Constitution of childhood in western society

Abstract

Childhood in History came to constitute, as theme and subject, from the beginning of the modern period, although the History of Childhood, as knowledge and narrative, is more recent. The historical constitution of childhood includes different ways of representing and signifying, indicating times of convergence and times of divergence or even contradictions and ruptures. In religion, civility, art, literature, pedagogy, Childhood results from a constellation that brings together demographic, economic, affective, sociocultural dimensions. Childhood has had childhoods that translate into new spaces, new manifestations of affectivity and relationship in the public, private and domestic settings, and to which spaces, times and means of being taught and learning have been destined. Childhood emerged and was constituted as a field of science and education. From motive and theme, Childhood and particularly the child have become the object of investigation, crossing different scientific domains, namely psychology, medicine, pediatrics, pedagogy and, more recently, sociology and history. The school emerged as the place and time of childhood. Since the eighteenth century historiography records structural aspects of long duration and conjunctures where evolution has suffered accelerations and ruptures. Childhood brings together and represents children, consigning homogeneity and admitting diversity and specificity. Thus, school emerged as the place and time of childhood, but was not uniformly fulfilled. In this article we will try to problematize, document and understand Childhood as a concept and epistemic category, with a recent past, but not without controversy, dense, cumulative, particularly in the Western World. Taking Europe as its main reference, particular attention will be paid to aspects of a conceptual nature and to the systematization of the main historical and pedagogical lines of the constitution of childhood. In the fundamental, the method used is the historiographic, combining diachrony and synchrony and resorting to a hermeneutical exercise of the main texts and theses on the subject. It is, however, an open-ended approach to interdisciplinarity that seeks to encompass the constellation of substantive, theoretical, and methodological vectors of Childhood in Western Society.