SHCY Bulletin

Society for the History of Children and Youth

On the Role of Theory and Investigation in Critical Childhood Studies

Jim Block, DePaul University

As a theorist of childhood and particularly child development in history, I of course find it inconceivable to do without at least an implicit developmental framework – or at the minimum to be in search of one.  To indicate the extent of my bias at the outset, I focus on societies, prominently the U.S., and eras in which children and youth have taken a major role in social and cultural (and, inferentially, developmental) change.  And yet if I may (perhaps dubiously) offer a character reference on my behalf, I have gained new perspective from my talks over the years with some, including members of this panel, amidst the profusion of our disagreements, and the searching discussion before this roundtable has similarly complicated my thinking to the good.

As I study the United States, I witness how the adult world and younger cohorts working in tandem create ideals of human potential which then get over time reduced to ideologies and manufacturies of the normal, which as its mechanisms of compliance tighten and misshape growth get shattered and reworked.  In this process, the young integrate, appropriate and advance adult expectations and demands at the same time they continually (most of the time under the radar) resist and periodically erupt with their own developmental demands and expectations.  I now believe that as a nation begun in youthful rebellion and a young more advanced than the elders (think Bailyn and Paine’s Common Sense), generational struggle has formed the deepest cleavage in our national history [and my book on this will soon be out].

What does this say for the study of children and childhood?  I see a dynamic tension between the socially constructed and the individually unfolding.  What is their relation?  Let me draw on an (admittedly highly prejudicial) metaphor of the plant with which Rousseau begins Emile:  at once it can by devoted arts be pruned and diverted into nearly any shape, and yet if watered and allowed to grow, it will become something different from and beyond what any gardener had in mind – how could you – the adult – ever have that plant/child’s developmental sequence and final shape in mind at the beginning?

Yet, since the final form is a combination of the gardener’s ideal and the plant’s will toward its own shape, let me address those arguing either that there is no “plantness” or “nature” beyond the constructed or naturalists who believe the young have their own developmental compass from the outset.  Social construction does not seem to me incompatible with a view that children develop, nor that they are capable of resisting shaping regimens.  Explaining how the young come to understand, form attitudes about, disagree with parents and society over, act upon divergent views of be it race, social oppression, anything including the role of conflict and normality, has – must have -- a temporal trajectory. 

Social history can bring to light the actual experience and sequence as the young evolve in the adaptive process, including the real tensions embedded in its implementation and rationalization of adulthood and citizenship.  Instead of giving society a pass, it can reject the claim of most communities that its maturation process is conflict free (I have seen how the U.S. has made adolescent turmoil go away – several times), and expose how socializing institutions muzzle conflict over their social agendas, including the use of theories of child plasticity designed (Dewey is key here) to deny resistance.  Childhood thus becomes a compelling site to examine not only the stages in the social construction of the adult, but the tensions within a community’s notion of the normal before these tensions have been papered over, f.e., the movie The Long Walk Home.

Unearthing these developmental sequences need not point in this socially constructivist view to anything deeper than socially constituted development and conflict.  But once one has laid out how societies normalize attitudes and repress conflict, how they measure using their own objectified social indicators their very process integration and adaptation and calling it the child’s capacity for maturation – or abnormality if it fails – what does one have?  What is the constructivist basis for questioning that normal?  What lies beyond the society being studied besides other, equally relative, normals?  How would or should adult feudalism, or the feudalism of the young, including the No Child Left Unmaligned of current practice, be addressed?  Are all treatments the same?  Of what value is a scholar’s external critique?  So what?

While this work is important, isn’t there a limit to social constructivism?  Why is it that children in no society turn out to become giraffes?  And if they did, we would I hope condemn it as a violation of their humanness?  Aren’t there practices that risk losing the plantness of the plant and the humanness of the child?  Isn’t the cult of the normal, our wish for standardized adults, a giant cover for our violations of what lies beneath? – a child seeking to become quite itself, and resisting social compliance in part from the call of its being, however inchoate?

This critical historical view rejects the adult presumption that child construction is entirely its prerogative and project.  It exposes how the young are forced into reactivity and hiddenness, and labeled for resistance as developmentally inadequate or recalcitrant.  The danger of this view is that it tends to tar all social practice with misshaping the young, and gives insufficient attention to the way social practices can promote human flourishing by developing conditions to nurture developmental capacities and potentialities.

In the end, social history and critical child study have much to learn from each other about how the young balance their roles as social absorbers and social initiators.  Social history can help us differentiate practices by society, group and era and delineate their impacts.  Critical study may be able to discern patterns that limit the claim of social constructivism and reveal the broader potential the young have for developing competences, activism and identities.  Both vindicate Children and Youth Studies as a realm apart from history from the adult perspective, particularly when each is attentive to the realities and tensions underlying society’s claim of unconflicted adaptation.  This dialogue between what children do become and what they might become can help us understand the young as they struggle for space and place in a world they are told – errantly – is already fixed upon their arrival.

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