Patrycja Orzechowska

The concepts of the child and childhood, as well as all their cultural representations, are constructs that change over time. In Centuries of Childhood, an original analytical study devoted to this phenomenon, Philippe Ariès explores how Western societies have understood childhood, the way they have imagined children and matters related to children, the position and social meanings they have ascribed to children, and, most strikingly, practices that have concerned children from the advent of the Middle Ages to the early modern period. These social constructs have been translated into the way children have been treated as real persons for centuries. In the Middles Ages, childhood virtually disappeared from recognized social spheres: small children did not matter at all, whereas slightly older children were perceived and treated as little adults, which is revealed in the portraits of children as miniature adults in old paintings. Children functioned in adult life on a nearly equal footing: nothing was hidden from them as taboo, including sexuality.¹ Their lives were not particularly valued, nor were their memories after they died; they were not sheltered at all from the dark sides of human life or hard work. Ariès argues that, essentially, childhood did not exist until the decline of the Middle Ages. This means that childhood was not considered to be an entirely separate stage of human development. As a result, educational practices were identical for both little and grown-up people. Only at the end of the fifteenth century, or actually the sixteenth, did the time come when childhood was separated from adult life, and children began to spend the period of their mental development isolated in institutions, the goals of which were achieved primarily through moral education and authoritarian discipline.² Significantly, discussions of children in the historical context refer primarily to boys and boyhood in the upper social classes. Ariès highlights the fact that boys were the first to be recognized as children, and it was boys who received the opportunity of mass education in the sixteenth century.³ Initially, the history of education was a history of boys, whereas girls were recognized only through the Romantic metaphor of the garden; one more century would have to pass before they were granted the privilege of institutional education.

With the advent of the early modern period changes linked to the emergence of Puritanism, and Puritan discourse, as evidenced by written records of sermons from that time,⁴ children began to be perceived as frail, wicked, and evil, whereas their parents, teachers, and mentors gradually became more and more empowered to assume moral responsibility for them. For the sake of redeeming souls in the name of God, all kinds of disciplining practices, both moral and corporal, were accepted or even valorized. Children were birched at the discretion of their carers; all children, even the youngest, were thought to deserve punishment, regardless of their social background. Thus, the frailty of childhood was deemed to be equal to the lowest strata of society,⁵ which was something that had been unthinkable previously. During this period of Western social history, childhood became, according to Diana Gittins, a battlefield in which parents, empowered by severe preachers, fought against the profound depravity of nature, a characteristic that was believed to be inherent in children, but also in all of mankind, and they waged battle to instil morality and social mores in their selfless struggle for the sake of redeeming the souls of their children.⁶

A shift in the consciousness of morally-panicked adults, who comprised a society that today would appear to be cruel, and corresponding changes in social customs only happened at the end of the eighteenth century. A new approach to childhood in the modern states of the eighteenth century, subtilized the form of oppression and transferred it to the field of the institutionally practiced discourse of knowledge-power, as postulated by Michel Foucault. According to Astrid Męczkowska-Christiansen, the forms of violence against children became more refined, while the source of these was primarily the Enlightenment discourse of tabula rasa, or socialization determined by norms.⁷ Based on the philosophy of John Locke, this perspective meant that a child could be transformed into a rational being only through appropriate training. According to this ideology, becoming a subject requires subjection⁸ (assujettissement—Foucault), and childhood is the period when this is the easiest to implement. Today, mainly in literature for children and in educational practices, this ideology manifests itself in the recognition of gender, professional and class roles, and related social rules, as the only roles that are legitimate. Thus, required reading for children presents models with which children should confront themselves and their own characteristics in the context of the requirements of the surrounding world in order to become fully human.⁹ In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault analyses the apparatuses and devices that serve authority in implementing training practices targeted at the body of the subject in the sites of torture, prisons, military barracks, dormitories, factories and, finally, also in schools, which implement the means of correct training¹⁰ of individuals according to the demands of the anonymous structures of power in order to awake in a child, as Ariès states, an adult sense of responsibility and dignity.¹¹ In this perspective, childhood receives a kind of pre-human a period that serves the purpose of preparation for adult life. This discourse seems be reproduced in the contemporary education system, which is oriented toward testing and measuring achievements against the standards of the neoliberal economy. In 1979, a culturally significant voice of opposition to such practices was portrayed and given powerful momentum by the group Pink Floyd on their album The Wall in the song, among others, that begins with the lyrics “We don’t need no education.”

From the late eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth centuries in Europe, an ahistorical and standardizing myth of universal childhood emerged and became enrooted in the culture in response to the discourse of childhood as a reservoir of the continuity of social structures. This myth derives its origins from Romantic discourse based on the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.¹² The child began to be perceived as an embodiment of the purity and innocent spirituality inherent in the child’s nature, and the only thing that could deprave this innocent nature was contact with the wicked world of adults. This view was supported by the famous line by William Wordsworth “The child is father of the Man.” In its exaggerated form, this perspective resulted in a sentimental view of children that had a strong presence in the nineteenth century. Today, this same discourse, especially characteristic of commercial cultural production for children, considers the child to be something akin to a sweet elf or as being cute (according to John Holt), and to require care, tenderness, and protection from the external threats coming from the world.¹³ The relationship between the adult and the child is saturated with unilateral affectivity and an untrue, artificial vision of the unity of the world. This ideology compels people to neglect everything that falls short of this idyll, and it seems to marginalize children in social life. Peter Hunt argues that such a vision of childhood becomes “the last refuge of a collapsing society; but the child as constructed here has nowhere to go: adulthood is not a state to aspire to.”¹⁴

In popular culture (especially aspects of it that have earned the title of literary classics) and in the everyday lives of its audiences, we come across many examples of how the discourses and concepts of the child and childhood described above operate. We need to remember that illustrated literature from the early modern period was not in the least meant for children; rather, it was to serve the pleasure of adults from the upper social strata. Books found in children’s rooms followed the iron rule of censorship: ad usum Delphini—they avoided causing excessive arousal of children’s imaginations. Therefore, the literary works that emerged from the societies of the time do not reveal the truth about children; instead, they show how visions of children and their upbringing were socially constructed and spread thanks to universal access to these literary works. Puritan discourse and the pre-humanstatusof childhood mentioned above seemed to recur every now and again throughout the centuries in children’s required reading and represented with varied intensity the ideology that originated from the Middle Ages. A particular upsurge in this discourse was observed in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was a time when two outstanding works of literature for children were penned, works that are not quite satirical as they implement the Medieval creed of severe pedagogy and discipline: this creed, popularized broadly in primers, not only praised the benefits of the lash, but also deemed corporal punishment to be appropriate in the eyes of God.¹⁵ The works in question are Heinrich Hoffman’s Der Struwwelpeter (Shockheaded Peter), recognized as the first picture book, and Max und Moritz (Max and Moritz) by the outstanding illustrator Wilhelm Busch, published twenty years later. With the release of the former book, society received a sarcastic antidote to the style of fairy-tales for good kids (often portrayed as little angels or cherubim), characterized by kitschy and sugary content and illustrations, a style that corresponded to the dominant Romantic discourse of the time. Der Stuwwelpter, published quite early on the Polish territories (in 1858) under the different titles of Złota Różdżka¹⁶ or Staś Straszydło, książeczka obrazkowa dla dzieci (in Russia as Stepka-Rastrepka) is considered to be the first picture book published specifically for children (naughty children) that adults particularly enjoyed, and the visual plane of which reinforced a didactic message concerning the threat of inevitable punishment for all kinds of disobedience, transgressions, stupidity, or maliciousness—traits that characterized the children from good homes who were the protagonists of the poems.¹⁷ Some of these children receive exemplary punishment for blatant transgressions of the prevailing principles of good conduct (principles that prevail to this day!). For instance, the evil Peter (Friedrich) who whipped servants, killed little birds, destroyed books and furniture, etc., was bitten until he bled by a dog he had previously whipped. In a similar fashion, three boys from the poem The Story of the Inky Boys, Edward, Arthur, and William (Ludwig, Kaspar, Wilhelm), mocked the skin color of a black man who went out for a walk. Then, a giant sorcerer gathered the three rascals and dunked them in an ink-pot. Thus, he turned them into a black laughing stock, while a crow that happened to fly above called them ugly black children.¹⁸ Some of the didactic stories shock readers with excessive cruelty; probably the most popular of them are The Story of a Little Suck-a-Thumb and The Story of Augustus who Would not Have any Soup. Another tragic protagonist is Harriet (Paulinchen). Against the warnings of cats, animals that seem more reasonable than her, the girl starts to play with matches when her parents are not at home. The story culminates tragically: at first the fire catches the little girl’s apron-string and then she burns all over, everywhere, leaving only her ashes on the ground and the two lamenting cats. The evident recklessness, or stupidity, of Harriet, who wanted to act like an adult, was thus exposed in a morbid way.

From the perspective of this discourse, such disobedient, hot-tempered, stupid, stubborn children deserved a wide array of punishments, mostly those that left an imprint on the body and often ended with complete annihilation, but punishment during their lives alone is not enough for such children! The Grimm Brothers wrote a short but particularly powerful story entitled “Das eigensinnige Kind” (The Willful Child),¹⁹ which had certainly been part of the oral discourse for centuries. The story is about a child who was punished by God with a fatal illness for disobedience to his mother. Buried in a grave, the child persisted in reaching out with its arm from underneath the ground. The mother was finally forced to strike the arm with a rod so the child could rest in peace and have its soul redeemed. This story clearly repeats the Puritan discourse discussed above, a discourse that compelled adults to use discipline in the struggle against original sin, which burdened human beings (especially children). It was original sin that was believed to make children prone to all kinds of misbehavior. Therefore, in the name of God, adults had to wield punishment primarily against children’s bodies in order to humiliate their sinful souls. All the examples discussed above have one clear goal, which is to reflect children’s evil conscience like a mirror. Having read these stories, the reader should follow the path of obedience and subordination to norms and commands that should never be subject to discussion. One should also fear the negative ramifications of deviating from this clearly defined way.

All of these things happened without any concern for the unleashing of an entire mechanism of violence. Psychoanalysis-oriented historians emphasize the fact that the practices of upbringing condition the transmission and development of all other elements of culture. Thus, these Puritan practices translate into experiences of suffering and cruelty.²⁰ The anti-pedagogical current regards this situation as a mechanism of reproducing evil, a subject that will be discussed later in this text.

Let’s return to the example of two protagonists, Max and Moritz, from the bestseller of the same title published in great numbers at the end of the nineteenth century and translated into more than forty languages. It is a story that parents and children are said to snatch back and forth from each others’ hands, and it begins with these lines from the preface: “Ah how oft we read or hear of—Boys we almost stand in fear of!—Who, instead of early turning—Their minds to useful learning—Often leered with horrid features—At their lessons and their teachers.”²¹ It is a story of two boys, rogues indeed, who care about nothing but inventing pranks, setting traps, and making jokes that are extremely hilarious to them but not necessarily to their victims. Their last prank becomes the final chapter of the lives of this original pair of protagonists. They are ground to flour in a mill and devoured by. . . ducks. Deliberately following satirical conventions, which are also targeted at adults, Busch’s stories feature a range of comical effects, but they also have a clear didactic message: a child that dares to oppose adults is annihilated. The discourse that positions children as non-humans can also be observed at the linguistic level of this story, a layer that both idealizes adults and degrades children. Throughout the story, the narrator refers to the boys as “bad boys for mischief ready,” “young shavers,” “rogues,” “boys who love bad tricks,” “flinty-hearted,” “scapegraces born,” “wicked souls,” “rascals,” and “scalawags.” This distinction between the adult and the child seems to lay at the foundation of legitimacy of all practices, including those of today, that deem children to be irrational, imbecile, frail, pre-logical, and primitive.²² Anti-pedagogy (originating in the 1970s and mentioned previously in this article) is a contemporary reaction to black pedagogy, as Katharina Rutschky refers to it. This negative pedagogy in its contemporary form of the objective hostility of adults towards children, as observed by Arthur von Braunmühl, a critic of it, emanates from the above quoted example and from the practices of educational institutions known from our experiences. Von Braunmühl argues that in the light of structural violence sanctioned in institutions, a pedagogue becomes a representative of evil, who, often in contrast to his/her own role, blocks or hampers the psychophysical development of the children in their custody.²³ This systemic form of wielding evil seems to be as cruel as subjective hostility, an attitude that manifests itself in the personal motives behind adults’ maltreatment of children. The anatomy of the mechanism of reproducing evil was captured perfectly in the film Weisse Band—Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, directed by Michael Haneke (2009).²⁴ One of the dimensions of this moving film is the justification of the sadistic attitudes to children brought up amid the extremely severe rules of Protestant ethics distorted by hypocritical adults. This ethics empowers the adults to pursue their perversely understood mission of the “moral improvement of the world.” However artistic and full of complex implications, it is a loud critical voice targeted at the foundation of all kinds of totalitarianism. The Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller refers to this matter in a way that is both theoretical and graphic. Miller equally underscores both the personal and the institutional dimension of the violent relationship between the child and the adult. She states: “Hitler wouldn’t have found so many supporters if the children had been brought up in a different way. The pedagogy of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries paved the way for genocide. Children were commonly maltreated in Germany at the time. This situation continues until today, but training rarely begins so early and is so systematic. These methods of rearing children had reached perfection two generations before Hitler rose to power. Goldhagen writes that some of the perpetrators were not subject to indoctrination. It wasn’t necessary because a person who is forced to idealize the humiliation suffered as a child believes in the redeeming value of corporal punishment throughout his or her life. I’m convinced that only people who suffer psychological and physical cruelty can become perpetrators. What’s more, parents punish their children without remembering that they themselves were punished in the same way. This is the essence of the compulsion to repeat one’s own fate.”²⁵

Vehemently critical of upbringing as a phenomenon that essentially consists in allowing adults to have unrestrained power over children, anti-pedagogy has remained a current in the humanities rather than a theory with practical implementation.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, childhood witnessed a number of reconceptualizations. The most significant ideas follow. Ellen Key proclaimed the twentieth century as that of the child, although contemporary societies did not succeed in fully implementing her concepts regarding empowering children to adopt individualistic attitudes. Another, and maybe even more topical reconsideration, is the perspective of John Dewey’s progressive (and constructivist) thought and the critical-emancipatory thought of Henry A. Giroux and Paulo Freire. These two perspectives positioned the child as a demiurge and contester—a being endowed with cognitive and moral autonomy that is practiced in the dialogue with social and cultural environments.²⁶ Again, this promising vision does not seem to be exemplified in any way in systemic social practices, but only somewhere on their margins or in spheres of resistance. Changing before our very eyes, the social and cultural environment of children immersed in digital technologies triggers new questions about childhood and compels us to search for answers in the new identities of children as digital natives (Marc Prensky) and in post-humanist philosophy.

To conclude, it can be stated that in contemporary times all the above enumerated discourses co-exist with varied intensities in the social consciousness, in the field of social practices and in living language. From the perspective of the links of the constructs of childhood and education with politics, Męczkowska-Christiansen characterizes the above-mentioned discourses that reveal the situation and the position of the child in relation to the adult in the context of political orders of varied types. What plays an essential role in the discourse of childhood as a pre-human state is the practice of turning childhood and education into the domain of politics; as a result, an emerging self is deprived of the power to decide about his or herself, a fact that consolidates a sense of being an incomplete human, mainly through the pedagogical practices of disciplining and punishing based on the logic of the pedagogy of obedience. In the concept of the child as a charming creature, Męczkowska-Christiansen discerns the process of excluding the child and upbringing from the public realm. From such a perspective, children are not considered to be actors in the theater of public life; they are deemed to be free from politics and from the duty of performing civic roles. What is more, a depoliticized upbringing is a product of alienation. The discourse of the political and ethical potentiality of childhood, which recognizes the child as a being who is capable of acting and thinking, entails the practices of democratic participation that manifest themselves in initiating actions, pursuing reflection, negotiating sense, and formulating critical judgments, or, as Hannah Arendt puts it, practices oriented toward the common good and memory that lays at the foundation of a community of experience;²⁷ these practices determine the political character of children and the political engagement of the education of children in the foundations of a democratic society.