The Well of Being: Childhood, Subjectivity, and Education

3. The Invention of Adulthood

3 The Invention of Adulthood Have I ever been a child I who know how to speak of childhood As I speak of death —Paul Eluard1 Adultism and Models of the Self It has already been suggested that early modernism was the historical moment at which there began an increasing social separation between adult and child through age-graded institutions, economic and domestic isolation, and, over centuries, psychological theories of childhood that acted to objectify children as a separate class. One could go further and claim that, just as Philippe Aries, in his seminal study of the history of childhood2 made the phrase “invention of childhood” famous, so this moment in Western history was also the moment of the invention of adulthood, or at least the form of adulthood of our age. The history of adulthood in the West—in the privileged, patriarchal West anyway, which is mostly what we have a record of—is characterized by an attitude toward childhood and children that I have called “adultism.” Like racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism, adultism is based on what appear to be empirical differences—in anatomy, neural development, ego-structure, psychoculture, size, and physical strength. These “real” differences very often lead to “subspeciation,” or the tendency to regard and to treat certain human others implicitly as if they were members of a separate species. As a psychological phenomenon, 63 subspeciation is projective, which means that the subspeciator—the one with the power—attributes his or her unconscious, unresolved sexual and aggressive material to the subspeciated. The projection is typically bipolar, in that the subspeciated receives both the dark and the light side of the subspeciator’s unconscious material—hence the divine child/deficit child, the goddess/whore, and the noble/bestial “savage.” Subspeciation is a form of psychological colonization that acts in a vicious circle with social, sexual, political, and economic colonization. The subspeciated status of the child is slightly more complicated than that of either women or the “savage,” since the child is, relative to the full-grown member of the human species, an undeveloped being. Aristotle , as we have seen, fudges the question of whether children represent a congenital or a developmental difference from free male adults. The child, he claims, has the deliberative element of the soul—which is what makes one an adult—but in incomplete and therefore nonfunctional, virtually useless form. But if the child is a woman, she will never have it with “authority,” and if a slave never have it at all. The categorical confusion that this formulation demonstrates mirrors the existential confusion of adultism, which experiences the child as difference, deviation, deficit, the unformed, and unshaped. For adultism, the child may not quite represent a difference in kind as does “woman” and “slave,” but she still lacks the requisite part of the soul—the one that makes us adult; so whether the difference is of degree or of kind becomes moot. The child is not just an incomplete, but an imperfect form of subjectivity. Aristotle’s theory of the nutritive (plant), sensitive (animal), and intellective (human) hierarchy of the parts of the soul,3 however compelling , formalizes another common adultist perspective that influenced the science of child study from the advent of Darwinian evolutionism to approximately the mid-twentieth century. This is summarized in the theory that the journey through childhood to adulthood recapitulates the journey of the species from its nonhuman origins to civilized humanity. So the child in the womb is analogous to the fish, the infant to the primate, the young child to the monkey, the teenager to the primitive hunter-gatherer.4 Each individual human history is a recapitulation of the history of the race. It follows that a good way to understand— and to treat—a five year old would be as one does a monkey.5 Analogously to this evolutionary model, Aristotle’s child is somewhere on the continuum between sensitive and intellective soul, and thus is something more than an animal and something less than a human. She lacks the faculty of prohairesis—choice or resolve or purpose —and thus cannot be “happy” in Aristotle’s deep, morally infused 64 The Well of Being sense of that term. Choice would appear to be a necessary aspect of reasoning , or the power of deliberation, which is the essential aspect of the intellective soul. Aristotle would probably grant that children—at least male children—possess it...