Imaging childhood in European history and developmental psychology

Abstract

Since Philip Ariès's disputable classic, the “history of childhood” became a serious and fruitful field of interdisciplinary science. An abundance of evidence shows that since the Renaissance, childhood became an increasingly prolonged part of the lifespan: This process is usually indicated as “infantilization”. The history of pedagogy—but also of the related developmental psychology—can and should be understood from this cultural historical developmental perspective. It is to be feared that the modern child, mainly because of its unlimited access to the mass media, can no longer be enticed away from its own infantilized world. There is thus a huge pedagogical problem: Traditionally we allow children to grow up by putting them in a separate niche, a “Kindergarten”, but at the same time we now no longer have any control over children's unlimited access to the stream of adult information from the mass media. For a while there was hope that empirical developmental psychology would help us out of this impasse: The empirical description of development would offer footholds for the desired direction for upbringing and development. But careful analysis leads us to the conclusion that traditional developmental psychology, with a prototype in Piaget's developmental theory, holds up its own empirical mirror of the Western Rousseau–Piaget tradition. Classic developmental psychology offers a description of the “natural development”, something that is a cultural historical result of our Western imagination of childhood. The conclusion is as painful as it is enlightening: Our children will be and will remain necessarily and unavoidably the product of our imagination. No scientific feats will be able to change this.