The criticism of philosophers in the discussion of Michele’s post, specifically from our own Daniel that not much of the discussion was about how philosophers might listen to people from other disciplines, reminded me that I have been meaning to say something about one of my favourite books that I didn’t read in graduate school, Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood
The trigger for the social construction of childhood thesis was Philippe Aries’s claim in Centuries of Childhood
Postman buys the Aries thesis wholesale. This is certainly a drawback to the book, since the Aries thesis is ambiguous (between the claim that childhood itself is socially constructed and the claim that the experience of being a child is socially constructed) and his evidence for the claim is modest. Most historians of childhood now seem to think that childhood as a distinct stage of human development is close-to-universal, and certainly that it was widely recognised in the middle ages. Postman argues that childhood emerged only when the spread of literacy enabled adults better to shield children from various aspects of adult life – particularly certain aspects of sexuality and certain horrors associated with death and disease – and that the emergence and increasing pervasiveness of a visual culture in the 20th century has brought about a decline in childhood and threatens, ultimately, to bring about its disappearance. Postman is a magnificently pessimistic writer; he overstates the case for the decline and threatened disappearance of childhood, and talks as if the world is going to pot. (I’m sure if he’d lived to see Facebook he’d have started to feel better).
On top of that, like most people I’ve read who talk about the social construction of childhood (or anything else), he is conceptually sloppy. He talks as if he literally mean that childhood is socially constructed, i.e. that there would be no such thing as childhood if we had constructed things differently. That isn’t necessarily false, I suppose, but what he really means is something much more intuitive and less controversial: the practices that create the lived experience of childhood are sensitive to the design of social institutions and to social norms the specific content of which is socially constructed. Childhood may be a universal; the kind of experiences that children have which constitute their childhoods and shape their development are not.
In my experience prior to reading Postman, the social construction of childhood thesis was accompanied by a quite determined moral relativism about the nature of childhood (coming, I guess, out of the intellectual influences that attract people to the social construction thesis). Obviously there is no necessary connection between the two: nobody thinks that because income inequalities are socially constructed they are beyond moral evaluation. So there was no need to read Postman to learn that the two claims (childhood is socially constructed; there are no universal moral norms governing childhood) are not related to one another. But reading Postman was such a powerful experience because he implies, without every being explicit about it the way that an analytical philosopher would, a quite rich normative theory of what a childhood should be like. It helps that it is, to me, a very plausible theory, but frankly even an implausible one with some rich detail is welcome. Whereas a lot of moral and political theory treats childhood as just a stage on the way to adulthood, Postman thinks of it as containing distinctive goods that are much less readily available (and in some cases would not even be goods) later in life (what Samantha Brennan calls the intrinsic goods of childhood), as well as being valuable for development into a flourishing adulthood. For Postman, carefreeness from consideration of the burdens of adult life, and temporary innocence about adult sexuality are key components of a good childhood, as are freedom from heavily burdensome work, sobriety, and ample time for spontaneous play. A society that could facilitate these goods, but doesn’t, is thereby subject to harsh criticism. Here’s a passage discussing the then-remarkable phenomenon of young teenagers being trained to become world class sport competitors:
The 1979 Wimbledon tournament, for example, was marked by the extraordinary performance of Tracy Austin, then not yet sixteen… In 1980 a fifteen year old made her appearance. In 1981, a fourteen-year-old…..Twelve year old swimmers, skaters and gymnasts of world-class ability are commonplace. Why is this happening? The most obvious answer is that better coaching and training techniques have made it possible for children to attain adult level competence. But the questions remain: Why should adults encourage this possibility? Why would anyone wish to deny children the freedom, informality, and joy of spontaneous play? Why submit children to the rigors of professional-style training, concentration, tension, media hype? The answer is the same as before: The traditional assumptions about the uniqueness of children are fast fading. What we have here is the emergence of the ida that play is not done for the sake of doing it, but for some external purpose, such as renown, money, physical conditioning, upward mobility, national pride. For adults, play is serious business. As childhood disappears, so does the child’s view of play.
The discussion at PEA Soup suggests a slightly different, and expanded, menu. But there is more work to be done here. And what struck me after responding to Daniel, was that it is implausible to me philosophical reflection on what a good childhood consists in at an interesting level of abstraction could get very far without engagement with a wide range of non-philosophically trained literature and voices. As in many areas of moral philosophy, philosophers are bound to read novels, history, sociology, and anthropology in order to get material to reflect on and in order to develop accounts of the goods in question in which it is possible for them to have any reason to be confident.
{ 67 comments }
R 06.16.09 at 5:43 am
My off-the-top of the head reaction to the idea that childhood is disappearing is that the extent to which parents strive to preserve the “goods of childhood” — particularly the protection from adult sexuality — is strongly correlated with parental aspirations for their children. It may simply be a reflection of how much effort is needed to shield children from the pervasive visual culture — the same parents who monitor whether their kids do their homework also monitor their TV and internet habits. But I think it goes deeper than that — on the one hand there is the culture of Bratz dolls and suggestive T-shirts for tweens, and on the other hand there is the rather aggressively nostalgic childhood marketed by Pottery Barn and American Girl dolls.
Clarity 06.16.09 at 7:29 am
I agree with R’s comment regarding parents’ attempted constraints, but frankly I think that constraints have to be coupled with moral accountability. There is too much of the “Do as I say so” culture inherent in our society, children see right through that as do we.
With regards to the “disappearance”, our materialistic culture is to blame for that. If parents follow society and society follows what they are told are the norms, then perhaps we are all going to pot, unless the cycle is broken.
An interesting documentary was broadcast a few years ago where children were placed in a 1950’s school environment and actually began to flourish. It was not so much a return to childhood, which they had never truly lost, but a rejection of the superficial emotional baggage they are weighed down with in this culture.
alex 06.16.09 at 7:35 am
“There is too much of the “Do as I say so†culture inherent in our society, children see right through that as do we.”
Because, of course, a 7-yr-old is an autonomous moral agent fully fitted to navigate his or her place in the world….not. Sometimes children need to do as adults say, for their own good. Even adolescents, according to some neuroscientists, have very poorly developed judgmental skills, precisely because of their actual physical stage of growth.
If perchance you actually meant ‘do as I say, and not as I do’, well then there you have a case for the denunciation of hypocrisy that is entirely unexceptionable.
Tracy W 06.16.09 at 7:54 am
Why submit children to the rigors of professional-style training, concentration, tension, media hype? The answer is the same as before: The traditional assumptions about the uniqueness of children are fast fading.
Is this right, in that there has been a change? Or at least, that there has been a change amongst those families with enough money to worry about things other than survival? For example, I recently read Bill Bryson’s biography of Shakespeare where he talks about the local school scholars think Shakespeare might have attended as a boy, which ran from something like 6 in the morning to 6 at night.
Or take John Stuart Mill in Victorian times being taught Greek and Latin. Now he may have been an exception, but then those kids who perform at the Olympics are also exceptions.
I find this thesis doubtful.
qb 06.16.09 at 8:40 am
…carefreeness from consideration of the burdens of adult life, and innocence about adult sexuality are key components of a good childhood, as are freedom from heavily burdensome work, sobriety, and ample time for spontaneous play.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean sexual ‘innocence’ and ‘sobriety’, but if the former just refers to the absence of anxiety about conformity to social sexual norms, and the latter means freedom from chemical dependency, then I think the items on this list are important goods for adults, too!
In any case, I really liked this post. Thanks for writing it.
Maurice Meilleur 06.16.09 at 11:36 am
Harry, it’s been awhile since I’ve read Postman’s book, but I remember literacy figuring into his argument in a somewhat different way: that with literacy comes a period (eventually institutionalized) where at least some people in society sequester their children in order to instruct them to read and write (which they won’t do as a matter of course in social interaction, the way people pick up language) and to introduce them to the realm of human knowledge, to history and models of belief, expression, and behavior–all in writing. Given that Postman’s original field of study was education, and given his argument in books like Amusing ourselves to death, it’s no wonder that this aspect of social transformation would have caught his attention.
Also, though maybe I missed this in your precis, wasn’t his argument more complex than the title? It wasn’t just that childhood was disappearing, full stop. It was that certain valuable (in his view) elements of childhood, like a temporary protection from more dangerous or unsettling aspects of human existence, were disappearing, while others, like a tolerance for impulsiveness and a waiver of full responsibility for one’s actions, were being folded into the definition of adulthood. Such that in some senses, kids no longer have the chance to be kids, while in other senses, they never have to stop.
I agree: with the exception of Building a bridge to the 18th century, I have found Postman’s work repays serious attention, even when I wind up disagreeing with him. His takeaway messages are so strong, though, that it’s more than once I’ve come back to books like Amusing ourselves to death and found his actual arguments to be more nuanced than I remembered them.
Harry 06.16.09 at 12:00 pm
Yep, I think that’s right about the thesis In your first para, MM), which I simplified just to make the point.
On your second para: well, the way you describe it (valuable elements being lost) is the only reasonable way of reading it. But it is interesting how strongly he resists normative language, lapsing into it only occasionally, while appearing to have a visceral moral impulse about all this. He talks, for example, about children and adults starting to dress the same way, and watch the same television shows (the latter being largely an artifice of the way American TV was regulated then, in fact, rather than something reflective of the culture) but holds back, for the most part, from saying this is a bad thing and why. But yes, you’ve added more nuance and detail all of which is accurate.
Tracy W — You may be right to be sceptical — he doesn’t give a lot of data, instead noting things that seem remarkable and new-ish. Part of what he was observing was the intensification of professionalisation of sports as the rich world had more discretionary spending and careers could be made not just playing, but training and supporting players of sports. The widespread professionalisation of amateur childhood sport, though (which he was only beginning to see) is new, or rather new in wealthy-ish countries since the “invention” of childhood (with some exceptions — circuses). Mill really is an exception, though! (I’m sure there are many cases of parents experimenting with extreme theories on their children, but Postman doesn’t deny that happens throughout history).
alex 06.16.09 at 12:33 pm
So we have not so much the disappearance of childhood, as a particularly irresponsible (and late-C20 historically specific) definition of appropriate adolescent behaviour imposing itself as a cultural norm for anyone between, say 8 and 38? I must say, it certainly feels like that sometimes… ;-)
Tyler Bickford 06.16.09 at 1:06 pm
When I see Postman’s book cited these days, it’s as an example of the continual cycles of anxiety that spring up around childhood and modernity, not as an exemplar of childhood studies and social constructionism. I think it’s right to point out that the issue here is Postman’s kind of ambivalent relationship to normative values about what is or isn’t good in some ideal form of childhood, and if what philosophers are into is sorting out these normative questions, go for it. Folks in childhood studies are much more concerned with empirical accounts of actually occurring childhoods, and representations of them, than with parsing the limits of an ideal childhood.
So when you say “but what he really means is something much more intuitive and less controversial: the practices that create the lived experience of childhood are sensitive to the design of social institutions and to social norms the specific content of which is socially constructed,” *that* is all the social construction of childhood was ever supposed to mean, and I’d venture that similar statements apply to any social constructionist aproaches. The strong version that is set up here (“he literally mean that childhood is socially constructed, i.e. that there would be no such thing as childhood if we had constructed things differently”) doesn’t really mean anything, and the italics around “childhood” are sort of a fig leaf deflecting against the basic social constructionist point that childhood, like gender, sexuality, race, or disability, entails a complex set of social calculations, none of which is reducible to, say, biological immaturity. So there isn’t/shouldn’t be anything particularly controversial or unintuitive about the social constructionist approach to childhood, because all we’re saying is that kids don’t reduce to their biology. The problem is that a century or more of developmental psychology has basically said that kids *do* reduce to their biology, which gets linked to normative moral philosophy about “intrisic goods,” making the notion of “childhood” incredibly ideological.
The fact that most people have found a way of accounting for youth does not then create a universal category of “child” whose ideal character/form can be sorted out in the abstract. Optimal childhoods in late modernity are certainly going to be different from optimal childhoods in medieval Europe. I’d venture that if you sorted out what such “optimal” childhoods would look like, you wouldn’t have to appeal to any values particular to “childhood”.
CK Dexter 06.16.09 at 1:17 pm
“He talks as if he literally mean that childhood is socially constructed, i.e. that there would be no such thing as childhood if we had constructed things differently. That isn’t necessarily false, I suppose, but what he really means is something much more intuitive and less controversial: the practices that create the lived experience of childhood are sensitive to the design of social institutions and to social norms the specific content of which is socially constructed.”
This strikes me as a controversial interpretation of social constructionism generally (allowing that this author may be an exception). My impression is that most social constructionist theses call into question the very distinction you’re making here. What is the literal sense of childhood left over after we separate out the “lived experience of childhood”?
Are you referring to a certain phase of psychological development? If so, that seems too variable based on forms of child-rearing and life to be the precultural fact of childhood. Are you referring to physiological development? If so, that seems a bit too broad to capture the meaning of childhood. So, what’s left?
Zamfir 06.16.09 at 1:33 pm
CK Dexter, I’d say the distiction is that in one interpretation, the particular form a childhood takes is socially constructed, the other interpretation is that the whole concept of childhood is itself a construction.
Tyler Bickford 06.16.09 at 1:41 pm
CK Dexter and I are saying the same thing. If there is a “childhood” that is left over after we strip away all the particularities of institutions and norms, it’s not clear that it would be recognizable to anyone as “childhood.” When Zamfir says “the whole concept of childhood,” or Harry puts “childhood” in italics, I wonder what the thing is that they’re referring to? I think it protests too much. At the very least the idea that there is “childhood” is the positive assertion that demands justification. I see the social constructionist position as the null hypothesis.
CK Dexter 06.16.09 at 1:43 pm
Zamfir,
That distinction makes sense, but it seems to make the claim too modest and trivial. “The particular form a childhood takes is socially constructed.” Wouldn’t that mean: childhood is experienced and interpreted differently in different places and times? Wouldn’t that view be uncontroversial? Surely, the social constructionist is saying something stronger than that.
Zamfir 06.16.09 at 1:49 pm
I guess that’s Harry’s point too: on closer inspection, Postman’s claim is not as extreme as it sounds. But “Childhood as we know it is disappearing/changing in something essentially different” is still a strong claim.
Tyler Bickford 06.16.09 at 1:51 pm
Except we’re also not saying the same thing (#13). My position is not that social constructionists are saying something (necessarily) stronger than “childhood is experienced and interpreted differently in different places and times”, but that the anti-social constructionist position is saying something *very* strong, which is that there is some thing/identity/role/subjectivity/state-of-being (??) that exists somewhere outside of particular social norms and practices that therefore must necessarily be universal (and presumably biological) that is “childhood.” That is a strong claim, and should not be the starting point that has to be argued against. But in practice that is the assumption, and so social constructionists sound like extremists saying preposterous things, when in reality this idea of a “whole concept of childhood” really just stands in for a constellation of ideological propositions about age, status, and personhood (among other things).
Or, all that is being said is that there is a universal feature of societies where age is parsed out into separate categories, one of which includes people who are young. That is a trivial claim, and is not what social constructionists are arguing with.
Zamfir 06.16.09 at 1:53 pm
BTW, these kind of “social construction” ideas often seem to me to float somewhere between those those extremes of hardly believable and almost trivial, and authors do sometimes have a tendency to stress the boldness of the hardly believable pole, even if their actual position is very reasonable.
Tyler Bickford 06.16.09 at 1:55 pm
Zamfir @14: exactly. That’s why Postman is not a good stand in for the social constructionist position, which is a lot more skeptical of broad claims about changing childhoods and of value judgements around the idea of childhood. Also, my own position, and that of a lot of contemporary childhood studies scholars, would be that childhood in its contemporary formation is pretty conservative, and that social change seems to conform to enduring childhoods as much as childhoods adapt to changes in society.
Tyler Bickford 06.16.09 at 2:08 pm
Zamfir @16: Absolutely. The reverse, of course, is also true — that the appeal to some preexisting “childhood” is simultaneously extreme or trivial.
The problem we face, though, is that almost a century of scholarship on childhood zeroed in on proving the idea that there was a universal pattern of psychological development as biologically determined infants graduated to socially determined adulthoods. This developmental model, which is totalizing and universalizing, pervades education, government, families, etc., and has real consequences for children who don’t conform these normative claims about who and what they should be. Cf. how gender, disability, race, sexuality all get biologized and universalized as part of projects of differentiation, oppression, etc. (Making such political parallels w/r/t childhood is admittedly imperfect.) I like to see social constructionism as a modest, scientific, empiricist approach that says, wait, let’s investigate these things as they actually are, maybe some of these assumptions need to be examined. It seems extreme because the standard position is so powerfully institutionalized.
Salient 06.16.09 at 2:13 pm
But “Childhood as we know it is disappearing/changing in something essessentially different†is still a strong claim.
My reading of The D of C (~3 years ago): it’s an American polemic; it gestures toward considerable insight; it doesn’t utilize enough analytic rigor to achieve that insight on its own; as a polemic, it’s fairly culture-blind, that is, it doesn’t acknowledge variety in cultural norms among Americans.
E.g. the claim that “free play is disappearing!” does more to reveal what culture Postman is preoccupied with than it does to state a universal truth about America.
As a polemic, the book’s pretty clearly advocating the normative claim: “There are compelling reasons to view childhood as we knew it / know it as preferable to childhood as it is being redefined. The obvious inherent value in the old characteristics of childhood is lost in the developing definition of childhood.” The ideology supporting this claim is implicit and assumed.
I agree that Postman makes few explicitly normative claims; at the same time, I think it’s correct to infer that Postman was assuming a very specific set of normative responses from his envisioned reader as he progressed.
Tracy W 06.16.09 at 2:15 pm
I agree that J S Mill was truly exceptional. I just think the people who make it to the Olympics nowadays are also truly exceptional. There are a lot more people around than in Victorian times, and there are a lot more people with the extra money and time to spend rigorously training their children. Therefore I would expect a rise in such behaviour even if the overall culture remained precisely unchanged.
alex 06.16.09 at 2:18 pm
Is there anything in the term ‘social construction’ which isn’t already dealt with under the labels of ‘culture’ and [maybe] ‘class’? Once you’ve dealt with the nature of a surrounding socio-economic context and the expectations produced by a given culture [complex and contradictory as they may be], what is there left apart from the kind of biological, endocrinological, developmental realities that some seem to shy away from?
My suspicion of the polemical use of the ‘social construction’ label is that it finds its most solid anchoring in the minds of the kind of people who think everything will be different after the Revolution, when Rousseau lays down with Marx, nothing will need to be ‘socially constructed’ ever again, and the finally-unalienated masses romp joyously through the cornfields, with ballet in the evening…
MarkUp 06.16.09 at 3:34 pm
Therefore I would expect a rise in such behaviour even if the overall culture remained precisely unchanged.
But the news reports all the contestants are pre-adults and/or pre-pubescent not the single exception who is now the senior [age 30+] or the older one [age 16] rather than where they fit as percentages of the whole. Is it not a culture shift when the whole team is comprised of what was one the exception?
CK Dexter 06.16.09 at 3:36 pm
Tyler (post 15):
This sounds exactly right, but seems different from the distinction you made in your earlier post: “He talks as if he literally mean that childhood is socially constructed, i.e. that there would be no such thing as childhood if we had constructed things differently.”
Based on your interpretation of his view in post 15, it seems that he does, in some sense, suggest there would be no such thing as childhood if we had not constructed it. (To be sure, this doesn’t suggest it was possible not to develop some conception and practice of a kind of childhood, but that there is no non-socially constructed real “childhood.”)
Matt McGrattan 06.16.09 at 3:41 pm
re: 21
Saying that some property of people is socially constructed isn’t quite the same as saying it’s cultural. It’s a causal/metaphysical claim about the origin and sustenance of a trait. So, if gender is socially constructed, it’s not just that a particular culture thinks about maleness and femaleness in a particular way, but that being brought up within that culture makes it the case that men and women actually are that way. There are countless attempts to spell out in detail what this causal/metaphysical claim is supposed to mean, and yeah, it’s often confused or insufficiently distinguished from fairly weak claims like ‘people’s beliefs about how things are are a product of the culture in which they live’.
CK Dexter 06.16.09 at 3:43 pm
Alex (21):
“Once you’ve dealt with the nature of a surrounding socio-economic context and the expectations produced by a given culture [complex and contradictory as they may be], what is there left apart from the kind of biological, endocrinological, developmental realities that some seem to shy away from?”
But I think that’s precisely the social constructionist’s point — that there is no basis for the postulation of some mysterious, pre-cultural, more natural or real or original something that is distinct from all of those things. Or, to put it more quaintly, in the form of anti-platonism: there are tables, but no “tablehood,” there are children, but no “childhood,” there is sex, but no “sexuality.”
This is part of the talking past one another side of social constructionist debates. The SCists point out there are only children, no ‘childhood,’ and the realists claim that all along, all they meant by ‘childhood’ was children.
“My suspicion of the polemical use of the ‘social construction’ label is that it finds its most solid anchoring in the minds of the kind of people who think everything will be different after the Revolution, when Rousseau lays down with Marx, nothing will need to be ‘socially constructed’ ever again, and the finally-unalienated masses romp joyously through the cornfields, with ballet in the evening…”
This sounds completely wrong. If the SCist doesn’t believe in the non-socially constructed reality of x (childhood, or sexuality, or humanity, or whatever), then how on earth could they be operating in the belief that they will return to this magical precultural non-existent x? On the contrary, it’s the realist who can coherently be nostalgic for the precultural real, not the SC. (And I’m inclined to think that Marx’ historicism would prevent him from such Rousseau-ian fantasies. This is a two for one strawman sale!)
magistra 06.16.09 at 3:49 pm
The advantage of the label ‘social construction’ is that it reminds us that our ideas of what it is to be a child, a woman, black, etc don’t just spontaneously emerge, but develop because particular groups of people are actively promoting these ideas. So, for example, the idea that children are ‘naturally’ innocent about sexual behaviour until adult culture informs them about it is not true historically of many cultures. Most children once probably learnt about sex at an early age through seeing the activity of farm animals and/or their family and friends. The idea of the natural sexual innocence of children was promoted by Victorian moralists who wanted to claim that an interest in sex was unnatural for women.
Mike 06.16.09 at 4:37 pm
I think it might be useful to separate two (often conflated) positions which commonly travel under the label of constructivism, namely: (1) the claim that our knowledge of things is socially constructed, and (2) the claim that the things we have knowledge of are socially constructed. I would suggest that (1) is a very, very modest claim that can be incorporated into your philosophy of choice with minimal effort, if it is not already there. Now (2) on the other hand makes a strong metaphysical claim by reducing ontology to epistemology, essentially saying that what is is a function of what we can know. In my experience, many of those who adopt the label of constructivist wants to argue (2), but ends up arguing (1), usually resulting in a “duh” from the audience as what tends to be presented as a radical position turns out to be anything but.
Doug K 06.16.09 at 4:46 pm
footnote: for girl athletes, the age from 12-16 is when their strength/weight ratio is the highest it will ever be. That’s not a social construct, it’s a fact of physical development. There aren’t any 12-year-old boys in the Olympic teams, because they’re not yet strong enough.
Of course this does not detract from the main point, that children’s sports are being professionalized. There are ten-year-olds with overuse injuries typically associated with aging professional players,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/sports/othersports/22overuse.html
Getting utilitarian about this, it’s not optimal for the children even from an athletic point of view:
“Athletes who specialized early had their best performances at 15-16 years of age while those in the multilateral group achieved their top performances at 18 years or older. By 18 years of age, the majority of athletes in the early specialization group had dropped out and those still competing had inconsistent performances. Individuals in the multilateral group had a longer athletic career, fewer injuries, and consistent performances at top-level competition.”
http://www.coachr.org/common_characteristics_of_successful_endurance_programs.htm
“multilateral” here means the kids get to play, instead of just practice their sport-specific skills. The intrinsic good of childhood play turns out to be the best training for a career in endurance sports too..
“The traditional assumptions about the uniqueness of children”
Whose tradition, and how old is it ?
For example, the Victorians had some fine traditions that children make uniquely great chimney-sweepers,
http://www2.careers.govt.nz/4401.html
or mudlarks,
http://www2.careers.govt.nz/4409.html
Matt McGrattan 06.16.09 at 4:55 pm
re: 27
Yes, I have a paper in a set of conference proceedings that covers this topic, distinguishing epistemic and metaphysical senses of ‘construction’. The distinction isn’t new to me, of course.
Tom Hurka 06.16.09 at 5:03 pm
Just a philosophical question (not having read Postman but having read Slote who seems to have arrived at similar — though less richly developed — ideas in a purely philosophical way).
Let’s say there are distinctive goods of childhood. It doesn’t follow that the ‘disappearance of childhood’ is a bad thing. What happens is that, at a certain earlier-than-before stage in life, childhood goods are replaced by adult ones — and the adult ones could still be goods. It could be that Tracy Austin’s achievements at Wimbledon embodied the same excellence and had the same value they would have in an older person’s life. And that value could outweigh any bad things she had to undergo to achieve them, just as they can in an older person’s life.
But then what’s required for a Postman-like view is something stronger: that what would be goods in the life of a 22-year old aren’t goods in the life of a 16-year old or, more plausibly, I think, that an ideal life should contain all the different types of good, both adult ones when you’re an adult and childhood ones when you’re a child. Then the loss of the childhood goods isn’t compensated for by the earlier appearance of adult ones. Because an ideal life should contain all types of good, and to a reasonable degree, the loss of childhood goods isn’t made good by the greater, because earlier, presence of adult ones.
This isn’t meant to disagree with anything above, just to suggest that what’s needed for a Postman-type view is more than just the claim that there are distinctive goods of childhood. The extra that’s needed is interesting and could take different forms, but it is interesting.
Tom Hurka 06.16.09 at 5:04 pm
Sorry: last word in the above post should have been ‘extra’ (he says using single quotes).
Tyler Bickford 06.16.09 at 5:17 pm
CK @23:
When Harry glosses Postman as “He talks as if he literally means that childhood is socially constructed” (childhood-in-italics as opposed to all the peripheral norms and institutions, as though the things are separable), my sense is that the emphasis is on Harry’s unwillingness to give up the idea of a childhood-in-italics (whatever that might be). My point is that childhood-in-italics is a strawman of sorts, or at the onus is on whoever’s asserting it to demonstrate it. You can’t just throw out “but what about childhood itself” or some such and expect it to stick.
Which is related to Mike @27: at risk of this thread getting away from itself, I completely agree with the distinction you make and I simultaneously think that (1) and (2) are inseparable. My sense is that the reducing ontology to epistemology seems metaphysical and extreme *more* because ontology has been mystified in Western thought than because those deconstructing it are mystifying it. That is, ontological claims, at least about the status of certain groups of people/subjectivities as fixed, given, etc. always depend on some metaphysics in their argument. A center that, SCists argue, cannot hold, never existed in the first place (always-already and whatnot). So in my work, when I want to talk about kids doing the stuff kids do, I’m often confronted by people who want to assert the status of my interlocutors as “children”, with whatever particular unexamined and unexaminable claims about what childhood is or should be. (At some level, this is the childhood-in-italics that comes up whenever someone suggests that maybe childhood is constructed: “but what about childhood? Surely you don’t mean… ) Piagetian developmental psychology is as mystical and metaphysical as you can get — it’s way off in modernist lala land — but it’s metaphysics of children’s personhood permeate all aspects of contemporay childhoods in schools, families, government… Or Butler’s stuff about gender, sexuality, and performativity, which is supposed to be the apex of this metaphysical social constructionism, has at its center the simple social facts of drag and passing. What I’d prefer is not to have to argue about ontology at all, at least when we’re talking about people and social roles, but the starting point in all of these discussions always is ontology, and so social constructionism (or at least the forms I subscribe to) comes off as radical critique when it’s really just kind of everyday.
alex 06.16.09 at 5:47 pm
So I guess, in the end, it’s all just folks doing stuff?
[And nobody got the Fred Kite ref.? Tchah!]
Matt 06.16.09 at 5:52 pm
But then what’s required for a Postman-like view is something stronger: that what would be goods in the life of a 22-year old aren’t goods in the life of a 16-year old or, more plausibly, I think, that an ideal life should contain all the different types of good, both adult ones when you’re an adult and childhood ones when you’re a child.
Another option would be to argue that the best of the goods (or the full degree of the good, or something like that) of adulthood cannot be achieved unless one has gained the goods of childhood, first- that a certain path of development is necessary, at least in most cases, if the latter goods are to be achieved in their highest form. I don’t know if that’s Postman’s view, and have no clear idea as to the truth of matter, but it seems a possible, and not inherently unlikely, position to me. (We sometimes say of people “he grew up too soon” as a way to explain certain flaws in their character or behavior, so the basic idea seems not too outlandish to me.)
Harry 06.16.09 at 5:59 pm
Tom –yes, that’s absolutely right, and it is interesting. Maurice has made me nervous that I might misrepresent Postman here, but I think he has a kind of Freudian view (and perhaps he is just open about this) that healthy adulthood normally requires the distinctive goods of childhood to be present for a long enough time to ensure successful emotional development. In other words, depriving children of them also deprives them of adult goods, rather than replacing them with adult goods. Not necessarily in all cases, but in most (so one might find that Tracy Austin in fact really does have a successful live because she’s exceptional; but, to use Tracy W’s example, James Mill pretty clearly put his own son’s long term emotional health in severe jeopardy). And the goods are also valuable in themselves, if you see what I mean. That said, while he has a pretty rich conception of what constitutes a good childhood, he doesn’t really defend it, and doesn’t give (as you wouldn’t expect him to) an account of how much weight the goods it involves have relative to other goods. Just, obviously from his pessimistic outrage, he thinks it has a LOT of weight.
Alex: some of us are just too cool to notice it publicly. I’d guess we have 15 readers who would get any FK reference you could throw at them.
Tyler Bickford 06.16.09 at 6:08 pm
alex @32: Yes. folks doing stuff is where it’s at. But not “in the end,” in the beginning — “folks doing stuff” is a really useful place to start a conversation or investigation, not as a conclusion. Which is one of the reasons for the “duhs” Mike @22 points out when people go to great lengths to end up with “and therefore it’s social constructed, QED.” It doesn’t make a very satisfactory result.
btw Frank Kite is over my head.
Martin Bento 06.16.09 at 6:17 pm
Tyler, while it is true that there is no “childhood as such” that any human being has or will experienced that is wholly independent of cultural influences, it is also true there is no “purely culturally-determined childhood” that has been experienced by non-biological children or by children biologically identical to adults. To claim social construction as the null hypothesis is a very strong claim. And this is a game. Biological explanations are supposed to have a strong burden of proof because they can point to no children that are independent of a particular human culture; but cultural explanations can also point to no children that have no biological or biological specificity relative to adults. The null hypothesis, then, is that for any particular question regarding the nature of childhood, we do not intrinsically know whether it is biological and cultural, and any affirmative claim in either direction should have an equivalent burden of proof.
Tyler Bickford 06.16.09 at 6:29 pm
Harry @34: Okay, the actual thrust of your post, rather than all this social construction of childhood stuff. I don’t have a problem with putting together a list of things that are good, and setting those things in relation to one another to see how they might conflict or vary in importance. And it seems like examining children, say, and seeing that there are a number of things in their lives that seem like goods, but that we’ve left off the list, or that don’t happen with adults, is a useful thing to do. And vice versa — identifying goods that normally acrue to adults that children don’t have access to.
I can see that certain categories of people might have different needs and so the relative weight of one good to another would shift for them — but presumably this would be true on a smaller scale too, from individual to individual as well as from group to group. So everything in the list of good things is itself good, and then they may be inherent orders among them, but the main ordering is context-specific. (I’m thinking of your discussions of “equity” in education the last couple of months. I’m also thinking of Optimality Theory in linguistics, which does basically this, posing universal constraints that are ordered differently in each language.)
What I don’t get is the idea that some item on the list of goods may apply only to a particular category of person. And the reason I don’t get that is because I can’t see it making sense without stronger definitions of those categories of person than I’m willing to countenance, because of my social constructionist leanings, I guess. So I guess if one were interested in actually formalizing the normative values of childhood in order to sort out what an optimal childhood would look like, a well-formed theory would require that none of the values being appealed to could be posited only to apply to children.
Martin Bento 06.16.09 at 6:34 pm
In #37 above: “no biological or biological specificity relative to adults” should be “no biology or biological specificity relative to adults” and I retract the line about it being a game. No need for the discussion to take that tone, and I apologize pre-emptively.
lemuel pitkin 06.16.09 at 6:43 pm
cultural explanations can also point to no children that have no biological or biological specificity relative to adults.
Why can’t I point to two people of the same age (and physical development), one of whom is considered an adults in his/her culture, and one of whom is considered a child?
Tyler Bickford 06.16.09 at 6:51 pm
Martino Bento @37:
No offense w/r/t to the comment about it being a game, but thanks for pulling it back.
To the substance: I think culture versus biology is a slightly different issue. One of my objections is that biology and universal are always joined in this conceptual matrix such that appeals to biology always present as claims about universality and vice versa. From the outset I pointed to “the basic social constructionist point that childhood, like gender, sexuality, race, or disability, entails a complex set of social calculations, none of which is reducible to, say, biological immaturity” — which acknowledges such a thing as biological immaturity. For the record there also aren’t children who are biologically identical to each other or adults to adults for that matter, and I’m not sure it makes sense to posit a categorical difference between “adults” and “children” in terms of biology that is not necessarily given in the biology. My point is that “adult” and “child” start out as social categories, and though they certainly refer in part to biological age, they also refer to a great many other things.
I don’t see a reason to privilege biology in the collection of traits held by “children” except that it helps make the case that “childhood” is somehow natural, given, etc. Just as we can see that gender and race, say, are so much more than genitalia and skin color, that genitalia and skin color are only trivially markers of those categories of identity.
Tyler Bickford 06.16.09 at 7:02 pm
Sorry for misspelling your name, Martin.
Currence 06.16.09 at 7:17 pm
I would think that socio-cultural and biological modes of analysis are both equally opposed to the ideological foot-stamping, refusal-to-investigate the substance of childhood. Yes, kids will be kids, but the question is: what are kids anyhow? “What about childhood itself, apart from biology and culture?” “What about it–by which I mean, what do you mean by it?”
Both modes of analysis are (can be) scientific (in the sense in which science is opposed to ideology; Nietzschean science, critique), though the biological mode (or at least its terminology–not necessarily its concepts) might be more favored by ideologues due to the historical connection between the refusal of a scientific investigation (or deconstruction) and the deployment of ‘natural’ (“It’s natural for children…”). However, the nature/artifice (convention) distinction needn’t be mapped onto the critique (science)/ideology distinction.
32: I admit that I’m confused by “modernist la la land”. Isn’t a rejection of ideology/embrace of critical, scientific investigation a hallmark of modernism? (I guess that would make the postmodern, whatever it is, continuous with modernism.) I’m here out of my element and the terms are used in too many different ways in too many different literatures (inclusive or: I’m completely unfamiliar with the childhood literature).
Tyler Bickford 06.16.09 at 7:41 pm
43: Yeah, sorry, the “lala land” is more important than the “modernist,” which was throwaway. I’m thinking of a piece in this book by Steven Huebner that’s a Piagetian reading of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, which highlights how trippy the psychological theories and the opera both are. But it’s neither here nor there. Sorry for the lack of clarity.
dsquared 06.16.09 at 9:06 pm
Harry – off topic except vaguely related through “childish games persisting into adulthood” – the new series of I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue chaired by Stephen Fry was sadly disappointing.
Tim Wilkinson 06.16.09 at 10:38 pm
(Apologies for further off-topicry) Haven’t listened yet, but not entirely surprising cos Fry is not really cut out for Just-Plain-Silly.
+ I’d say Humph’s appeal in ISIHAC rested largely on comic timing, and especially his brillant delivery of crude innuendo in a way that was urbane and yet (or therefore?) still somehow always belly-laugh-surprising to hear from his lips. SF, in his QI performances anyway, seems squirmingly uncomfortable with sex-gags – generally self-referential and archly queeny which might explain it as he still seems rather self-conscious about all that stuff – but still seems to feel compelled to come out with them. Still, the script writers may have avoided that pitfall. Will cease evidence-free carping and have a listen.
Harry 06.16.09 at 10:59 pm
I too haven’t yet listened, but will do instead of working tonight (I’m holed up in a super-fancy resort in Aspen for some reason, so feel unusual compulsion to be productive). My guess is that the writers need to learn what Fry (and Dee?) can do and adjust accordingly.
I don’t regard it as off-topic. ISIHAC has been a central part of my children’s good childhood. Imagine what it was like for me last to tell a 11 year old and an 7 year old that their #1 living idol had died aged 87. (My now 8 year old frequently asks of her idols “is he/she dead?” because the odds are that he/she is).
Tim Wilkinson 06.17.09 at 12:50 am
Ah didn’t realise they were taking the HIGNFY route. David Mitchell has my vote there.
nick 06.17.09 at 5:27 am
Ian Hacking has a book that tries to sort out the uses of “social construction”; probably more than ten years old now, and I read it some time ago: quite good, as I remember, at sorting out weak and strong versions of the argument, perhaps less good at situating them in intellectual history…..
Matt McGrattan 06.17.09 at 6:30 am
Yes, the Hacking book is good; as is Andre Kukla’s book, “Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science.” Kukla, iirc, does quite a good job of teasing out the various constructivist claims and putting them in terms that would make sense to people versed in ‘mainstream’ metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of science.
alex 06.17.09 at 7:39 am
Biology is of course prone to confusion with ‘nature’, and thus tendentious essentialisation, while evidently the precise chronological line between childhood and adulthood differs between cultures [as I hinted above, in the modern West, it seems to be hovering around 38…]
But one can make non-essentialising generalisations about the biology of childhood which nonetheless record it as a fundamentally different state to adulthood – to wit, it is a time when the organism, and particularly the brain, is undergoing rapid, constant [if uneven] developmental change. Those people unfortunate enough to be temporarily trapped in this period of their lives can’t be treated as ‘adults’, because adult means grown-up, and that is the one thing, at a basic biological level, children aren’t. No?
Tracy W 06.17.09 at 10:02 am
MarkUp: Is it not a culture shift when the whole team is comprised of what was one the exception?
I understand that for gymnastics the power-weight ratio in the female body is highest just before puberty, allowing those point-winning flips. So the statisically-few parents who are willing to put their daughters through massive training for most of their childhoods, and whose daughters also had the other attributes for success, such as not being wiped out by an injury, would be the ones picked up on by the selection process for gymnastics. A bit like how natural selection operates. We don’t need to believe that, say, spiders are consciously trying to maximise their genes’ chances of survival when they make webs, evolution operates on them regardless. As far as I know, other sports might be like gymnastics too in rewarding a particular body type that almost always ocurrs amongst youngsters.
Of course sports are socially constructed in a way that evolution isn’t, and perhaps we should change the rules of various sports so as to make more maturity more valuable in terms of winning.
And perhaps parents pushing their children into heavy training during childhood is statistically more common nowadays than it was amongst the reasonably-well off during Victorian times, reflecting a cultural shift. Just without relevant statistics it seems a bit too early to conclude that there has been a cultural shift.
magistra 06.17.09 at 10:37 am
And perhaps parents pushing their children into heavy training during childhood is statistically more common nowadays than it was amongst the reasonably-well off during Victorian times, reflecting a cultural shift. Just without relevant statistics it seems a bit too early to conclude that there has been a cultural shift.
One major relevant cultural shift since Victorian times has been the development of female sport. Gymnastics and athletics for women effectively did not exist before the twentieth century, tennis-playing was pretty unathletic, etc. Given that it seems to be female sports where adolescents are most successful, that in itself would make a big difference to numbers of parents who might consider training their children.
Tom Hurka 06.17.09 at 1:36 pm
Harry at #35:
But if Postman has the Freudian-type view you suggest, isn’t he back to treating the goods of childhood as means to adult goods, i.e. the reason you need to have goods like innocence in childhood is that they’re necessary for mature goods later on, like a healthy adult emotional life? The more radical view would be that childhood goods should be preserved for their own sakes, and at the expense of what at other times in life would be significant goods, even if forgoing those goods doesn’t have bad effects later on. But maybe this is the kind of thing it’s unrealistic to expect Postman to have clear views on.
ben 06.17.09 at 3:17 pm
(2) the claim that the things we have knowledge of are socially constructed. … Now (2) on the other hand makes a strong metaphysical claim by reducing ontology to epistemology
Maybe that’s the way most pursuits of (2) go, but it’s clear from the minimal description of (2) that they needn’t all go like that; not every metaphysical claim proceeds via a reduction to epistemology. (Or maybe they all do, but then this particular reduction is no worse off than those carried out elsewhere.) That this thing didn’t exist until we began thinking in such and such a way is, anyway, not obviously an epistemological claim.
Salient 06.17.09 at 3:44 pm
isn’t he back to treating the goods of childhood as means to adult goods, i.e. the reason you need to have goods like innocence in childhood is that they’re necessary for mature goods later on, like a healthy adult emotional life?
Probably “the reason” is a bit strong; it doesn’t seem to me that Postman advocates a hard-line provision model.
The more radical view would be that childhood goods should be preserved for their own sakes, and at the expense of what at other times in life would be significant goods, even if forgoing those goods doesn’t have bad effects later on.
I’m not sure that’s all that radical. It sounds like the impartialist perspective in a nutshell, which I’ve seen deployed most often by social conservatives — e.g. “innocence” is the kind of childhood good that shouldn’t just be preserved for its own sake, but should be preserved even to the detriment of adult life. Thus, we should prohibit sex education in schools even if it would help children grow into healthy adults.
Maybe it’s more correct to say the impartialism is a convenient ideology to temporarily adopt when making social-conservative arguments against specific educational goals. I doubt social conservatives sustain impartialism comprehensively; it renders “spare the rod, spoil the child” nonsensical.
The related idea that children have rights that should be preserved, regardless of whether it matters to their adult well-being, is implicit in the UN Convention on children’s rights (see Article 31, Article 9).
For reasons independent to the topic of this post, Article 29 is particularly interesting. To date, the U.S. has not ratified that Convention, and it’s my understanding that Article 29 is the chief cause for controversy (which I learned to my chagrin & embarrassment when I made what I thought would be a game-set-match reference to Article 29 while doing some advocacy work; it’s a good thing I’m doing small-potatoes stuff).
Laura Purdy writes interesting things about these legal issues.
—
A different question – does it make sense to mentally categorize Neil Postman in the same field of work as Malcolm Gladwell?
bianca steele 06.17.09 at 4:10 pm
Salient:
You seem to be describing social conservatives as using a consequentialist argument. I am not sure it would be possible to find an actual social conservative whose position does really boil down to consequentialism. I tend to think that any consequentialist-like argument a social conservative could use would be indistinguishable from liberalism–which means it might appeal to neoconservatives, and would appeal less well to progressives to the extent it began to look like neoliberalism–but for that reason it would appeal decreasingly well to social conservatives, who frequently want not to look like neocons. They defend their argument because it is a conservative argument. Social conservatives, at least in the US, tend to be opposed to analysis precisely because it can point out contradictions in their point of view.
Salient 06.17.09 at 4:23 pm
You seem to be describing social conservatives as using a consequentialist argument. I am not sure it would be possible to find an actual social conservative whose position does really boil down to consequentialism.
Hm. I’d argue the exact opposite: that all social-conservative policy advocacy boils down to a form of consequentialism, something to the effect of (and this is going to be loose and botched in such a draft attempt) We should do X, because it will result in more stable safe family environments.
I may find the understanding of “stable safe family environment” envisioned and advocated by social conservatives disagreeable, but the italicized argument seems to me to be both consequentialist and reflective of their arguments.
Salient 06.17.09 at 4:25 pm
submitted a sentence too soon — bianca, I meant to ask you for an example consequentialist social-conservative argument that seems like liberalism. I might not be understanding “consequentialist” correctly
bianca steele 06.17.09 at 4:29 pm
Sorry, I read too quickly. I see you were opposing that. Is Postman saying innocence is good because it’s where we start: everybody believes innocence is good? Or is he saying innocence is good because we have reason to believe it’s necessary for some other good? Or is he saying it’s good because it’s part of a larger ethical system, which we have reason to believe is good?
If, as Tom H. and Salient seem to suggest, Postman’s view seems to tend conservative, and yet he is, I think, considered left-wing or radical, and indeed as an early adopter of social constructionist theories would also seem to be left-leaning or radical–how could we explain this? Everybody is somewhat conservative in at least some aspects of their lives, that is one explanation.
Tim Wilkinson 06.17.09 at 4:40 pm
In this extended (and indirect) sense, I think you might argue that everyone’s a consequentialist up to the point at which their arguments hit bedrock. But then the question is how soon do you hit bedrock – and bianca steele suggests that the Soc Con might well (want to) stop at the goodness of childhood ‘innocence’ and refuse to offer further justifications. (ah the conversation is moving on as I type…)
As with ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’, ‘libertarian’, I think left and right have to be decomposed into (at least) two conceptually independent elements – the personal (confusingly also called social in some cases) and the economic. I know that’s not exactly insight of the year, but failure to do so probably gets the prize for biggest single cause of confusion/crosstalk in informal discussions of political philosophy. I don’t know about Postman in particular.
Salient 06.17.09 at 4:48 pm
If, as Tom H. and Salient seem to suggest, Postman’s view seems to tend conservative, and yet he is, I think, considered left-wing or radical, and indeed as an early adopter of social constructionist theories would also seem to be left-leaning or radical—how could we explain this?
I’m not sure how to categorize Neil Postman’s politics. In particular, it seems to me most political agendas are silent on, say, “free play” — I’m having a hard time thinking of a political perspective which implies a strong stance on the issue. (Maybe libertarianism?) Likewise with the other characteristics for which Postman adamantly advocates.
I read Neil Postman for the same reason I enthusiastically read Thomas Geoghegan and half-grudgingly read Malcolm Gladwell and watch Michael Moore films — more interested in the personality who produced the work and shines through it than I am in the merit of the content (unconvincing) or the rigor of any supporting research and arguments (questionable/sloppy).
Salient 06.17.09 at 4:57 pm
In this extended (and indirect) sense, I think you might argue that everyone’s a consequentialist up to the point at which their arguments hit bedrock.
Come to think of it, I guess “we should do/prohibit X, even though it results in problematic consequences, because it upholds a principle of What Ought To Be” is anti-consequentialist to the core. But social conservatives might dispute just how problematic the allegedly problematic consequences are.
Uy. The trouble is (I think), consequentialism is a methodology (a method for establishing what’s morally wrong) which could be employed by someone of any general political ideology (depending on what normative valuate one assignes to the consequences perceived as likely).
bianca steele 06.17.09 at 4:57 pm
Salient,
Here’s what I mean, more or less: You, it sounds like, are consequentialist with respect to childhood innocence, because it leads to a stable home life. A social conservative might say a stable home life is good because it’s traditional, it’s part of their religion, it’s just good and everybody knows this deep down inside themselves. But a consequentialist argument would say that a stable home life is good because people with a stable home life are happier, healthier (physically and mentally), wiser, more intelligent, less likely to become alcoholics or addicts, better parents, better employees, better neighbors, better citizens. A consequentialist or neoconservative argument, frequently, makes use of results in the social sciences to prove this. This is why liberals (or neoliberals) would often accept the same arguments.
It is also a kind of argument that hard-line right-wingers like Ann Coulter seem to consider “liberal” (by which they mean “socialist”)–though possibly because they automatically assume all college professors are liberals. So, in the US, to avoid the wrath of the Coulters et al., social conservatives need to continually bash that kind of argument.
bianca steele 06.17.09 at 4:58 pm
Salient,
Here’s what I mean, more or less: You, it sounds like, are consequentialist with respect to childhood innocence, because it leads to a stable home life. A social conservative might say a stable home life is good because it’s traditional, it’s part of their religion, it’s just good and everybody knows this deep down inside themselves. But a consequentialist argument would say that a stable home life is good because people with a stable home life are happier, healthier (physically and mentally), wiser, more intelligent, less likely to become alcoholics or addicts, better parents, better employees, better neighbors, better citizens. A consequentialist or neoconservative argument, frequently, makes use of results in the social sciences to prove this. This is why liberals (or neoliberals) would often accept the same arguments.
It is also a kind of argument that hard-line right-wingers like Ann Coulter seem to consider “liberal†(by which they mean “social1stâ€)—though possibly because they automatically assume all college professors are liberals. So, in the US, to avoid the wrath of the Coulters et al., social conservatives need to continually bash that kind of argument.
Salient 06.17.09 at 5:10 pm
:-) Bianca, we crossed oars – I think I comprehended in #63 what you clarified in #64.
You, it sounds like, are consequentialist with respect to childhood innocence, because it leads to a stable home life.
Not I qua me; in #58 I was just hypothesizing. (I think anyone who goes on overmuch about preserving the “innocence” of children has disconnected from what being a child actually means, what kids say and do, etc. In any form beyond the self-evidently practical, “protecting the innocence of children” requires sustaining a notion of childhood that’s as naive as the pastoral ideal.)
bianca steele 06.17.09 at 6:22 pm
Well, to try to bring the discussion back on-topic, I don’t see a reason why either the social conservative or the neoconservative would have to reject social constructionism, or why either of them would be necessarily required to accept such an argument (though I think an earlier generation of neocon might have be inclined to such an idea, both prior to and after his/her “conversion”).
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