (Butler, 1997). New patterns of governing the child as a subject tied to futurity, inextricably linked to adult fears, desires, and fantasies, have indeed shaped the concept of the educated child and the educated child’s recognizability of itself (Smith, 2014), but do so as contextualized and historicized lineages of truth and rationality.
For the purpose of this work, we deploy the term child and childhood, not in reference to an individual child, but rather as a shifting relational term whose meaning is defined primarily through its interaction with another shifting term, adulthood (Gittins, 2004; James & Prout, 1990; Jenks, 1996; Kehily, 2008). Therefore, childhood implies more than a biological phase in human development or an idealized state of romanticized innocence and purity. Instead, we consider childhood as the existence of a distinct, separate, and fundamentally unique social group that has been “fabricated” (Bloch et al., 2004; Popkewitz, 2004) and made possible through an amalgam of statements and hierarchies about what is needed from the child. Therefore, notions of childhood are not simply descriptions of individuals or representations of social interests and structural forces, but ways of thinking that produce certain kinds of individuals living in a certain kind of world (Katz, 2008, 2011). Through this approach, we can consider childhood as a site of struggle upon which to better understand how historically situated educational aims and practices produce cultural theses about how a child should live and be.
According to Diana Gittins (2004), since the beginning of the sixteenth century, two primary notions have undergirded conceptions of the modern child: the “romantic,” morally innocent child and the “tabula rasa,” or cognitively empty child. However, prior to the age of Enlightenment, the child bore little distinction from adults and during this time lived alongside adults rather than under the pretense of adults-in-the-making. There was no attention given to their unique experiences, nor was there a need for specialized education. As Western reason came to disambiguate concerns over the human capacity to emancipate oneself from a state of ignorance, the child came to sit between two disp...

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