Rethinking Children's Citizenship

T. Cockburn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349322831, 9780230271876
• eBook ISBN: 9781137292070
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the relationship between children and citizenship, analyzing international perspectives on citizenship and human rights and developing new methods for facilitating the recognition of children as participating agents within society.

Part I

1

Children and Citizenship in the Classical Period

Greece

In Ancient Greece half the population was under 15, and archaeological digs have unearthed toys that reflect our modern understanding of childhood, such as rattles, tops, dolls and other items, as well as evidence of richer families having pets. On the other hand, many babies died as infants, and the reluctance to name babies attests to the emotional distance that characterises societies that have a high infant mortality rate. Furthermore, most Greek cities adopted the practice of swaddling children up to the age of two. However, Lawrence Stone’s (1977) hypothesis of the high infant mortality rate resulting in the unwillingness of parents to give love and attention to infant children is to be treated with suspicion. Louise Pratt (2007), in a strong example of affective relationships, discusses the beautiful scene in Iliad 6 in which Hektor says farewell to his wife Andromache and their baby Astyanax as he prepares to return to battle. In the scene Hektor is a loving father and “an individual devoted to the care of others, so deeply invested in others that he sacrifices his own life in their support” (Pratt, 2007, p. 27). Yet ancient Greek parenthood was nevertheless considerably different from that of today. As Gillian Clark observes:

Arranged marriage, early childbearing, painful and dangerous childbirth, the abandonment of newborn babies, the practices of swaddling and wet-nursing can all be used to argue that parents and children were at best unlikely to form a strong emotional bond.

(1994, p. 7)

A distinction must be made between rich, aristocratic children and those of the peasant classes: the latter were given more free rein and were expected to work in the fields from a young age. For upper-class children, as we will see, the foundation of democratic societies constrained children into the home, and for aristocratic girls the confinement into the home would last into their marriage, which could happen as early as age 13.

The polis of Ancient Athens was essentially an adult male association, and the citizen body consisted of men who would join together in making and carrying out decisions. All male citizens who participated were, in principle, equal; however, it was clear that citizenship, in this classical sense, was based upon social class (as it was open only to aristocratic men) and also ‘race’, as ‘foreigners’ were excluded from citizenship, even though foreign-born people far outnumbered Athenian citizens. Ironically, political equality in Athens enabled the establishment of an empire that produced tyranny abroad in its vassal states. There are parallels with the European democracies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which had defeated Bonapartism, held in check Czarist absolutism, and created a flowering of artistic and intellectual culture, yet cruelly dominated and exploited the ‘dominions’ throughout the world.

Central to Athenian organisation were the phrateres, which designated a non-familial type of ‘brotherhood’. These brotherhoods were open to all ‘Athenian men’; all male citizens belonged to a phratry, and the phratry dominated social life. It is illustrative to reflect on the way young males were admitted to the phratry, as it forms the germ of the gradual, or staged, introduction of children (specifically boys) to full citizenship. At an early age a boy’s father introduced him ceremonially to the phrateres; again at adolescence he was presented ritualistically with shorn hair and was then voted by the phrateres as a phratry member. The phratry was involved in the main stages of a man’s life, including betrothal. There was a gradual absorption of the young male into the ‘public sphere’. The ephebe was the first time a young man was separated from his family and placed with a company of peers for an extended period of time. The young men were split from the mature fighting men and posted in the second year to outlying borders of the state. They wore black cloaks that marked them apart from other fighting men. On completion of a young man’s two-year service he joined the ranks as a reserve hoplite, or citizen foot soldier, alongside other adult citizens. As Beaumont (2000) has noted:

Athenian male youth’s development shows quite clearly that no abrupt dividing line existed between childhood and adult manhood … roughly between the ages of 13 or 14 and 20 – seem to have constituted an adolescent phase of ambiguous, liminal social status when the youth was considered to be neither truly child or man. (p. 47)

This type of brotherhood association was common in the Greek world, such as the militaristic masculine mess groups of the different syssitia in Sparta. The Spartan system had similar ritualistic ‘stages’ at seven, at 12 (when boys were famously taught Spartan self-reliance and survival skills), and at 20 when they joined the syssitia, until the age of 30. After that men were still required to eat with the syssitia, although beyond their fighting best. These two forms of brotherhood are illustrative of the staged nature of boys’ and men’s involvement in citizenship, although in the case of Athens the stages were crafted to fit into a ‘democratic’ citizenship.

In Athens full participative citizenship was made up of a variety of what we would now call civil society associations, such as religious guilds, drinking groups, traders and philosophical schools. The associations created the sense of community and belonging that was deemed essential to the operation of the polis, beyond kinship ties. Interestingly, Greek thought understood freedom, not according to the individual, in contrast to the social contract thinkers we will discuss in the next chapter, but as public and linked it to speech and public action. Perhaps resembling the ‘positive’ forms of liberty discussed by Rousseau, again this theme will be discussed further in the next chapter.¹ For Ancient Greeks, a good society was one in which arguments were settled through consensus (harmonoia); they proceeded from tightly knit communities where public good was placed above private advantage.

While the networks of associations were the social glue of public life and formed the basis of participative democracy, the family remained a key institution. Families in Greece tended to be nuclear and monogamous, providing children for the new citizenry. There were strong rules for citizenship based upon marriage between two Athenian citizens and they excluded foreign-born partners and children from other types of liaison. Thus, citizenship was controlled and the transmission of property stabilised through the familial structure.

Another function of the family in Athenian social values was the control of women and children. Indeed, gender, as well as age, defined citizenship. There are many good commentaries on the position of women in Greek thought (see, for instance, Okin, 1980), but few have focussed on children. Aristocratic women in Athens were citizens, in contrast to foreign women, but lacked independent status. Women and children were explicitly proscribed from entering into any transactions (other than personal items) and could not own property. In this context Ada Cohen (2007) reflects: “women’s and children’s shared ‘minority’ status is often invoked, as is their shared subjection to discrimination in the majority of known societies, where patriarchal values dominate” (p. 2). At all times women and children were to be under the protection of a kyrios, or a guardian, and with few exceptions were under the legal protection of the family head. For aristocratic women and children the coming of democracy meant the locking out from participation in democracy. While in contemporary agrarian societies there may have been some form of mistrust or devaluing of women and children by men, these were held in check at least by the need for labour in the fields that was undertaken by women and children. With the beginning of ‘civilized’ urban life, women’s and young children’s lives were confined to the house, and increased wealth ‘liberated’ women and children from domestic chores (usually at the expense of slaves and later bonded or waged labour). The layout of Athenian houses was segregated into public rooms for men, and women’s and children’s rooms, which in larger houses were separated from the street entrance, usually around the courtyard, thus instigating an architectural public/private split within the domestic home.

The development of the famous Greek philosophy encouraged the belief that women and children were less endowed with reason than men. As Aristotle states: “the deliberative faculty is not present at all in a slave, in the female it is inoperative, in the child underdeveloped.” Thus the confinement of slaves, women and children to the private sphere is ‘justified’ only through the deployment of the concept of reason as a higher, more mature, Greek and male characteristic. It is interesting to note that the Greek word for child, pais, can also mean slave, thereby a similarity of the characteristic is shown. As Cohen has argued: “In Greek antiquity the word pais was ambiguous, sometimes used to contrast child with adult and other times child with adolescent” (2007, p. 4).

There was little difference between boys’ and girls’ lives up until the age of seven; they were confined to the women’s quarters of houses; but then boys would commence their education. Their mother and her retinue instructed girls in preparation for marriage, but this education was usually quite rudimentary, as preservation from the world was the primary concern. Sophocles wrote: “young girls, in my opinion have the sweetest existence known to mortals in their fathers’ homes, for innocence keeps children safe and happy always” (Sophocles, Tereus, fr. 583).

For boys education was vital, as the ability for male citizens to read and write was taken for granted. Derek Heater characterises Greek education into two forms: one “encouraged individual political and forensic skill, notably rhetoric and judgement, the other emphasised training, indoctrination even, of the youth to obedience to the laws, submission of government and a readiness to defend the state by recourse to arms” (1990, p. 6). Thus, the soldier and the deliberator were seen as mutually reinforcing aspects of citizenship, both requiring a system of education. Athenian law regulated the education of boys by specifying the opening hours of schools, the numbers of boys permitted and the ages of pupils, and regulated the supervision of teachers. Although it was probable that formal education only affected a small proportion of adolescents, it seems that there was concern for the moral protection of children from teachers, who were generally disliked. Instruction was provided in the fields of literature, physical education and music to equip aristocratic young people for the gymnasion and symposium. The importance of the arts and culture in Greece was highly prized; the word paideia includes not just the education of children but also their lifelong ‘cultivation’, whereby the importance of physical prowess and skills in public speaking was established. Towards the end of the fourth century there was a standard and universal (physical) youth training for all young men under 18, not just aristocratic young men. Further developments in education at this stage enabled a flowering of scientific knowledge, especially in the field of medicine and in general culture.

However, for our own debates around citizenship, the Ancient Greeks provided two of the thinkers with the greatest influence on modern western political theory. The work of Aristotle we will discuss soon, but before him was Plato.

Plato

In many respects Plato has a very bad name in political philosophy. Karl Popper (1966), in his Open Society and its Enemies, cast Plato as the originator of totalitarianism. Indeed, his advocating for an ascetic and collective life, guided by ‘objective’ experts, is an anathema to today’s material, individualistic and cynical culture in modern democracies, although Platonic thought is perhaps behind the tendency in Western Europe of consolidating democracies in the current economic climate with ‘technocrats’ gleaned from the banking sectors. Plato’s strand of thought is important to understanding his warning of the dangers of hysteria and mass ignorance and the requirement for education. The centrality of the role of education in Plato’s writing as ‘the first stage’ resonates through political theory across the ages. It also places children and children’s relationship to citizenship at the heart of understanding broader aspects of citizenship in both theory and practice. In Plato’s ideal city (Kallipolis), he advocated for sexual equality, the deprivation of private property and the abolition of private families, to the point where children are produced by couples planned by older guardians and thus will not know who their biological fathers and mothers are and will be raised communally. However, this was no proto-communist and feminist text, for it was restricted to the class of guardians. Indeed, Plato, along with many of his contemporaries, considered children (together with women and slaves) as prone to the tyrannies of their desires. In The Republic Plato argues:

the greatest number and variety of desires and pleasures and pains is generally to be found in children and women and slaves, and in the less respectable majority of so-called free men. (431C)

What we know of Plato’s thought in seminal texts on politics and citizenship, such as the Republic, is that it is very much shaped by the death of Plato’s mentor Socrates. Socrates was convicted, sentenced to execution, imprisoned and put to death by democratic citizen–persecutors on the grounds of, opposite in terms of the subject of this book, corruption of youth. Following Socrates, Plato’s highest political goal was the psychological unity, harmony, flourishing or happiness (eudaimonia) of each citizen. This was to be achieved by cultivating the main virtues (arete) of wisdom, courage, self-discipline and justice. These virtues could not be separated from each other and all depended on wisdom, or knowledge. Knowledge could not be derived from rhetoric or democratic debate but was a matter of genuine expertise.

Plato, then, had a distrust of democracy, and argued that democracy causes the virtues of wisdom, courage, self-discipline and justice to be underdeveloped. There is a tendency for tyranny to lie at its heart, ready to manifest itself in times of crisis. Individuals are capable of tyranny, and Plato presents metaphors of the struggles between human, Lion and Beast to illustrate how these passions are best controlled through reason. Feelings contrary to harmony, such as indignation or appetite, are not to be controlled through force or suppression but, rather, shaped through education. Plato’s educational writings were formed by his debates with and opposition to Sophist teachers who simply advocated for the art of rhetoric as a means of raising moral standards, as well as a political device. However, the ‘sophistry’ that has come to be used to characterise the dangers of ‘sleight of hand’ oratory became apparent in the Peloponnesian War of 404 BC and the defeat of Athens at the hands of the Spartans. Plato’s writings, and later those of Aristotle, established the urgent need for attention to programmes of socialisation in Greek life. Thus, in the Republic, the political philosophy is closely linked with that of education. Plato was deeply concerned with the corruption and political instability of the age, and argued for a more effective and direct form of education from the state itself, rather than leaving the education of the young to private duties of families. Later, in the twentieth century, the philosopher R.G. Collingwood, a passionate believer in home schooling, declared that one of Plato’s biggest crimes was “to have planted on the European world the crazy idea that education ought to be professionalised” (quoted in Inglis, 2009, p. 18). Thus, the Republic provided a distinct blueprint for the education of the ruling class, who were to learn self-sacrifice, and the education of the ruled, who were to learn obedience.

Concern with education was not necessarily new; practices of instilling control of the basic instincts in children must have been widespread, for Plato appeals to this as a principle underlying hierarchical governance and standards to be upheld in adult life. In the Republic, Socrates (according to Plato) argues:

And this is plainly the intention of the law, in the support it gives to all citizens, and the control we exercise over children, not letting them run free till we have established some kind of constitutional government in them, and have educated the best in them to be their guardian and ruler and to take over from the best in us: then we give them their freedom.

(590e–591a)

In this sense the theme of the Republic is concerned with cultivating maturity as a normative ideal. Much of the Republic details the form of Greek education and culture that will ensure that people behave justly by checking their appetites and do not experience lust, arrogance, greed or indignation.

So, does everybody achieve a full sense of justice? For Plato, the rational element of most people, including most adult men, is beyond them. He states:

the simple and moderate desires, guided by reason and right judgement and reflection, are to be found in a minority who have the best natural gifts and best education … This feature too you can see in our state, where the desires of the less respectable majority are controlled by the desires and the wisdom of the superior minority.

(The Republic 431 C–D)

Thus, Plato provides an exclusive, or even elitist, theory of citizenship and argues against the democratic assumption that all citizens are capable of making political decisions, as ordinary people’s reason is too weak and they are liable to give way to their appetites. Political rule is necessary as most people are incapable of, or deficient in, making fully reasoned decisions. Plato’s democracy is thus very limited; few adult men make the grade for competent citizenship, as most fall short of the requisite skills and degree of rationality. Few today will advocate for this as the model to spread democratic well-being across all sectors of society.

Aristotle

More influential towards modern theorists of citizenship are the works of Aristotle, who, according to Faulks (2000), “represents the first systematic attempt to develop a theory of citizenship” (p. 14). Aristotle, more than Plato, emphasised the role of participation as an element of citizenship and the good life. Aristotle’s own background, his role as a resident alien in Athens, perhaps explains his more inclusive emphasis on more direct political participation. However, people played the roles appropriate to what Aristotle believed to be their natural qualities. Thus, only some qualified as polites, or citizens.

The characteristics of being human are an important element in Aristotle’s writing. In his Ethics he outlines that humans differ from most animals because they are in essence a ‘political animal’, or, as one of his commentators Jonathan Barnes (1982) puts it, a ‘social animal’. The crucial point is that humans are gregarious creatures and differ from other social animals, such as bees, ants and cranes, in that they can distinguish between good and bad, just and unjust, and so on. This defining characteristic of humanity resonates through historical debates around childhood age at which children come to have this function, or even whether children are born with an innate function to tell right from wrong. For Aristotle, the prime determinant of the capacity to determine right from wrong lies with the possession of reason and the power of thought. Our intellect is ‘the divine within us’ and is our sovereign and best element. It is the use of the intellect that, Aristotle argued, formed the foundation of flourishing for humans.

Aristotle outlined his theory of citizenship most systematically in his Politics. For Aristotle, a citizen is “defined by nothing else so well as by participation in judicial functions and in political office”. It was this performance of citizenship that rested as the fundamental aspect of being human. The state’s affairs are run directly by citizens, who have defined duties: notably, financial, military and to be part of a judiciary. Aristotle produced a taxonomy of political constitutions that boiled down to three types: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The former two would be appropriat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index