Pedagogy, Culture & Society
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Remaking the boundaries between childhood and adulthood Lindsay Fitzclarence To cite this article: Lindsay Fitzclarence (2003) Remaking the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 11:1, 159-168, DOI: 10.1080/14681360300200166 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681360300200166
Published online: 20 Dec 2006.
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Date: 26 January 2017, At: 09:21
Pedagogy, Culture and Society, Volume 11, Number 1, 2003
REVIEW ESSAY
Remaking the Boundaries Between Childhood and Adulthood LINDSAY FITZCLARENCE Monash University, Churchill, Australia
Childhood and Society: growing up in an age of uncertainty NICK LEE, 2001 Buckingham: Open University Press. 172 pp., £16.99 (pb), ISBN 0335 20608 5 In April 2002 a group of cardinals from the Catholic Church in the USA were summoned, on short notice, to the Vatican to meet the Pope. The reason for this summons was a growing controversy about the Church’s failure to deal effectively with priests who had sexually abused children and minors. A communiqué delivered after the meeting stated: Children and young people have been abused by some priests in our country, and this abuse was sometimes not ended early enough, or decisively enough, due to the action or inaction by some bishops,’ said Bishop Wilton Gregory, head of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. (Cooperman, 2002)
This is not an issue exclusive to the USA. Elsewhere, in Australia, the Governor General and former Archdeacon of Brisbane, Dr Peter Hollingworth, and George Pell, the former Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, have both been embroiled in controversy by claims that they had failed to act effectively against paedophiles within their respective churches. These controversies, in the USA and Australia, conducted at the highest level of public life, signal an emerging debate about the dominant assumptions about appropriate child/adult relations. Nick Lee’s book Childhood and Society (2001) is a timely entry into the debates about such issues. The book is a contribution to a reformulated social science designed to investigate the ‘assumed characteristics of our current epoch’ (p. x). In introducing his argument,
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Lee asserts that, as we enter ‘an age of uncertainty’, there is an increasing need to redefine the traditional boundaries between childhood and adulthood. This article outlines the three parts of Lee’s analysis; ‘human beings and human becomings’, ‘ambiguities of childhood’ and ‘human becomings and social research’, followed by a cross reference of Lee’s arguments with associated literature. Lee begins his analysis with a brief history of some of the major policy developments that pertains to adult/child relationships. Here, he examines the United Nations policy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and then, 41 years later, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1999). The production of this second policy statement highlights a primary, ‘universal’, division in belief about differences between adults and children as humans. By implication, this suggests that adults are one category of human being and children constitute a different category. As a result, Lee poses the questions ‘Why was an extra special convention needed for children? If the first declaration covered all humans, did it not cover human children along with human adults? (p. 5). As such the two policies, read as one, reveal an assumption that children are somehow less than fully human. This matter thus provides a warrant for exploring the development of two contrasting belief systems about children and adults. Traditionally, adults have been understood to be complete and selfpossessed ‘beings’. This view has been formalised in the legal classifications of ‘adult’ as an age whereby an individual can, for example, vote in elections for public office. Children, on the other hand, have been understood as incomplete, irrational and dependent. As such, children are ‘becomings’ in the process of developing into complete fully formed, adult beings. According to Lee, this division has evolved progressively during the course of several centuries and has been institutionalised in law and custom. Lee is not alone in noting this distinction or alone in voicing concern about the way that caring and concern for children has become mixed with abuse. Legally sanctioned adults, as providers and carers, have too often given themselves excessive ‘entitlements’ Jenkins (1990) in controlling the minds and bodies of young people. For over two decades Alice Miller has been writing about the institutionalisation of abusive practices by virtue of the cultural, legal, political and economic licence given to adults vis à vis children (1986, 1990a,b, 1992). Miller thus stands on the same platform as Lee in trying to promote better understanding about the cultural logics shaping dominant forms of adult/child relationships. Lee notes that the division in categorising adults and children as different has been underwritten by the modern, industrial state, whereby children are investments in the future. That is child/adult relationships have been increasingly inscribed with the values and practices of ‘Fordism’ in which the assembly line became a metaphor for many ways
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of life and, as a result, brought business, government and individual aspirations into alignment around goals of long-term political stability and economic growth (p. 12). As such, the Fordist model of development suggested a narrow pathway through childhood into adulthood, and directly linked individuals with nation states concerned with order and regulation. Clearly, such a view implicates ‘modern’ education with its assembly line structures and practices, whereby students are regularly tested, compared, promoted and, finally, credentialed to enter the postschool world of work, community and domestic duties. Despite there being no direct reference as such, the reader can be forgiven for thinking that there is something distinctly Gramscian (1957, 1971) about the way Lee frames his analysis. The focus on Fordism and post-Fordism, coupled with the geo-political division of the industrially advanced ‘north’ and the less advanced ‘south’ (see later), provides a meta frame for the analysis. The institutionalisation of the Fordist model constitutes what Lee understands as a ‘dominant framework’ of the socialisation and development of children (p. 38). As such it is an ideology that contains theoretical legitimation and justification and operates as a ‘truth regime’ about childhood. Talcott Parsons, a sociologist, and Jean Piaget, a psychologist, are described by Lee as two theorists whose work provides key justification and legitimation for the dominant framework. As such, society, comprised of self-contained adults, is complete while the presocial world of children is fragmented, irrational and incomplete. At this point Lee turns to the recent work of James & Prout (1997) who, he asserts, offer a critique of the dominant framework. Their work suggests that as a result of this ideology, children are registered as ‘mute’ and invisible. Adults, on the other hand, become ‘authorities over them, capable of knowing better than them and speaking more fully on their behalf, than they are able to’ (p. 43). Of particular relevance for educators is the view, taken by James & Prout (1997) that this positioning is most potent when adults adopt the role of experts who represent the upholders of the ‘true’ insights about the nature of childhood. As such Lee introduces his critique of a range of major assumptions underpinning a number of professions including childcare and teaching. The counter position, according to Lee, is to recognise that there is not a single state of ‘being a child’, but instead a diversity of childhoods and that children are active and agential from the very start of life. Such a position requires that researchers take an alternative standpoint, one where: ‘They must choose to see children as human beings, active in social life, rather than as human becomings, passive recipients of socialisation’ (p. 47). The research strategies that are in keeping with such a view involve use of ethnography, macro-analysis, including generation as a key variable and a ‘standpoint’ approach designed to generate insights from the point of view of children.
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In section two, ‘ambiguities of childhood’, Lee turns his focus towards an examination of the actual worlds that children occupy. Here, he argues that adults as the fully formed ‘other’ of children set out to regulate and control children in two primary sites – homes and schools. Within these settings the dominant framework, as espoused by Piaget and Parsons, and like-minded theorists, is enacted and ‘policed’. Children who are deemed to be ‘out of place’, are an important issue in Lee’s analysis because they pose a threat to the stability and order of proper society as represented by adults. As such, for example, children in packs and gangs in public spaces are experienced as a threat to law and order. Lee believes that such anxiety is present all over the world, in the advanced nations of the north and the ‘developing’ nations of the south that are currently undergoing processes of modernisation (p. 58). Thus, Lee is arguing that within different cultural contexts there is a distinct over-arching logic framed within a push towards modernisation and globalisation. At the same time, within these different socio/political contexts the responses to children ‘out of place’ vary. At this point in the book, Lee offers two examples of different political responses where adults affect control and authority over children. The first example is taken from Brazil, representing a developing ‘southern’ nation-state. Here, the issue of ‘street children’ is used to dramatise the ambiguity of children who are not under direct adult and state control. In this case, the process of modernisation in the sprawling cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro has resulted in many situations where children have no choice other than to survive by living on the streets. Despite the fact that the Brazilian constitution espouses the importance of children in the process of becoming fully formed citizens, in 1993 police opened fire on a group of 40 children in a Rio de Janeiro street, killing eight of them (p. 62). Lee argues that these children, living in ambiguous, circumstances were categorised as a sub-human pack or horde (p. 62). As such, this group and all other similar groups living under the same conditions pose a threat to the idea of a competitive, orderly and efficient ‘modern industrial’ state. In the second example, Lee turns his analysis towards the advanced nations of the ‘north’ to demonstrate that similar themes exist there. Here, post-Fordist political and cultural logic deems as necessary high levels of ‘social capital’, or mixes of individual and community independence and interdependence. The negative side to this logic is that certain forms of community interaction are considered dangerous and counterproductive The example Lee uses to dramatise the ‘northern’ solution to such threats is from the United Kingdom in the form of a 1998 policy titled Bringing Britain Together: a national strategy for neighbourhood renewal (Social Inclusion Unit, 1998). This was a wide-ranging strategy designed to make sure that children arrived at school ready to learn. In tandem with
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Bringing Britain Together was the Crime and Disorder Act (Home Office, 1998) that contained three sections pertinent to the idea of controlling children who are ‘out of place’. Child Safety Orders authorised officials to make sure children ‘at risk’ of getting out of control receive appropriate care protection and support (p. 67). Parenting Orders are designed to facilitate parents’ capacities to keep children under strict control and finally local child curfews (1) ‘can impose a curfew on children under 10 who are on the streets between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.’ (p. 68). To this point, Lee has effectively argued that the developmental state has institutionalised, through policy making and resource allocation, a dominant framework designed to maintain control of children in the process of their becoming adult. The regulation of childhood has occurred mainly within institutions of family and school. This process has proceeded on the assumption that these two ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (Althusser, 1971) could be sealed off from the corrupting influences of the outside world. Lee argues that with the advent of mass culture via television and information communication technologies (ICTs) this is a false claim. Despite the protestations of conservative social commentators, such as Neil Postman, about the corrupting influences of television, the new media, in its various forms, has opened up the wider world to children, and activated them as key players in the new global marketplace of ideas, issues and commodities (Kenway & Bullen, 2001). Similarly in schools, the idea that ‘the teacher’ carries full moral authority as the voice of reason no longer holds. Here, Lee brings into question the idea of the traditional pedagogue who once stood as an allknowing, all-powerful, controlling figure. With the introduction of child-centred pedagogies, and ICTs the control dyad of teacher and formal, state sanctioned, curriculum has been destabilised. The relatively unstructured nature of information on the WWW has further ‘activated’ students as learners, and intensified the ambiguity of schools as sites of control of their hearts, minds and bodies. The final site of ambiguity that Lee describes is the courtroom. In the past, legal convention decreed that cases involving children were discussed, argued over and represented by adults. As a result, in the legal process, children rarely spoke for themselves or represented their own interests. The dominant framework, as represented by Parsons and Piaget, suggested that children did not have the intellectual or moral resources to speak independently about the social processes they participated in. In the courtroom, as in most families and classrooms, the dominant framework dictated the belief that children should be seen but not heard. With the growing number of child sexual abuse cases in courts: ‘We have seen how standard courtroom assumptions, expectations and practices place a burden of ambiguity on the child witness’ (p. 99).
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That is, children as witnesses had to provide the facts of an event and, under cross-examination, prove themselves as witnesses capable of providing credible evidence. Needless to say, most children have not been able to deal with the complexity of such a double agenda within the stressful circumstances of cross-examination. Now, through the use of videotaped recordings, children can submit evidence in their own words, and leave it to the judge and jury to make an independent judgment about their capacity to ‘offer a credible account of past events’ (p. 100). In the final section of the book Lee argues that the becoming/being distinction that has traditionally separated children and adults is inadequate. The counter position is one that proceeds on the understanding that all human life involves an endless and endlessly variable process of becoming (p. 104). That is, what is needed are different ways of thinking about the totality, complexity and ambiguity of human life. The theoretical support for this position comes from Derrida (‘all life is lived in extension’, p. 111) and Deleuze & Guattari (‘we do not see single incomplete natural order waiting to be finished by culture, we see many incomplete orderings that remain open to change’, p. 115). Taken together, these propositions suggest that in current times all human life is lived within complex social associations involving multiple meanings, practices and forms of interaction. As such, Lee focuses attention on a particular form of ‘agency’ and turns to the work of Latour and Law, and their ideas regarding Actor Network Theory. This view suggests that humans enact agency through the creation of networks of social association and meaning. In this account, agents are understood to be able to act against convention to bring change, because they are, in some way, ‘independent’ of convention (p. 129). Such a view of agency and change opens the way for a sketch of a new sociology of childhood. This overview and summary concludes the book. Within the view of childhood provided by the dominant framework, societies are comprised by a complete set of stable conventions. It is this perspective that opens the way for the dualist proposal of adults as complete beings and children as incomplete becomings. It follows logically that adults use set conventions to control and coordinate the world of children in order to establish and maintain social order. The counter view, emerging from the argument that Lee has developed, is that social life is lived in search of conventions, involving an ongoing process of creation of rules, values and norms. This form of convention building also suggests that the creation of an ethics of childhood is dynamic. As noted previously, one manifestation of the development of new forms of ethics is the search for means to give children voice. The direct implication for research on this matter is a form of ethnography that enables children to speak on their own terms.
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Interpretation and Issues Nick Lee has written a book that is bound to be unpopular with many conservative bureaucrats and policy makers. His critique challenges the very assumptions of order and control that a great deal of contemporary management and administration relies on. On the other hand, in my opinion, Lee has a written a timely book that takes up themes that others have been working on for a long time. For example, there is a close relationship between the line of analysis that Lee presents and the metacritique provided by Alice Miller in her accounts of poisonous pedagogies. Similarly, Lee appears to follow on from a line of inquiry sketched out by Berger et al (1973) in their inquiry into the emergence of a new form of social consciousness and identity based on the flexible notion of dignity as distinct from an older concept of honor. As if to forecast the work of contemporary theorists such as Bauman and Giddens, Berger et al reflected on the emergence of a form of identity that had been released from the constraints of many traditional institutional roles, including the social advances made by, among other things, the ‘discovery’ of the rights of the child. For this reason, I chose to commence this essay by tabling some issues about child abuse. If for no other reason this book should be read in order to gain insight into some of the possible underlying factors associated with child abuse that is now being made public. I do, however, have a complaint about Lee’s overall analysis. As readers we are provided with an historical account of the limits and latent contradictions of the ‘dominant framework’. On this matter Lee observes that: The early pattern of investment in children was primarily a matter of efficient use of human resources. The power this gives to states, and to adults, operating from reasons of the state, could be used for or against children’s interests. The being/becoming distinction, and the happy fiction of the standard adult ... then, together, open the possibility of the abuse of children by giving adults power over them. It also closes off children’s opportunities to protest against such abuses on their own behalf by casting doubt on their ability to know anything better than an adult. Silent dependency is a trap. (p. 90)
Lee seems to place inordinate faith in new media to provide the forums for children and young people to find a voice. This seems to me to underestimate the power of the current backlash against the freeing up of traditional institutions. Policies are now being developed to drive women back into the private domain, to keep children/young people off the streets and out of employment, and to silence them in schools. The rate at which school-aged children/young people in countries such as Australia, are being prescribed drugs such as Ritalin, to keep them 165
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subdued and passive is a scandal. New globalised curricula are being designed to sift, sort and control students as never before. In other words, social power is being consolidated and used in new ways. Teachers and students are on the receiving end of these power shifts. On many of these issues, Lee remains either ignorant or silent. On current evidence, adults as bearers of the standards of traditional society are simply not going to move easily or quietly in to a power sharing arrangement with children and young people. Nor do I think that ideas about open dialogue are the answer. The existing power differentials will get in the way of effective change. As such a new approach is needed, one that commences with a recognition of the way power is inscribed within everyday practices. In this sense, power is both enabling and constraining. Only when we can more clearly understand the processes of change that produces the uncertainty and possibility that Lee mobilises in his argument, will we be able to attain the sort of equality for children that is promoted in this book. The age of post-Fordism does not mean that these are times that are power free. Instead we need to recognise a historical shift, whereby the institutions designed by the modern nation state that were used to shape children for an industrial order, are now overlaid by more powerful and abstracted forms of social interaction. The focus of attention given to the events of 11 September 2001 and, more recently, the World Cup of Soccer is evidence of such developments. As a result, power and authority has not been dispersed; instead, it has been concentrated and made more indirect. For this reason, educators, acting as genuine mediators of knowledge, rather than transmitters of information, have an increasingly important role in aiding children and students to better understand the world they are growing up in (White, 1994). I cannot finish on a negative note. I have learned a great deal from Nick Lee’s book and will use it to guide my teaching. I recommend others to do the same. However, there is a need in Lee’s analysis for consideration of the content of new forms of pedagogic relationship that start from the premise that authority remains with those who have lived longer and attained greater understanding. The challenge is to find ways of enacting this form of authority that are not abusive. Lee’s book brings us to such a conclusion. On this matter, I turn to the work of family therapists who have been busy developing alternative strategies for members of families to use in order to develop more stable, sharing, supportive and life enhancing relationships. For the ideals that Lee espouses to be effective, schools and similar institutions need to be ordered as cultural communities in which different sub-cultures can be acknowledged, and forums and ceremonies created, where different issues and ideas will be listened to and taken seriously. This is an idea taken from the work of narrative therapists who are acutely aware of the way that traditional power differentials can get in the
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way of effective change. Here, Michael White (1995) invokes the notion of partnership accountability and claims that: ... for children and teachers to share their experiences and knowledges with each other in forums of this sort could have a profound influence on student/teacher relations and on processes and structures of education. (p. 64)
Nick Lee’s achievement in writing this book is that he brings us to an awareness of the need for such outcomes as described by White. Correspondence Lindsay Fitzclarence, Department of Education, Monash University, Gippsland Campus, Churchill, Victoria 3842, Australia (
[email protected]). Note [1] As this review was being completed the press in Australia carried news of a Queensland politician’s plans for a process of tagging juvenile offenders with electronic anklets designed to stop them making a nuisance of themselves in public places. The policy proposal mirrors ‘a scheme in Britain’ (The Age [Melbourne], 2 July 2002, p. 4).
References Althusser, L. (1971) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in B. Brewster (trans.) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Berger, P., Berger, B. & Kellner, H. (1973) The Homeless Mind. New York: Random House. Cooperman, A. (2002) US Cardinals Vow to Act on Sex Abuse. Available at: www.theage.com.au. Gramsci, A. (1957) The Modern Prince & other writings. New York: International Publishers. Gramsci, A. (1971) Americanism and Fordism, in Q. Hoare & G. Howell Smith (Eds) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Home Office (1998) The Crime and Disorder Act. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Jenkins, A. (1990) Invitations to Responsibility: the therapeutic engagement of men who are violent and abusive. Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications. James, A. & Prout, A. (Eds) (1997) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood, 2nd edn. London: Falmer.
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Lindsay Fitzclarence Kenway, J. & Bullen, E. (2001) Consuming Children. Buckingham: Open University Press. Lee, N. (2001) Childhood and Society. Buckingham: Open University Press. Miller, A. (1981) The Drama of Being a Child. New York: Basic Books. Miller, A. (1986) Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: society’s betrayal of the child. New York: Meridian. Miller, A. (1990a) Banished Knowledge: facing childhood injuries. London: Virago Press. Miller, A. (1990b) For Your Own Good: hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence. New York: Noonday Press. Miller, A. (1992) Breaking down the Wall of Silence: to join the waiting child. London: Virago Press. Social Exclusion Unit (1998) Bringing Britain Together: a national strategy for neighbourhood renewal. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. White, D. (1994) Curriculum Reform: the big picture, in Schooling What Future? Balancing the Education Agenda. Geelong: Deakin Centre for Education and Change. White, M. (1995) Schools as Communities of Acknowledgement, Dulwich Centre Newsletter, Nos 2 & 3, pp. 51-66.
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