Beyond the Century of the Child

by Koops, Willem; Zuckerman, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780812237047
• ISBN10: 0812237048
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-01-24
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

In 1900, Ellen Key wrote the international bestsellerThe Century of the Child. In this enormously influential book, she proposed that the world's children should be the central work of society during the twentieth century. Although she never thought that her "century of the child" would become a reality, in fact it had much more resonance than she could have imagined. The idea of the child as a product of a protective and coddling society has given rise to major theories and arguments since Key's time. For the past half century, the study of the child has been dominated by two towering figures, the psychologist Jean Piaget and the historian Philippe Ariegrave;s. Interest in the subject has been driven in large measure by Ariegrave;s's argument that adults failed even to have a concept of childhood before the thirteenth century, and that from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth there was an increasing "childishness" in the representations of children and an increasing separation between the adult world and that of the child. Piaget proposed that children's logic and modes of thinking are entirely different from those of adults. In the twentieth century this distance between the spheres of children and adults made possible the distinctive study of child development and also specific legislation to protect children from exploitation, abuse, and neglect. Recent students of childhood have challenged the ideas those titans promoted; they ask whether the distancing process has gone too far and has begun to reverse itself. In a series of essays,Beyond the Century of the Childconsiders the history of childhood from the Middle Ages to modern times, from America and Europe to China and Japan, bringing together leading psychologists and historians to question whether we unnecessarily infantilized children and unwittingly created a detrimental wall between the worlds of children and adults. Together these scholars address the question whether, a hundred years after Ellen Key wrote her international sensation, the century of the child has in fact come to an end.

Author Biography

Willem Koops is Professor of Developmental Psychology and Dean of the Department of Social Sciences at Utrecht University. Michael Zuckerman is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Imaging Childhood	1	(20)
Willem Koops
The History of Childhood
The Child in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance	21	(22)
Barbara A. Hanawalt
Early Modern Childhood in the Dutch Context	43	(19)
Els Kloek
Patterns of Childrearing in America	62	(20)
Karin Calvert
The Birth of the Virtual Child: A Victorian Progeny	82	(14)
John R. Gillis
Historical Perspectives on Twentieth-Century American Childhood	96	(16)
Peter Stearns
The History of Children and Youth in Japan	112	(24)
Hideo Kojima
Childhood, Formal Education, and Ideology in China, Then and Now	136	(23)
Michael Nylan
The Child in Developmental Psychology and Pedagogy
On Infantilization and Participation: Pedagogical Lessons from the Century of the Child	159	(24)
Micha De Winter
The Nephew of an Experimentalist: Ambivalences in Developmental Thinking	183	(21)
Gerrit Breeuwsma
Developmental Psychology in a World of Designed Institutions	204	(21)
Sheldon H. White
Epilogue: The Millennium of Childhood That Stretches Before Us	225	(18)
Michael Zuckerman
Notes	243	(6)
Bibliography	249	(26)
List of Contributors	275	(4)
Index	279