The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities

Childism: The Challenge of Childhood to Ethics and the Humanities

68 If the humanities focus in some way on “the human,” including its meanings , diversities, constructions, and possibilities, then it would be curious to neglect the third of human beings who happen to be under the age of eighteen . This situation would appear all the more peculiar if the humanities are charged, as many argue, with challenging normative assumptions and investigating historically marginalized voices. Yet to a large extent children and youth do in fact occupy the periphery in contemporary humanities scholarship, arguably more so than any other social group. The oddness of this situation is compounded by the fact that childhood studies have become increasingly prominent in the social and biological sciences. In this chapter, I take a critical look at my own field of philosophical ethics in order to propose a more child-inclusive humanistic methodology. I argue for what I call a new “childism” that would be somewhat analogous to recent forms of feminism, womanism, race theory, queer theory, and the like. By “childism” I mean the effort not only to pay children greater attention but to respond more self-critically to children’s particular experiences by transforming fundamental structures of understanding and practice for all. Children will take a central place in humanities scholarship only if there is a revolution on a similar scale to the revolutions that have occurred in connection with other “minorities.” Art, literature, history, culture, philosophy , religion, and the like would need to be considered narrow and stunted Childism The Challenge of Childhood to Ethics and the Humanities John Wall Childism 69 if they did not account for age in addition to gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity. The field of philosophical ethics is a useful test case for childism because here children are rendered second-class citizens in especially profound ways. It is true that children are often considered objects of justice, care, and responsibility . But the field almost entirely neglects children as ethical subjects . The question I ask here is not how ethics can be applied to children, for ethics is adult-centered to begin with. It is rather how a fuller understanding of children’s lived experiences in the world can transform basic ethical assumptions and norms, regardless of whether one is considering particular issues concerning children or not. Feminism has reconstructed ethical ideas, for both women and men, around new understandings of gender , agency, voice, power, narrative, care, and relationality. Childism should similarly rearrange the ethical landscape around experiences such as age, temporality, growth, difference, imagination, and creativity. As long as there has been scholarship, there has been scholarship about children, from the ancient Greek academy to twentieth-century developmental psychology. What is introduced by the new field called “childhood studies” is a historically new sense of children’s agency and social constructedness . What I propose to call childism grows out of recent efforts in this field, led by the social sciences, but childism also takes the field in transformative directions that the humanities are especially suited to articulate. Allow me to use the feminist metaphor of “waves” to describe how to move from childhood studies to childism. What may be called a “first wave” of childhood studies (my own term, not one from the field) arose in the 1980s primarily among sociologists who recognized that children are actors and constructors of meaning in their own right and within diverse social and historical contexts. This idea challenged what was perceived as the dominant Western norm of childhood as a period of passive development, a presocial and premoral time of adulthood-in-the-making. As two founders of childhood studies put it, “Children must be seen as actively involved in the construction of their own social lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live.” Furthermore, childhoods are socially constructed, by children and adults alike, in relation to diverse and changing historical contexts. Finally, as social agents, children must be seen as legitimate subjects of human rights. 70 John Wall A “second wave” of childhood studies can be identified with increasing efforts since the late 1990s to include children themselves as research and societal participants. The idea is that children should not just be studied and treated as objects of adult research and policy but also from the points of view of children’s own concerns and agendas. Children should be empowered to help formulate research questions, contribute to academic and...