An interesting question came up today in our Child Learning and Development class - is childhood a social construct?
I'd like to read your thoughts.
I'd like to read your thoughts.
-
This was originally an extensive conversation with me in the bathroom. For me, most of them either end up as amusing footnotes in Oral Bath...
-
Tom Petty - Freefaller Elvis Presley - Bee-bap-loola The Steve Miller Band - Joker Aerosmith - Dude Looks Like A Lady Beatles - Yellow ...
-
(21st March, 2010. I stand corrected: Google does n't know everything - I) Think of the most random thing. Then add pepper, and l...
yes, like all life experiences/narratives. the narrative (if there is a single one) as we confidently tell it is always in retrospect, we don't have competent language childhood (for eg, "as a child I was..." etc; ideas always formed/recognized during adulhood. No one says such a thing when they are as a child.) Also a social construct in the larger sense of childhood being/not being a Particular Thing; 'children are x, y, z' is as much of a construct as 'sex should be x, y, z', or 'women are x,y, z'. but the more interesting question for me would be, yes, childhood is a social construct but so what? and? what are we doing with this knowledge?
ReplyDeletecompetent language DURING childhood, sorry.
ReplyDelete*no one says such things when they are children.
DeleteI think it also has to do with the kind of agency society gives to children. You see it in memoirs of horrendous events in history, in the way school curricula are structured, the middle, upper-middle class' anxiety about "unsupervised time" (this of course, doesn't count for children whose parents/caregivers are unrecognised workers).
ReplyDeleteThere was an interesting question raised during one of the colloquiums here (did I just spell that right?!) - where are the voices of children in childrens' literature?
I can only think that the use of this knowledge leads us to create better, more context-sensitive learning environments. For instance, textbooks. The centrality of textbooks in education might be an echo of Brahmanism but there's no doubt that as a mode, they are affordable to many parents and teachers across the country. Can we perhaps - armed with a better understanding of childhoods and how they are 'constructed' - introduce a more democratic mode of learning? Like for instance, children creating their own knowledges of history, geography, political science, science, maths, language?