ECE 4101 Week 2 Power point presentation

ECE 4101 - The History and
Philosophy of Early Childhood
Education
Week 2
Prepared By: La Shanna Anderson
University of Guyana

Names of Sub - Units
● The Child in History
● The Emergence of Class and Age Groups
● Childhood and Property
● Working Children
● Children’s Rights and Responsibilities
● Changing Attitudes Towards Children

The Child in History
It is easy to assume that definitions and expectations of age groups—infants, children,
adolescents, adults, the aged—are fixed and unchanging determined principally by the
biological facts of physical and mental development and decay. However, they have
changed remarkably over time, and are still changing.
In the present they vary considerably among different cultures, especially between rich
and poor societies. A ten-year-old in a Latin American shanty town or on a Calcutta
pavement may be economically self-supporting and behave with an independence we
define as adult, and which would be unthinkable for most of his or her peers in Britain.

Even in current British legal and administrative practice the dividing line between
adults and younger people is less clearly defined than might be expected.
The age of attaining legal majority and the right to vote has recently been lowered
to 18. Yet a Member of Parliament must be 21 and it is possible to take on the
responsibilities of marriage at the age of 16, although parental consent is required
until the age of 18.
Also at 16 it is possible to leave school and enter full-time employment; a girl may
engage in sexual intercourse with a male without his running the risk of
prosecution.

No one can be sent to prison or hold a driving licence before the age
of 17, although a boy may join the armed services with parental
consent at the age of 16; a girl not until 17.
A ten-year-old may be convicted of a criminal offence, although
until the age of 14 the prosecution must prove the defendant capable
of knowing the difference between right and wrong.

Most of these divergences in the ages at which children
acquire adult responsibilities in the worlds of work, crime,
politics, sex and other activities, and the assumed slower
acquisition by girls than of boys of some but not other aspects
of adult competence reflect historical changes in definitions
of childhood.

There is no biological or psychological reason why boys who mature
physically and intellectually later than girls should be assumed to be
responsible for their sexual activities at the age of 14, whilst girls are
given the protection of the law until 16. Nor is there any clear reason why
individuals should be assumed capable of the considerable
responsibilities of conducting a marriage and a home at 16, but unable to
carry the responsibility of the vote until 18.

The current wavering line between ‘childhood’ and
adulthood is the most recent stage in several centuries of
change in the definition of the length and responsibilities
of both childhood and adulthood.

The Emergence of Class and Age Groups
In the past few years, understanding of such historical changes
has been much influenced by the work of Philippe Ariès. Ariès
has argued that in medieval Europe ‘the idea of childhood did not
exist’. Rather, individuals moved directly from the physical
helplessness and dependency of infancy into adult society—if,
that is, they were among the minority who lived to complete this
vulnerable early period of life.

In the tenth century’, Ariès points out, ‘artists were unable to depict a child
except as man on a smaller scale’. He continues: ‘In medieval society, the idea of
childhood did not exist; this is not to suggest that children were neglected,
forsaken or despised.
From the thirteenth century, Ariès argued, and most notably in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, a new consciousness emerged, at least among the
prosperous middle and upper strata or society, of the specific nature childhood,
of a period between infancy and adulthood which was different in character from
the preceding and succeeding age periods.

During the same period, however, Ariès argues that another new concept
of childhood began to emerge. This emphasized the need for a period of
training and discipline before the individual could acquire full adult
capabilities, a training normally in the shape of formal education. It was
decisively influenced by the sixteenth-century Reformation with its
emphasis both on the importance of a disciplined life and upon the need
for a fully formed person to possess the contemporaneously expanding
range of knowledge in theology, the humanities and sciences.

Childhood and Property
In medieval and early modern Europe property
ownership was the crucial defining
characteristic of a full member of society.
Property ownership meant power and freedom.
In Roman law children before the age of
majority had no legal rights.

The concept of patria potestas subordinated them
entirely to the control of the father or, if he was
deceased, to a male guardian. They could own no
property, could not marry without parental permission,
could live only where the parent or guardian directed. In
England after the disappearance of Roman control a
distinctive body of law and custom emerged.

By 1066 it was established, and continued to be accepted as
law after the Norman Conquest, that where an heir was a
minor the lord to whom the hereditary tenant owed service
obtained legal wardship of the heir. Until the minor attained
majority the lord could take the rents and profits of the land for
his own use, indeed deal with it as he wished. In return he was
obliged to provide for the maintenance of the heir. The lord was
also entitled to the body of the heir.

By the eleventh century the age of majority
in such cases was 21. In the sixth century
it had been only ten, by the seventh
century 12, although a father had a right to
chastise a son until the age of 15.

For inferior classes, holding their land by non-military forms of
tenure, in the twelfth century ‘full age’ remained 14 or 15, the
age at which a male could work the land. The son of a burgess
attained majority when he could ‘count pence, measure cloth
and conduct his father’s business’. However, increasingly the
age of legal majority for the élite was extended to all social
classes, 21 being effectively the norm by the thirteenth century.

With the decline of feudalism, rights of
guardianship passed from the feudal
lord to close male relatives of the heir or
to others appointed by the deceased.

Working Children
The evidence so far suggests that even in
medieval times children were largely cut off from
the world of adults in important areas of their lives
—control of their own incomes, and, given the law
of custody, control of their own persons, as well as
in their liability for crime.

Working Children
From the earliest times, children from as
young as the age of nine or ten might work
away from the home of the parent or
guardian, either as apprentices or in such
unapprenticed labour as domestic service.

Working Children
Industrialization almost certainly increased the
potential material independence of working class
minors since in many, especially un- or semi-
skilled occupations, such as in Lancashire textile
factories, they could earn sufficient wages to be
self-supporting from their mid teens.

Working Children
Significantly, however, the spread of ‘teenage’
independence in nineteenth century, Britain was
followed by increased attempts at parental and
societal control of this age group and the
emergence of a new literature concerning
adolescence as a ‘problem’.

Working Children
The belief that the children of the labouring
poor had no right to try to be economically
independent but should remain under the
control of their parents, or, if parents could not
or would not support and control them, that of
the community, had indeed a long history.

Children’s Rights and Responsibilities
The legal fact that parents or guardians had custody of
children and wards until majority meant that children or
wards could not normally sue their parents or guardians
for cruelty or exploitation as an adult could sue another
adult for assault— and frequently did.

In other respects, the nineteenth century saw an
increase in the spheres of life in which the child was
assumed not to have equal civil rights with the adult.
The reduction in legally permissible hours of work and
the regulation of work conditions, first for pauper
children, mainly orphans, then for all working children,
first in textiles, later in other factories, workshops and
other forms of work, began in 1802.

Also in the second half of the nineteenth century and
especially from the 1880s there were other moves to
remove children from the full rigours of adult life.
No legal questions arose concerning the custody of
children in cases of marriage break-up before 1839.
Before 1839 children were automatically in the
custody of a living father.

The later nineteenth century saw a
number of decisive moves to protect
poorer children from adult work, legal
processes, and adult cruelty.

The fact that children were younger, physically weaker and
had less knowledge of the world than older people made
them vulnerable to adult authority even in medieval times,
and the courts do not appear in practice to have had a high
opinion of the capacity of minors to speak for themselves.
The modern situation in which the welfare of a minor is
regarded as a matter to be settled among parents or
guardians and the state has a long history.

Changing Attitudes Towards Children
Although there have been significant
historical changes in the experience of and
attitudes to children, described by Ariès
and others, as regards certain aspects of
childhood, notably the subordination of
children by the law, there has been much
less long-term change.

From the seventeenth century there was increased
interest in the child as the object of scientific
enquiry.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Calvinism
emphasized infant depravity, arguing that children
were doomed to sin and evil unless controlled by
the parents.

The decline of Calvinism in Britain in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries loosened the
control of such ideas.
This continuing subordination of children was justified
by Protestant theology among those who accepted it,
by non-theological conceptions among the increasing
numbers who, in the nineteenth century, did not.

The major post-Darwinian secular justification
of the differentness of childhood has come
from psychology, with its development as a
distinct sphere of intellectual activity from the
late nineteenth century.

Children from the 1880s were protected from the
cruelty and neglect of adults. The definition of ‘neglect’
gradually widened until Bowlby in the 1950s achieved
wide currency for the belief that the definition covered
almost everything other than full-time maternal care
during at least the first five years of life.

ECE 4101 Week 2 Power point presentation

ECE 4101 Week 2 Power point presentation

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