Education and Constructions of Childhood

Writing for undergraduate and graduate students in education studies and related fields, as well as policy makers and practitioners, Blundell (education studies, London Metropolitan U., UK) considers how society has come to think about children, the attached meanings, and the childhoods children experience in educational settings, with an emphasis on the UK and its legislation. Contending that childhood is socially constructed, he explores how school has become a place where social tensions and anxieties about national economic competitiveness and underperformance impinge upon children's lives and suggests that understanding childhood might help explain why many children are not happy, secure, and confident. He traces the history of ideas related to the child and examines the way they have become translated into imperatives, practices, professional identities, and educational institutions that identify a normal childhood, and explores the historical construction of schooling as a response to industrialization and to regulate societies. He considers the combination of the ideas of the child created by an intellectual elite and childhoods constructed by schooling and how this process culminated in the attempt to construct a system of child-centered, progressive schooling in the 1960s and 1970s, but how this undermined the idea of the universal child. He discusses the link between ideas about childhood and moralization and human nature; the roles of theoretical notions and the influence of Christian doctrine in the construction of Western childhood institutions; how the progressive ideals of the intellectual and social elite served as philanthropic goals and self-interests; the contemporary connection between education, health, and social care; whether the requirements of schooling can be reconciled with universal ideals of childhood and the reality presented by real children in contemporary multicultural and globalized Western societies; and whether an emphasis on discourses of "childhood as futurity" burden children with expectation, so that education becomes the remedy for all social ills and childhood is constructed as a stage of redemption. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

David Blundell is Principal Lecturer in Education Studies at London Metropolitan University, UK.