The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities

Introduction. The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities

1 As anyone who has attended a Thanksgiving dinner can attest, the children’s table is not usually an A-list destination. Denied the good china, seated at a wobbly folding table, placed out of earshot of the juicy adult gossip, the guests at the children’s table know that they occupy a marginal space. In many ways, the children’s table is an apt metaphor for the role childhood studies has played in the humanities and, more discomfortingly perhaps, for the role the humanities sometimes seem to play within the academy. Yet, as in many marginalized spaces, there can be an intense sense of freedom and creativity precisely because one’s voice is out of earshot. This book provides an overview of the innovative work being done in childhood studies—a transcript, if you will, of what they’ve been saying at the children’s table. But this volume is also an argument for rethinking the seating arrangement itself. The study of children, often seen as peripheral to the important work of understanding social, political, national, and ethnic structures, allows us to rethink the very foundations underlying these structures. The chapters in The Children’s Table share a unifying premise: to include the child in any field of study is to realign the very structure of that field, changing the terms of inquiry and forcing a different set of questions. Because defining childhood is a means of defining and distributing power and obligation, studying childhood requires a radically altered approach to the questions of what constitutes knowledge and what animates the work of power and resistance. introduction The Children’s Table Childhood Studies and the Humanities 2 Introduction In short, we argue that engaging children as individuals worthy of study inevitably complicates how we process knowledge about the human subject. For at least a generation, the humanities have been in a state of continual self-evaluation (some might say self-recrimination) about how to define the field and the value of what lies within those parameters. Charles Frankel, the first director of the National Humanities Center, characterizes the humanities as “that form of knowledge in which the knower is revealed.” For Frankel , all “knowledge becomes humanistic when we are asked to contemplate not only a proposition but the proposer, when we hear the human voice behind what is being said.” Geoffrey Harpham takes another tack, focusing on methodology and motivation. “The humanities,” he argues, take “‘the text’ as their object, humanity as their subject, and self-understanding as their goal.” Perhaps the most pervasive—if largely unarticulated—definition stipulates that the humanities are what the sciences are not. In her article “Defining the Humanities” Anna Wierbicka writes that whereas the focus of science is things, the “subject-matter of ‘the humanities’ is ‘people,’ and people studied not in the way in which ‘things’ can be studied.” In sum, science purports to focus on objects, and thus to be objective, while the humanities are a messier enterprise. Echoing Frankel’s assertion, this argument suggests that the voice of the knower, replete with that knower’s political and aesthetic beliefs, can be heard in the humanities but is largely undetectable in scientific inquiry. Within a model that defines the humanities and the sciences as antithetical , childhood studies can function as an important corrective. Willem Koops, a developmental psychologist, contends that children pose questions that science cannot answer. For Koops, the empirical approach favored by science cannot, by itself, provide the capacious approach necessary for fully understanding the experience of children. Further, empirical knowledge does not attempt to trace how the experiences of children shape our larger culture. “Normative issues,” writes Koops, “cannot be solved empirically.” The Children’s Table goes still further, arguing that ideas of normativity themselves often get in the way of accurate knowledge. The pull of the normative still needs to be questioned, and humanists are well positioned to do the asking. A brief history of the evolution of childhood studies reveals that the field does not just function as a corrective to scientific essentialism but that it also reveals how profoundly interdependent scientific and humanistic knowl- The Children’s Table 3 edge are in the first place. As an endeavor that focuses on children with the intent of locating and studying their agency, childhood studies defies the easy divisions of biology and culture, body and book. More precisely, childhood studies demonstrates how the science we...