module 3 Flashcards
(23 cards)
existence of youth
youth culture wouldn’t exist if distinct stages like “adolescents” and “childhood” didn’t also exist
absence of childhood
- “infancy” → miniature adults
- during the middle ages however infancy lasted till roughly 7 years old bc it was the time language & communication was mastered
tasks based on individual development
- take on adult roles despite physical differences between “children” and “adults”
- tasks one is responsible for were based on an individual’s level of development, cognition and their individual capabilities
formal education
- reserved for clerics/priveleged aristocratic families
- wealthy paid for their child to be accepted into the institutionalized church
- only received by a tiny portion of the population
3 factors that created the concept of childhood as a distinct stage after the middle ages
- protestant reformation
- invention of the printing press
- philosophers
printing press
- 1400s/15th century
- created a change as to what was defined as “legitimate knowledge” began to change
- created the first form of mass media
- created idealization of the literate man
ideal man
- literate, could read, expose himself to all knowledge contained in books
- carry the knowledge into the world and act on it
literate woman
- was considered a threat in a highly patriarchal society
- did not want women to think and act in new ways or have access to all this knowledge
protestant reformation
- protestantism are thinkers who didn’t agree with everything to church was doing, thinking or saying
- exposed to new ideas and knowledge through reading while breaking off from Catholicism
- minister doesn’t have a special role but instead each person has direct pipeline to God; pray directly to God and receive direct answers
- learning/literacy is a crucial part of “saving your soul” so you go to the afterlife
john locke
- children are born as unformed adults; tabula rasa
- parental responsibility and social experiences contribute to the “blank slate” and social experiences
- argues the importance of school and responsibility to a formal education to shape unformed adults into competent, social and political adults
jean-jacque rousseau
- saw growing up or maturing as a process of becoming something other than what you start as when you’re born
- humankind is born into innocence and purity and the process of growing up is actually a process of corruption
- introduced the idea children need to protected to maintain their innocence and purity as long as possible and that this is done one through controlling their physical environments and protecting their intellectual environments
recognition of childhood
- the end of the 18th century - at least among the privileged, literate classes in Europe and European colonies
childhood requires
- separation from the adult world
- protection of the adult world
- dependence on the adult world
- delayed responsibility
separation from the adult world
children shouldn’t occupy the same space as adults
protection from the adult world
protection from ideas, forms of knowledge, experiences
dependence on the adult world
depend on adults to fulfill their needs and to shape the paths they end of taking in life
delayed responsibility
protection from corruption
who was entitled to childhood
“white children DESERVE a childhood; poor kids NEED it; racialized children are something else entirely”
social reformers
- believed all children were entitled to a childhood
- primarily middle-class women with a lot of time on their hands; used that time to make society a better place from their pov; which was still focussed on white children/people
race, ethnicity and colonialism as an effect of “childhood”
- racist discourse was pervasive at the time
- view some races as more “evolved” over others
- not subject to the same protections as white christian children, who were considered the most superior and evolved
school as “the most orderly of rescues”
- lower class parents cant teach their children appropriately so the state must do that through schools
- lower class people are immoral, simply by being “lower class”
childhood in ancient rome
- connections between the growing child and the idea of shame as a crucial step in the evolution of the idea of childhood
- “without a well-developed idea of shame, childhood cannot exist”
why did the concept of childhood largely disappear after the collapse of the Roman empire
literacy, education, shame and as a consequence of this childhood disappears
