Читать книгу Decolonizing Childhoods - Liebel Manfred - Страница 9

2

Colonialism and the colonization of childhoods

It is said that the Negro loves to jabber; in my own case, when I think of the word jabber I see a gay group of children calling and shouting for the sake of calling and shouting – children in the midst of play, to the degree to which play can be considered an initiation into life. The Negro loves to jabber, and from this theory, it is not a long road that leads to a new proposition: The Negro is just a child. The psychoanalysts have a fine start here, and the term orality is soon heard. (Frantz Fanon. Black Skin. White Masks, [1952]1986: 15–16)

Although generalizations are of course dangerous, colonialism and colonialization basically mean organization, arrangement. The two words derive from the Latin word colĕre, meaning to cultivate or to design. Indeed, the historical colonial experience does not and obviously cannot reflect the peaceful connotations of these words. But it can be admitted that the colonists (those settling a region), as well as the colonialists (those exploiting a territory by dominating a local majority) have all tended to organize and transform non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs. (V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, 1988: 1)

Introduction

In order to develop a concept of childhoods in postcolonial and decolonizing contexts, it is necessary to understand the connections between colonialization and childhood.

Childhood is understood here equally as a form of being a child and a discourse about this form of being (Alderson, 2013). Both dimensions should not be confused, but also should not be separated. The history of childhood is closely intertwined with changes in the modes of production and reproduction of societies, in the modern European era particularly with the development of the capitalist mode of production and the rise of the bourgeoisie to the ruling class. They have led to a spatial separation of the production and reproduction sphere and the localization of women and children in the small family, which is organized as a private space. In this context, new normative conceptions of a childhood have emerged, which were conceived beyond the production sphere as a ‘pedagogical province’ (Goethe), ‘family childhood’ and finally also as ‘school childhood’ (see Hendricks, 2011). To this extent, the history of childhood is always a history of the ideas and conceptions of childhood. They gain a life of their own and influence the way in which children are treated. They also influence how children perceive themselves, and what opportunities are available to them and are used by them. Here I now argue that childhood, as well as the ideas and conceptions of childhood that have been developed in Europe since the late Middle Age, are closely linked to the colonialization of other continents in many ways.

The concept of childhood, separated from adult life, ‘liberated’ of productive tasks but also directed to the margin of society, arose almost simultaneously with the ‘discovery’ and colonialization of the world outside of Europe. The subjugation and exploitation of the colonies, first in America, then in Africa and Asia, formed their material prerequisites by creating a class living in material prosperity in the ‘mother countries’, which could privatize their children and place them in a reserve of rearing and care. On the other hand, the conquest of the colonies constituted the model for the subjugation and ‘education’ of the domestic children, whether of the ruling classes, or the subaltern classes, so that we can rightly speak of a colonization of childhood or the modern childhood as a kind of colony. This perspective also served as a model for early childhood science, which was aimed at the control and perfection of childhood. Conversely, the construction of childhood as an immature pre-stage of adulthood constituted the matrix for the degradation of people of any age in the colonies as immature beings, which were still to be developed and civilized, as expressed in Hegel’s famous dictum of Africa as a ‘land of childhood’ (Hegel [1837]2001). Looking at the postcolonial constellation, questions arise around how childhood research can learn from history, how to account for its own entanglement, and how to use critical postcolonial thoughts for the understanding and analysis of today’s childhoods.

A few words on the use of the concepts of colonialism, colonialization and colonization, which are here addressed in various contexts and meanings. Under colonialism I follow Osterhammel’s (2005: 16–17) understanding. According to him, colonialism is:

… a relationship of domination between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority and a minority of foreign invaders. The fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonized people are made and implemented by the colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that are often defined in distant metropolis. Rejecting cultural compromises with the colonized population, the colonizers are convinced of their own superiority and of their ordained mandate to rule.

In encyclopaedias or dictionaries, the concepts of colonialization and colonization are mostly understood synonymously, but in two different directions: a) in the sense of the exploration of a natural space not previously used for human purposes; b) in the sense of subjugating a territory, including the population living there, as a colony. The former is identified with the extension of human settlements to virgin forests, deserts, moors, districts, and similar difficult-to-use natural areas within a national territory (sometimes referred to as ‘internal colonization’). In contrast, the second sense is identified with the establishment of colonies outside an existing territory (‘external colonization’) and corresponds to the above-mentioned understanding of colonialism. One problem with this distinction is that in reality it is often not clear (where there are still uninhabited areas in the sense of Terra Nullius) and the states themselves can extend their borders, or according to their own (military and economic) power claim spheres of influence and ownership beyond their national borders. I will only use the concepts of colonialization and colonization here in the second meaning. However, I propose an extension by referring the term not only to spaces and areas but also to living persons and their inducement. In the first case, I prefer the concept of colonialization; in the second case, that of colonization. This corresponds to a proposal by Maria do Mar Castro Varela (2015: 23), who distinguishes the terms de-colonialization and decolonization as follows:

If de-colonialization signifies the formal independence of a former colonized country, the concept of decolonization aims at the ongoing process of liberation from a rule that determines thought and action.

In the first part of this chapter, I shall discuss the mental connections between the emergence of the European-bourgeois childhood pattern and the colonialization of foreign continents. I will then trace the dialectic of education or literacy and power in the colonial and postcolonial relations. In the second part, I will trace how, in the 1960s and 1970s, the discourse on the ‘colonization of childhood’ arose and finally was linked with postcolonial theories. Finally, I will shed light on some ambivalences of European-bourgeois childhood construction with regard to colonialization and decolonization.

Colonialization as a childhood project

An essential feature of the modern European concept of childhood is the idea of imagining the child as imperfect and in a developing stage before adulthood. This not only justifies the need for strict control and education of children, but also justifies the subjugation of the people in the European colonies. According to the literary scholar Joe-Ann Wallace, the ‘idea of “the child”’ was a necessary precondition of imperialism – ‘that is, that the West had to invent for itself “the child” before it could think a specifically colonialist imperialism’ (Wallace, 1994: 176). This connection, however, should not be understood as a one-sided causality, but as a reciprocal relationship, which has intensified over the centuries. As early as in the ‘discovery’ and conquest of the ‘new’ continent called America, since the end of the 15th century, when the new concept of childhood was still emerging in Europe, the child metaphor was used to describe the ‘primitive peoples’ who were perceived as ‘wild’ and ‘uncivilized’ (see Chapter 8). We can therefore assume that the ideas and mentalities that shape the conquest and the new experiences have also influenced the development of the new childhood concept.

Bill Ashcroft’s On Postcolonial Futures (2001) is one of the few contributions of postcolonial theory that has drawn attention to these connections. According to Ashcroft (2001: 37), ‘it was the cross-fertilization between the concepts of childhood and primitivism that enabled these terms to emerge as mutually important concepts in imperial discourse’. The Indian psychologist and social theorist Ashis Nandy (1983; 1987) had already previously pointed out that the new concept of childhood, which had emerged in Europe in the 17th century, was associated with the notions of primitivism. The idea of social progress had been transferred to the field of cultural differences in the colonies. Thus, for example, colonized India was located in the infancy of civilizational progress.

Ashcroft also points to the important fact that, at the time when the child emerged as a philosophical concept, ‘race’ as a category of physical and biological distinction was produced. ‘Whereas “race” could not exist without racism, that is, the need to establish a hierarchy of difference, the idea of the child dilutes the hostility inherent in that taxonomy and offers a “natural” justification for imperial dominance over subject peoples’ (Ashcroft, 2001: 37). The connection of the child with the savage goes along with the general assumption that the ‘races’ represent different stages of development in the 19th century. Thus, for example, the French Orientalist Ernest Renan, in his book The Future of Science, first published in 1848, argued that the conditions of humanity and human intelligence must be studied in the earliest stages of development. The researcher had to combine the experimental investigation of the child and the exercise of his reason with the experimental investigation of the ‘savages’ and therefore to deal intensively with travel reports from the newly discovered areas on earth. To him this was urgent, because he expected that the savages would quickly disappear under the influence of their civilization (Renan, 1891: 150).

The moral conflict that results from colonial conquest and occupation for the ‘enlightened’ Europe is subdued by its naturalization as a parent–child relationship, equated with the contradictory impulses of parents between exploitation and care. The child, at once both other and same, according to Ashcroft (2001: 36–7), ‘holds in balance the contradictory tendencies of imperial rhetoric: authority is held in balance with nurture; domination with enlightenment; debasement with idealization; negation with affirmation; exploitation with education; filiation with affiliation. This ability to absorb contradiction gives the binary parent child an inordinately hegemonic potency.’

The interrelations between the new concept of childhood and the colonization of foreigners and continents were already applied in the ideas of the liberal English philosopher John Locke, and the French enlightenment protagonist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who both influenced childhood history, albeit in various ways. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1690, Locke conceived the child as a ‘tabula rasa’ or blank page (Locke, [1690]1995). Thus, he gave parents and school masters great responsibility for what is written on this blank page. At the same time, the concept was of great importance to the imperial enterprise, as the idea of an empty space was an important prerequisite for the colonization understood as civilization. While Locke imagined the newborn child as an empty space which had to be filled, Rousseau, just 100 years later, in his novel-essay Emile, or on education ([1762]1979), conceived the child as ‘pure nature’ which represents a worth as such and is ultimately digested by civilization. Following Rousseau, the parallel to colonization consists in the idea of the ‘good savage’. According to Ashcroft (2001: 41),

Locke’s metaphor of the child as a blank page, an unwritten book, makes the explicit connection between adulthood and print, for civilization and maturity are printed on the tablet of the child’s mind. For him the child is an unformed person who, through literacy, education, reason, self-control and shame, may be made into a civilized adult. For Rousseau, the unformed child possesses capacities for candour, understanding, curiosity and spontaneity which must be preserved or rediscovered. In the tension between these two views we find encapsulated the inherent contradiction on imperial representations of the colonial subject.

Both perspectives justify the paternalistic actions of the colonial enterprise, since the innocence of nature, like the blank page of the unformed child, is equivalent to absence and exclusion. According to Uday Singh Mehta (1999: 48), exclusionary strategies involve ‘civilizational infantilism’. Neither the child nor the colonial subject has access to meaning outside the processes of colonization and education.

The idea of literacy gained a similar function in the sense of acquiring the ability to read and write, even if it was imposed on an already alphabetized society.¹ It is based on the distinction between civilized and barbarian peoples and nations, and constitutes a hierarchy among them of more or less developed beings. Thus, the discrepancy between childhood and adulthood, caused by the emergence of the need to learn reading and writing, in the late Middle Ages, can be seen in the direct context of the discrepancy between the imperial centre and the unintelligible people in the colonies.

Just as ‘childhood’ began in European culture with the task of learning how to read, so education and literacy become crucial in the imperial expansion of Europe, establishing ideological supremacy, inculcating the values of the colonizer, and separating the ‘adult’ colonizing races from the ‘childish’ colonized (Ashcroft, 2001: 39).

In this sense, colonialism has always been ‘educational colonialism’ (Osterhammel, 2005: 110), which pretended to ‘free’ the colonized from tyranny and spiritual darkness. The equality of the colonized with children provided an opportunity to dismiss this claim even as a moral duty and ‘the white man’s burden’ (Kipling, 1899). ‘Colonial rule was glorified as a gift and act of grace of civilization, and was respected as humanitarian intervention’ (Osterhammel, 2005: 110). To this end, particularly the schools, which were either run by missions or the state, were used. They have always aimed to convey a certain kind of thought and morality that goes beyond formal reading and writing, a kind of ‘moral technology’ (Wells, 2009: 111), ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak, 1988; Cannella and Viruru, 2004; de Sousa Santos, 2008) or ‘colonization of consciousness’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2008).

One of the most influential consequences of childhood and colonial conquest was the concept of development that emerged in the late 19th century and constituted non-European countries as permanently backward. The meanings of this term result from ‘the link between primitivism and infantility and the need for “maturation” and “growth” in both’ (Ashcroft, 2001: 38). The equilibrium of childhood and primitiveness was still present in the second half of the 20th century and was regarded as scientifically serious, as can be seen from a chapter on the origin of language in a linguistic textbook published in several editions since 1964:

In so many languages, the nursery words for mother and father are mama or dada or dada or baba or something similar; there is no magic inner connection between the idea of parenthood and words of this form: these just happen to be the first articulated sounds that the child makes. … Such words may also have been the first utterances of primitive man. … The languages of primitive peoples, and the history of languages in literate times, may throw some light on the origin of language by suggesting what elements in it are the most archaic (Barber, 1964: 25).

The question of literacy and education has played a central role in the history of colonialism and still plays it today in the postcolonial constellation. Colonialism used the reference to the lack of education and the idea of childhood as a primitive stage of development in order ‘to confirm a binarism between colonizer and colonized; a relationship which induced compliance to the cultural dominance of Europe. Colonizer and colonized were separated by literacy and education’ (Ashcroft, 2001: 52). This separation was confirmed by geographic distances, sometimes also by the distinction of nationalities. The question now arises whether these so far clearly visible antitheses exist in the postcolonial present, which is characterized by extensive globalization.

On the dialectic of education and power

In the debate about colonial and postcolonial power relations, it is justified to refer to educational processes. One of the most important insights of postcolonial theory is to understand the relations between the colonizers and the colonized as dialectical (Said, 1978; Bhabha, 1994). While the colonizers themselves are influenced by the colonial relationship, the colonized people can be seen not only as uninvolved and innocent spectators. The colonized are not ‘“cultural dupes”, incapable of interpreting, accommodating, and resisting dominant discourses’ (Rizvi, 2007: 261). The same is true of current global relations, which necessarily are accompanied by negotiations on cultural messages, even when they take place in socio-geographic areas characterized by asymmetric power relations. The relationships between the global and local are always complex and ambiguous, and require an accurate ethnographical case-specific analysis.

Ashcroft believes that today ‘the gap between colonizing parent and colonized child has been masked by globalization and the indiscriminate, transnational character of neo-colonialism’ (Ashcroft 2001: 53). The neo-colonial subject can no longer be fixed by geographical distance and lack of literacy and education. Instead of the colonial subject being placed geographically, according to Ashcroft, the ‘subject of global capitalism’ (Ashcroft 2001: 53) appears as fluid. To me, this assessment seems to be overstated and inaccurate. The impression aroused by Ashcroft – the separation of colonizers and colonized would be invalidated by globalization, or would be at least no longer visible and perceptible – affects only one of its aspects, namely the unlimited movement of goods and capital. For the people themselves geographic location and politically defined national boundaries remain powerful barriers to one’s own physical space of movement; moreover, the barriers become even higher. Even the seeming limitlessness of new communication media remains trapped in private ownership, which make it possible to cut off communications and make someone disappear from the ‘net’ or remain in it against their own will.

Nevertheless, Ashcroft’s consideration that the colonial conquest and domination, legitimized by the childhood metaphor, implies ambivalences and contradictions. The literacy introduced to uphold the up and down is no longer limited to reading and writing, but includes versatile forms of communication that are no longer bound to scriptures. Among the researchers dealing with literacy, especially in so-called development programmes, not only is the limitation of the view on the ability to read and write criticized, but there is also awareness that each form of communication must be considered in the context of the power relations contained therein. They point out that communication and education processes can never be understood merely as technical processes but always include a certain kind of knowledge while excluding other kinds of knowledge. According to Street (2001: 7), ‘in developing contexts the issue of literacy is often represented as simply a technical one: that people need to be taught how to decode letters and they can do what they like with their newly acquired literacy after that’. This approach is criticized by Street, who argues that it ignores or conceals the fact that literacy and education can never be neutral or universal. In practice, it goes beyond imposing and over-contributing Western concepts of education to other cultures. Instead, he favours a model that offers a more culture-sensible view of educational practice and recognizes that it is different depending on the context. The model is characterized by the fact that it considers educational processes as a ‘social practice’, which is

… always embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles. It is about knowledge: the ways in which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity, being. Literacy in this sense is always contested, both in meaning and its practices, hence particular versions of it are always ‘ideological’, they are always rooted in a particular world-view and a desire for that view of literacy to dominate and to marginalize others. (Street, 2001: 7–8)

Street’s model claims not only cultural differences, but also ‘the power dimension of these reading and writing processes’ (Street, 2001: 9). When the effect is examined, it should be noted that this is always ‘part of a power relationship’ (Street, 2001: 9).

Another author (Rogers, 2001) notes that literacy in the context of the development of societies can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, education is regarded as a causal condition or a key element for any kind of development (‘literacy-leads-to-development equation’), which is typical of educational programmes of the World Bank. On the other hand, education can be seen as a way to promote social transformation or social change, for example in the sense of liberation, for which the so-called Educación Popular may serve as an example (see Freire, [1968]2000). In this respect, dominant and non-dominant educational processes should be distinguished. In the interrelations between the various educational contexts, the question arises which is the upper hand, an education that humiliates human beings to ‘human capital’ and alienates them from their lives, or a formation aimed at the elimination of inequality and oppression which provides tools to people to resist any form of degradation. This also raises questions about how education is institutionalized and who ultimately determines it.

The same is true for the image of the child, which in the colonial relationship was used to legitimize paternalism and the denial of independence. Ashcroft sees the ‘allegory of the child’ as a ‘counter-discourse’ of the age because the child is so strongly ‘constructed as the ambivalent trope of the colonized’ (Ashcroft, 2001: 53): ‘The child, invented by imperialism to represent the colonized subject amenable to education and improvement, becomes the allegorical subject of a different trajectory, a site of difference and anti-colonial possibility’ (Ashcroft, 2001: 53).

As tempting and promising as this sounds, it must be asked whether a metaphorical view of the child is overstrained. Since being a child always means having a future, the image of the child can become a personification of a better future and gain a mobilizing meaning. This is expressed, for example, in the speech of the ‘young nations’ emancipated from the colonial rule. In this speech there is still an ambivalence inherited from colonialism, which varies between new beginnings and immaturity. Furthermore, the question arises whether the hopeful metaphorical speech of the child also corresponds to real children who do not find themselves in the colonial childhood picture, but represent a new kind of childhood, which also holds its mirror up to postcolonial societies and urges the breaking up the colonial eggshells.²

A look at the history of decolonization shows that young people, which we would call children today, have always played a driving role in liberation movements. This can be observed, for instance, from the anticolonial liberation struggles in Latin America at the beginning of the 19th century to the Intifadas in Palestine, or the struggle against apartheid in South Africa at the end of the 20th century. Even today, in the Southern world regions young people are the main players of social movements that push to continue the process of decolonization. They are facing missing life perspectives against corrupt power elites stuck to their chairs, yet also take their lives in their own hands on the path of collective self-help and by producing solidarity forms of subsistence.

In contrast to earlier child and youth movements, these movements are characterized by the fact that they do not turn away from society and are set up in a deprived world of children and adolescents, and they understand themselves as a decisive part of society, which can be transformed in their interest. They represent configurations of childhood (and youth) that go beyond the European-bourgeois pattern of a ‘not yet’ life phase, and engage in equal participation in all areas and questions relevant to them (see Casas, 1998). For these children and young people, education means more than preparing for predefined functions. They access and make use of the information (including the digital media) accessible to them, as well as the educational elements that are derived from their daily experiences (to which the school belongs today) and mix in their own responses to the problems they face.

Colonization of childhoods

The instrumentalization of the bourgeois concept of childhood for the justification of colonial conquest finds a remarkable correspondence in the consideration of childhood as a colony or as colonized object. Since the 1960s, the concept of colonialization or colonization in a broader sense has referred not only to geographic areas outside Europe and their populations, but also to the internal structure of societies and their people. In the early 1980s, for example, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas introduced the concept of the ‘internal colonialization’ of the lifeworld (Habermas, [1981]1985: 356). He assumed that, in the late phase of capitalism, the central subsystems economy and the state interpenetrate the ‘lifeworld’, understood as the independent existence of the members of a society, as ‘colonial masters coming into a tribal society’ (Habermas, [1981]1985: 355) and seize this life.³ Thus, he saw the socializing and identity-building functions of the lifeworld in danger. The philosopher Friedrich Tomberg (2003: 315) summarizes the reflections of Habermas as following:

The term ‘colonization’ is intended to make it clear that society, as a whole is not a system to which the lifeworld belongs as a sub-area, so that individuals who want to live in this society would be compelled to adapt themselves to the system. … The lifeworld should rather be viewed as an area, which is not under the rule of the system. In its core area the system is not to have anything to look for. However, if it prevails there, the existing society does not realize itself, but there is certainly an occupation by strangers, as if economically leading states, as in the past centuries, subdue the population of foreign countries by setting up colonies.

The sociologist Stefan Sacchi (1994: 327) interprets the ‘social pathology’ (Habermas) expressed in the category of colonization of the lifeworld in terms of the political economy:

Colonization is based on the economic and political subsystem, and is carried out through its specific subsystem media ‘money’ and ‘power’. From the perspective of the lifeworld, the colonization in the case of the economic subsystem is expressed in a subterfuge of ever more social areas under market laws, in the replacement of communicative relations by commodity relations. The interventions of the political system, on the other hand, show themselves above all in a legalization of social relations, as well as their substitution by means of bureaucratically organized, standardized actions.

Here is not the place to discuss the theoretical foundations and basic assumptions of Habermas’ time diagnosis and the conclusions drawn from them.⁴ It is only a matter of making it clear that in a certain historical period the concept of colonialization or colonization has been extended and applied to new social phenomena. This is also true of the feminist debate on women as a ‘last colony’, which came up a little later. In a publication that was first published in 1983 and re-published five years later, Claudia von Werlhof, Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen (1988) identified the women and the colonized people of the ‘Third World’ as the last resource to be exploited. They were concerned,

… to demonstrate that the subordination and exploitation of women is the foundation and the keystone of all further exploitation conditions, and that the colonization of the world, the plundering of nature, territories and people, as above all capitalism needs as a prerequisite, happens according to this model (von Werlhof et al, 1988: IX).

Similar thoughts were already formulated by the US-American feminist Shulamith Firestone in the early 1970s and transferred from women to children (Firestone, 1970). In this text, the author points to a parallel between the ‘myth of childhood’ and the ‘myth of femininity’ (Firestone, 1970: 88–9):

Both women and children were considered asexual and ‘purer’ than man. Their inferior status was ill-concealed under an elaborate ‘respect’. One didn’t discuss serious matters nor did one curse in front of women and children; one didn’t openly degrade them, one did it behind their backs. … Both were set apart by fancy, and non-functional clothing and were given special tasks (housework and homework respectively); both were considered mentally deficient (“What can one expect from a woman?” – “He’s too little to understand.”). The pedestal of adoration on which both were set made it hard for them to breathe. Every interaction with the adult world became a tap dance for children. They learned how to use their childhood to get what they wanted indirectly (“He’s throwing another tantrum!”), just as women learned how to use their femininity (“There she goes, crying again!”). All excursions into the adult world became terrifying survival expeditions. The difference between the natural behavior of children in their peer group as opposed to their stilted and/or coy behavior with adults bears this out – just as women act differently among themselves than when they are around men. In each case a physical difference had been enlarged culturally with the help of special dress, education, manners, and activity until this cultural reinforcement itself began to appear ‘natural’, even instinctive, an exaggeration process that enables easy stereotyping: The individual eventually appears to be a different kind of human animal with its own peculiar set of laws and behavior (“I’ll never understand women!” … “You don’t know a thing about child psychology!”).

Firestone speaks in the past in order to underline the historical genesis of the ‘class oppression of women and children’ (Firestone, 1970: 89). The text leaves no doubt that she was convinced that it applied to the time in which she wrote it (the readers may judge for themselves whether it has changed significantly to this day).

Firestone’s interpretations are unmistakably influenced by the writings of Philippe Ariès on the history of childhood, first published in French and English in the early 1960s (Ariès, 1960, 1962). It would, however, be too easy to trace the work of Firestone and other childhood studies that had arisen during these years back only to the influence of a book. It is to be assumed that their works were also brought about by the new social movements, which had been taking place in the US and other parts of the world since the 1960s. Above all, the movement of civil rights against the racist oppression of the African American population and the movement towards the oppression of other minorities, as well as the movement against the Vietnam War and the closely linked youth movements, which were directed against authoritarian exhortation and structures in schools, universities and other social spheres. Another of the writings, which demanded equal rights for children, expressly speaks of these as the ‘last minority’, whose emancipation is still outstanding (Farson, 1974).

Some of the writings written during this period understand the suppression of the children as a form of colonization and relate it to colonialism. In an essay first published in French in 1971, Swiss anthropologist and psychoanalyst Gérard Mendel claimed (Mendel, 1971: 7):

All forms of human exploitation, whether religious or economic in nature – exploitation of colonial peoples, of women, of children – have taken advantage of the phenomenon rooted in the dependent, biological and psychological relationship of infant child to adult. Hence, the destruction of our society, which occurs before our eyes, day by day in a chain of cultural Hiroshimas, goes much deeper than it appears and incorporates various aspects of all societies worldwide.

In the German-speaking world, the writings of the Austrian education scientist Peter Gstettner are particularly worth mentioning; they bear the title Die Eroberung des Kindes durch die Wissenschaft. Aus der Geschichte der Disziplinierung (‘The conquest of the child by science: From the history of discipline’; Gstettner, 1981). In this nearly forgotten text, Gstettner makes reference to the history of colonialism, and, exemplified in the newly emerging pedagogical and psychological sciences on childhood, he demonstrates a close connection to the ethnology and anthropology arising from colonization. The thesis of his work claims ‘that the academic conquest of unknown territories precedes the conquest of the childish soul’ (Gstettner, 1981: 15). He demonstrates this especially with the history of developmental psychology, but also in the conceptualization of childhood (and youth) in the corresponding scholarship as a whole (Gstettner, 1981: 8 and 85):

All dominant models of human ‘development’ today include territorial associations: populations and individual people alike are thought of in terms of political regions, as territories to be conquered, occupied, researched and proselytized. Thus, having a look at anthropology, called previously ‘Völkerkunde’, can inform us as to why academics consider ‘savages’ to be primitive, ‘primitives’ to be naïve, the ‘naïve’ to be childish, and children, to be naïve, primitive and savage. … From the outset, childhood and youth studies have focused their research interest on the idea that it must be possible to analytically grasp lost ‘naturalness’ and, in a scholarly manor, to reconstruct it as the ‘natural state’ of the child (as well as the ‘savage’). That’s why educational child and youth psychology is connected in a causal relationship with anthropological fields of research, which, despite their different ‘research subjects’, exhibit the same analytical interests – namely to separate the influences of civilization and culture from inherited predispositions; to separate ‘developed’ from ‘undeveloped’.

At the time that Gérard Mendel and Peter Gstettner formulated their scholarly ideas about the colonization and conquest of children, they could not yet refer to postcolonial theories, as they only emerged in the following years. Thus, they can be credited even more so for drawing parallels and bringing attention to the relationship between colonization and the ideologies stemming from the emerging sciences on childhood.⁵

Twenty years later, similar reflections were also found in a study by the two US-American early childhood educationalists, Gaile Cannella and Radhika Viruru (2004), who have so far received little attention in the field of childhood research. The authors do not limit themselves to challenging childhood studies, but they also make an effort to transfer fundamental ideas from postcolonial studies to childhood studies.

The starting point of Cannella and Viruru’s ideas is that, from a postcolonial perspective, Western dominated models of childhood reproduce hierarchies and separations, for which European enlightenment and modernization and the accompanying demand for universality can be blamed. These models of childhood, they claim, are the concurrent product of the same ideologies, which have served as justification for colonial expansion and conquest. This can especially be seen in the parallel application of the idea of the development from a lower to a higher grade of perfection. Childhood, like non-European geographical regions and populations, is classified at the lowest rung of the scale, and colonized people are equated with children, both of whom have yet to be developed. Colonization, they go so far as to say, was even executed in the name of children, whose souls were seen in need of saving and whose parents had the obligation to raise them ‘correctly’, in terms of modern conceptions of childhood (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 4).

Similar to the relationship between colonial rulers and the colonized, according to Cannella and Viruru, a strict separation between adults and children is established, and the relationship between both becomes institutionalized as a power structure, based on the force and privilege of the stronger party. This is already expressed, in that the term child is associated with a state of incompletion, dependence and subordination, thus means ‘a kind of epistemic violence that limits human possibilities’ (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 2). This power structure can also be understood, in that the ability to speak (in the widely recognized form of ‘speech’) and read written texts are the only form of communications recognized, and in which important ideas can be expressed. Based on their experiences with very young, ‘speechless’ children, Cannella and Viruru at least attempt, ‘a glimpse of the possibilities that the unspoken might offer, that the previously unthought might generate’ (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 8).⁶ Their (and others’) interest is quintessentially the question: ‘What gives some people the right to determine who other people are (determinations like the fundamental nature of childhood) and to decide what is right for others?’ (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 7; italics in original).

Modern childhood, seen as separate and opposite from adulthood and which in its institutionalized form isolates children into special reserves, is identified by the authors as a ‘colonizing construct’ (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 85). Thereby, ‘binary thinking’, a pioneering concept of modernity, is reproduced, which can only distinguish between good and evil, superior and inferior, right and wrong, or civilized and savage (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 88). This division puts adults in a privileged position, since their knowledge is considered superior to that of the child; children may even be denied knowledge under the pretence of protection. This child-adult dichotomy prolongs colonial power, as it is transferred to an entire population group, which is in turn labelled as deficient, needy, slow, lazy or underdeveloped (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 89). The categories of progress and development, the authors argue, devalue certain population groups, and secure one’s own superiority over people from other cultures. The idea of ‘childish development’ is transferred to adults of other cultures, thereby arguably ‘infantilizing’ them.

Like colonized people worldwide, children are obliged to see themselves with the eyes of those who have control over them, and they are not allowed to reject the hierarchies of surveillance, of judgement, nor of intervention in their lives. Even at a time when discussions about children’s rights are becoming more commonplace, this hierarchical relationship is rarely questioned. Cannella and Viruru argue that the subordination of children remains so steadfast because it is substantiated and objectified by ‘the scientific construction of the adult/child dichotomy’ (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 109).

Steps towards the decolonization of childhoods

The thesis of the colonization of childhood has occasionally been called into question because it was precisely in the bourgeois concept of childhood coming up with the Enlightenment that not only the mastery of the children was foreseen by means of disciplinary techniques, but also their autonomy had been sought. For instance, the educationalist Gerold Scholz (1994) argues against Gstettner’s view that the discipline of children has been unstoppable since the beginnings of childhood science, with the thesis that ‘with the emergence of developmental psychology, also the thought of the child’s autonomy arose’ (Scholz, 1994: 206). It could not have been a coincidence that at the beginning of the 20th century the ‘century of the child’⁷ was proclaimed. There must be a relationship between the child’s conquest of science and the child’s autonomy. This assuming relation compels Scholz in the thesis (Scholz, 1994: 203)

… that the childhood constructions are destined from the attempt to remove the contradictions which the distinction between ‘child’ and ‘adult’ has brought with. On the basis of this distinction, the adult and the child share a space, and since then the child has called the adult to behave in a manner that takes into account the ambivalence of the child’s difference and similarity.

The autonomy mentioned by Scholz has always been imagined in bourgeois childhood construction as a form of education, which is to be generated by education; it was conceived as a task and obligation for adults. It was based not only on the idea that bourgeois society and the labour relations between capitalists and ‘free’ wage-workers had required a certain degree of individual self-responsibility, but also that it should be granted to children so that the desired norm-adequate behaviour can be produced more effectively and more sustainably. The autonomy granted was always related to this purpose, aiming at self-control and self-discipline (see Elias, 2000; Foucault, [1969]2002). In reform pedagogy, which was conceived as enlightened and directed against the superficial discipline of children, especially in schools, it was called on to respect the ‘nature of the child’. But this nature was always regarded as a first to be worked on and developed. In addition, it should be borne in mind that the children of the dominated classes have long been excluded from the bourgeois childhood ideals and left to the mere drill of ‘black pedagogy’.⁸ That this drift was gradually loosened was itself due to the fact that the new prosperity, which also spread to the subalterns, was largely based on the persistent exploitation of the colonies and is now based on the continuing inequality in the world order. Apart from the exception of the children in privileged classes, in the education institutions of the Global South, the children have had little autonomy.

The construction of a childhood that is strictly differentiated and separated from the adult is necessarily connected with ambivalence. Even though it is intended to provide the children with their ‘own space’ and to temporarily relieve them of the ‘seriousness of life’ or to provide them with special protection, it inevitably goes hand in hand with the devaluation of their competencies and their social status. Under these circumstances, the ‘privilege’ of being spared and protected is at the expense of independence, and the recognition of the peculiarity or difference takes place in inequality. This is shown by the fact that children may sometimes be happy to be overwhelmed by commitments, but they sooner or later perceive childhood as a form of contempt and do not want to be considered as ‘children’ anymore.⁹

Certainly, human life (as well as animal and plant life) has a beginning and an end, and every society has to find a way how to structure the life course and how to organize the relationship between people of different ages. Nevertheless, the form that has been ‘invented’ in Western-bourgeois society and which has produced what is now called ‘childhood’ is not the only possible one. It would also be conceivable and can be found in many non-Western cultures that the relationship of different age groups is not institutionalized and legally regulated as a strict distinction or even as a separation, but as a shared coexistence, which includes different kinds of (co-)responsibility. This also means that people do not have to be distinguished, as is customary in Western societies, primarily according to chronological age, but to tasks, which are more or less vital. The abilities required for this can be distributed very differently and not necessarily lower in younger people than in older adults. Furthermore, it is to be remembered that – according to the saying that each one grows with one’s tasks – abilities that are required for such tasks are not given, but rather arise as these tasks are trusted and entrusted to a person.

The strict separation of childhood from adulthood in bourgeois society has to do with the fact that the production and reproduction of life in this society is carried out in forms that make the continuous unfolding of one’s own abilities almost impossible. The notion of the ‘seriousness of life’ is characterized by the fact that it is localized in the ‘world of work’, which in its turn is separated from the rest of life and follows rules which are not based on human needs, but on the exploitation of human labour power and the maximization of profits. This circumstance makes it difficult to imagine the world of work as a place where children can also have their place and test their abilities. It suggests that childhood should be nailed in places where no important activities are to be done, and where it is only important to ‘be prepared’. Thus, children are condemned to a life characterized by lack of independence and passivity or at best by a previously limited and determined autonomy or participation. However, these separations are also questioned in bourgeois-capitalist societies, and there is an increasing search for possible ways of combining abstract learning in educational institutions with life-related or life-relevant tasks. This would be an opportunity to learn from the way children’s lives are shaped in some non-Western cultures, rather than to continue setting the childhood pattern as an absolute must and to impose it on the cultures and societies in the Global South.

At the same time, it must be borne in mind that life in such cultures and societies is affected by the postcolonial constellation. This constellation means that not only are the childhoods found here underestimated and made invisible, but they also are damaged and impaired in a very material sense. In order to put an end to the colonization of childhood, which can also be described as postcolonial paternalism, it is particularly urgent to push the decolonization of postcolonial societies further.

Notes

¹The concept of literacy also includes the ability to communicate as well as the appropriation of ways of thinking and value beyond its written form. To emphasize this is particularly important in the age of digital media.

²Erica Burman (2016) has identified metaphorical as well as empirical references to children and childhood in the writings of Frantz Fanon, which were so important for the anticolonial movements, and analyzed them under liberationist pedagogical aspects (see also Dei and Simmons, 2010).

³Without using the term ‘colonialization’, Habermas had formulated this basic idea almost ten years earlier in his work on legitimation problems in late capitalism (Habermas, [1973]1976). Although Habermas speaks of colonialization, the concept of colonization is most often used in the reception of his works.

⁴In the 1980s, in Germany, the theses of Habermas were also taken up in social pedagogy and social work in order to question their legitimizing role. For example, an expert conference focused on the question of ‘understanding or colonizing?’ (Müller and Otto, 1984). It was also an occasion for the reflection of professional ethics in social pedagogy (Martin, 2001).

⁵It should also be pointed out that French sociologist and educationalist Émile Durkheim, one of the fathers of positivist sociology, saw in children ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’ who endanger the social order of modern society. They must therefore be educated strictly ‘morally’ from an early age, especially through school (Durkheim, 1934). With regard to children, the influential US-American sociologist Talcott Parsons spoke of an imminent ‘invasion of the barbarians’ (Parsons, 1951).

⁶Here, it should be remembered that Jean-Jacques Rousseau ([1762]1979), who is considered to be the father of the modern conception of childhood, referred to the alleged speechless utterances of children as a ‘universal language’, which all children are capable of understanding.

⁷Here, Scholz refers to the book of the Swedish women and children’s rights activist Ellen Key, which was first published in 1900 and later published in many languages (Key, 1909).

⁸The uncritical notion of the ‘evil black man’, which has been reproduced and reproduced in many popular texts – such as the song of the Ten Little Negroes – resonates with this critically-intended designation.

⁹This is also reflected in the refusal of many young people who, according to the legal definition of the UNCRC, are still regarded as children until the age of 18 to consider the ‘children’s rights’ relevant to themselves.