Childhood and Conflicting Ideas about Innocence
By the mid-eighteenth century, philosophers such as John Locke (16321704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778), and Johann Friedrich Pestalozzi (17461827) had introduced a new, romanticized vision of childhood as a period of natural innocence (Figure 3.1c). Painters and book illustrators of the nineteenth-century Victorian period often depicted children in rural or domestic scenes whiling away their time in pastoral pursuits. This view conflicted with notions held over from the Middle Ages, of children as sinful, deceitful, and even depraved (Morrison, 2001).
A changing concept of the nature of children affected schooling and curriculum. Early American education, especially for poor children, was primarily limited to religious instruction focused on curbing “sinful” behavior (Boers, 2007). As Americans were increasingly influenced by a more humanistic view of children, curricula became more secular and child-centered, as evidenced, for example, in the emergence of the playground in the late 1800s and the evolution of the famous McGuffey Readers. These simple textbooks were introduced in 1836 as a series of graded readers that made ample use of biblical text and references as a means of both reading instruction and moral education. For example, a passage from the 1836 second reader states: “Never forget before you leave your room to thank God for his kindness. He is indeed kinder to us than an earthly parent” (p. 3). Only 3 of the 32 story titles in the 1836 version included the name of a child, compared with 15 of 71 in the 1879 revision.
By the 1870s, in response to an increasingly pluralistic society, the emphasis on purity and obedience had shifted to more of a focus on patriotism and civic responsibility, as this passage from the 1879 primer demonstrates: “This house is on fire. Look! The roof is in a blaze. Run, boys, and ring the bell. Call some men to put out the fire. We may yet save the house if we work hard” (p. 40). The older notion of schools as a place where children must be controlled and tamed had given way to seeing young children as unique individuals and to considering certain pursuits, such as play, as part of the domain of childhood.
Beliefs about the innate nature of children play out in the way adults interpret children’s motivations and the choices they subsequently make about curriculum and classroom management (File & Gullo, 2000; Scarlett, Ponte, & Singh, 2009). Suppose that a 3-year-old turns all the puzzles on a shelf upside down, dumping all the pieces on the floor. In the past, a teacher who viewed children as innately mischievous or motivated to misbehave might reprimand the child, saying, “I knew that was bound to happen one of these days.” She might ban him for a time from the puzzle center and make him sit on a bench during outside time as punishment. Today, we are more likely, because of the influence of developmental research, to see children as “works in progress” and recognize this episode as an opportunity to introduce natural consequences and promote self-modification of the child’s behaviors. Now a teacher might explain that since all the puzzle pieces are mixed up on the floor, no one can use them. She could tell the child that she will be happy to help, but that until the puzzles are put back together, he may not play with other toys.