Ethics in Light of Childhood

Abstract

Ethics in Light of Childhood By Wall, John Washington, DC : Georgetown University Press , 2010 ISBN 9781589016927 , 204 pp, £24.25 This book challenges the dominant paradigm that sees children as trainee adults. It suggests that throughout history the serious questions about what it means to be a human being have been considered from the perspective of the adult. Children have generally been the most marginalised of all groupings. Instead, Wall asks us to reverse our thinking and adopt an entirely new approach, one that places childhood at the centre of our consideration of moral and ethical issues. He cites some very impressive antecedents for this, including Plato, Calvin and Kant, all of whom at some time adopted a child centred critique of society. Wall proposes a new paradigm, which he calls ‘childism’. The author takes us on a stimulating journey through considerations of history, theory and practice, and frequently relies on the perceptions of children themselves to illustrate the points he wants to make. He does this through the device of recounting children’s stories of their own experience. For example, he quotes a child talking about the strict Chinese rules restricting family size, “But the babies didn’t do anything wrong. Why do they have to lose their first families? I don’t think those rules are fair to babies”. It is rare for an adult to put a moral and ethical case quite so succinctly. It is all too easy for adults to dismiss the thoughts and feelings of children, as being irrational and uninformed, but in my experience children’s behaviour frequently reveals deeply held moral belief systems that the adult world often struggles to live up to. For example, I once witnessed a toddler spend 5 minutes trying to get a teddy bear through the bars of a cot where another child was crying. A nurse had placed the child in the cot as a punishment. The toddler appeared to understand at some very fundamental level, not only how to help his friend, but that there was a moral imperative to do so. Readers of this book will find a refreshing and sometimes challenging sweep through themes including children’s rights, societal issues, love, religion, gender, moral growth and much more. There is a fascinating discussion of the significance of time, and the way in which narration transforms time into reality. I was especially struck by the phrase “narration is how time grows over time into meaning”. One of Wall’s basic premises is that children’s narratives are every bit as valid as those of adults, but that our current adult-centric way of assessing human worth not only dismisses the value of children’s narratives, but even denies children’s narrative capabilities. He expands on these ideas by exploring the role of play in developing the human sense of being. He defines play as “the gift in all persons from birth to death for opening themselves up to more expansive experiences of being and relations”. Play offers the potential of new possibilities. It is important to understand that humans play throughout their life, so children’s play should not be dismissed as an insignificant aspect of childhood; nor should we adopt an approach that says it is only adult play that is worthy of recognition. Rather, because of its universality, we should afford the same recognition to that aspect of children’s lives as we give to all other human behaviours. In Ethics in Light of Childhood, Wall invites the reader to reconsider some of the most fundamental ways of approaching the subject of ethics. His arguments will have appeal well beyond academic circles, as they echo so many of the child-centred principles taken for granted by those who work with children outside the formal education system.