Thread by @Anuraag_Shukla

This arrived today. The book is an attempt to present a historically-embedded account of western childhood and how the co-constitutive logics of capital and motherhood have shaped its modern understanding. @VSLIIMA

#childhood #education #motherhood

"Situated at the confluence of children's nature and childhood's nurture, mothers are those who most often held personally responsible for navigating the dense undergrowth of competing and confusing narratives and expectations of childhood." #childhood

"Three elements- childhood's pliability, maternal accountability for children and children's subjecthood- entangle and tussle with one another in a variety of ways to produce a 'moral architecture' of childhood."

#childhood #motherhood #maternallife #education

Childhood consumerism has often been conceptualized in an opposition to an innocent, pre-capitalist child whose worth resides beyond any economic value. This separation of "home"/"sentimental" with "the market" ignores the cultural/moral dimensions of childhood.

#childhood

#Childhood in Dickensian #London:

Dickensian narratives of the history and imaginary of child labourers in Western industrial capitalism.

london.ac.uk/senate-house-l…

#childhoodtwitter #education #ChildrensLivesMatter

Similarly, photographer Lewis Hine captured the appalling #childlabour conditions of early 20th-century #America in stark, history-making detail. It also signified a transformation of "the child' from labourer to consumer.



#childhood #childhoodtwitter

Sociological texts that have studied the phenomenon of child consumerism have failed to consider the motherhood and positionality of mothers within it and how these categories get inflected in the handling of the uncertainties posed by children's malleability. #childhood

How a particular discourse of motherhood created the moral architecture of childhood we see today.

#childhood #childhoodtwitter #education

17th century Europe was enmeshed in the puritan theological-philosophical ideologies of Protestantism, that espoused the idea of child damnation, gradually accepting the idea of infant regeneration (i.e., early conversion to Christianity).
#childhood #childhoodtwitter #education

This 17th-century determinism of fate for the child's soul came to be increasingly challenged by the Lockean notion of the intellectually malleable child in the 18th century, encouraging general belief in the open-endedness of the impact of early childhood influences.

#childhood

So, the intermingling of Lockean malleability with the Protestant conception of innateness, along with the "feminization" of religion through sentiments and affect, made possible the 20th century modern, consumerist "child" a possibility.

#childhood #childhoodtwitter #education

The conceptualization of childhood in terms of predestination and deprivation in the puritan Christian thoughts, including the teachings of John Calvin, was becoming untenable and required intercession.

#childhood #childhoodtwitter #education

people.ucls.uchicago.edu/~snekros/The%2….

Central to the change in how childhood was understood was the work of the philosopher, Rousseau, whose Émile (1762) not only rejected the doctrine of Original Sin, but maintained that children were innately innocent, only becoming corrupted through experience of the world.

As its Christian origins grew less pronounced, it came to be seen as a force for good (with some Christian influences). With poets such as William Blake and Wordsworth delving into childhood, the idealized version of childhood became highly influential.

bl.uk/romantics-and-…

Periodicals in the early 19th century shaped the moral bearing of motherhood. It was the site of motherhood that offered a space for pre-psychological science theorization of infant interiority.

#childhood #motherhood #education

It is in the active tension and co-dependence of mothers' intensive obligations regarding emphatic identification to the moral and emotional pliability of the child, a moral architecture of childhood was created.

#childhood #motherhood #education

In dominant racist and nationalistic ideologies of Victorian Britain, non-white, foreign-born people, including those of a "heathen race", were not regularly granted the presumption of the ability to engage in higher learning.

#childhood #motherhood #education #geneologies

Nazera Wright shows in her history of 19th-century black girlhood, that the "normal" development for a black girl was neither casual nor natural and had to be motivated by either harsh circumstances or dedicated biblical tutoring.

#childhood #motherhood #education #geneologies

Once the imagination of child as malleable, morally educable was fixed, the questions of who children are and what they should be and should not be - as gendered, raced, and classed being- came into play on an everyday basis.

#childhood #motherhood #education #geneologies

The trick of taste and materiality resides in their duality- that they behave like portals as much as borders. Victorian middle-class understandings of taste decried material life while living off it, with materiality providing the substance to craft non-material virtue.

Understood in this way, the middle-class Victorian home of the mid-to-late 19th century served not so much as a reprieve from commercial life as it did a sorting mechanism for the meanings and value of things- including an emerging sense of market value itself. #childhood

In the middle-class culture, taste mattered because engagement with the world of things was both unavoidable and desirable, constituting the cultural space where character was made and revealed in a conversation with a disciplined attitude toward things. #childhood #motherhood

Taste made the interiority of the child available by laying bare the interiority of the “mother”. Mothers were to understand, intervene in, and direct the taste of their children by self-reflexively consulting their own preferences, their own self-presentations, and “character”.

It is not surprising, then, that the voiced concerns of mothers, observers, and pundits of the time centred on the profound moral bearing wrought by the implications of the malleable child- i.e., in the progressive realization of the problem of making human beings. #childhood

Through the malleability of its character, desires, and ontological trajectory, the child became manifest a new sort of dynamic problem of social reproduction. Childhood depravity jumped from within the child into the world over the course of the century.

Locating source of depravity as potentially external to the malleable child made possible the production of a subject whose pleasure-seeking was, at once, a "natural" facet of development while also serving as a site of surveillance, regulation, training and discipline.

Interestingly, it was this externalization of depravity that made corporal punishment increasingly unpopular. if the 'Devil' no longer exists within the child, then it does not need to be beaten out of her. #childhood #education #learning #corporalpunishment

Other forms of punishment such as using the Finger Stocks (aka Finger Cuffs) also came under severe scrutiny.

#childhood #education #ChildrenLivesMatter #motherhood

A malleable child also meant that she manifested herself as an active, knowing, agentive being who reactions and sensitivities required consideration and adjustment on the part of the mother who was striving to govern.

#childhood #education #motherhood

The malleable child continued to represent a problem not of "order" per se, as in the Hobbesian tradition, but of ordering, i.e., of shaping and moulding. The responsibility for this ordering fell on mothers who became subject to the unsettling openness of the malleable child.

In this light, the increasingly popular Santa Claus can be seen as a mythical figure deployed to deflect the everyday dynamics of punishment and reward onto an impersonal plane, embodied by a half-deity who stands in judgement of children. #childhood #children #education

Discourses about the ills of punishment and the ills of reward both engaged with the child's perspective, making its acknowledgement something of a moral imperative.
punishment- disregard of the child's view
reward- an excess of consideration of the child's view. #childhood

Supported by an admixture diffusion of the theoretical understandings of educational theories of Locke, Rousseau, as well as Spencer, Froebel, and Pestalozzi, mothers struggled with the impossibilities of governing children according to social expectations. #childhood #education

From the pedagogy of Froebel's kindergarten, which put physical objects at the centre of instruction, to rituals of fest-giving, the materiality of childhood could not stand apart from character training and moral pedagogy.

#childhood #education #motherhood

At the opening of the 20th century, neither a strong sense of innocence no of the pecuniary pollution of a sacred child dominated the public understanding of children's involvement in and relationship to good and consumer market.

#childhood #education #motherhood

Rather, discourse, practice, and attention reached for a moral amalgam whereby goods, children's subjectivities, and mother's imperatives found mutual resonance, often with the interlocution of market actors.

#childhood #education #motherhood

If one starts from the question and position of the child, it becomes evident that the problems posed by malleability- coupled with the reciprocal responsibilization of motherhood- help make for emergent childhood.

#chidhood #motherhood #education

This conception of childhood is engaged with, not turned away from, the materialities, values, and meanings of the world. It gained a central position as the child's standpoint, subjectivity, perspective, interpretations, etc., procured the acknowledgement across cultural fields.

Similarly, the conception of a creative child, seen from this perspective, reflects and embodies an existential uncertainty about the direction and trajectory of the life course. Creativity, here, works as a highly elastic category.

#childhood #creativity #education #motherhood

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