Discourses of Childhood

Abstract

A number of ideas are taken for granted in education: there is a pre-analytic “international” understanding about aims and goals of schooling. The educational discourse is complemented by a parallel, rights-based understanding about childhood, of child labor and of child marriage. Often the Western way of understanding these concepts is clashing with local understanding. Here, we understand discourse not as an abstract phenomenon, but as situated practices that are dynamic, flexible, and changing. There is a dialectics of discourse, since the clash of various discursive practices results in adaptation and transformation. Discourse analysis can help understand and perhaps reformulate the discourse about schools: reinventing schools as protection, instead of being a “pre-packaged solution” to fight child labor or child marriage. A Western view of children as individuals with specific rights would not necessarily be appropriate in many contexts. Hence, we argue that instead of integrating local discourse into an international one, a third space could be generated, in which local discourse engage and interact with international discourse. Such third space could be more useful than trying to convince local communities about the righteousness of the international discourse. In such view childhood would be considered as continuous with adulthood, and the change from education to work not as an abrupt, age-determined shift, but as a gradual transition.