Book review of sorts: A history of childhood by Colin Heywood

One of the many perks with being a university teacher is that you get to read alot of various scientific literature. This semester I have been assigned to teach course about the history of childhood, which actually aligns rather well with my research interests on the history of families and migrant children. However, teaching also requires to read through the course literature and in this case a key-book was Colin Heywood's "a history of childhood". 

As a standalone book it works rather well as an introduction to both the history of childhood and, in a wider sense, social constructionism. What I however have struggled with when incoorporating it to teaching is these three aspects:

a) The structure which is divided thematically rather than chronologically 

b) The books overestimation of the social; whilst also underestimating human evolution

c) The approach where the past is presented as a one-way route to an enlighted, contemporary Europe or western world 

Starting with my first objection I have encountered a clear problem with utilizing the book in lectures since the book is thematically structured rather than chronological. This is not something that is unique to Heywood's book and I also think it would be extremely hard to write this sort of book by utilizing a chronological approach. Still it is often frustrating that issues of education is handled in a chapter of it's own and operates over a period of thousand years when the chapters themselves are not chronological. In this regard it seems like Heywood have based alot of his writing on the classical approach of continuity and change. It should, however, also be noted that this is a common theme even in larger books such as a history of world societies which is the most utilized book on history teaching at university.

My two other points of critique is however with regard to Heywoods approach to the subject of childhood. In the first chapters Heywood presents a development in which childhood from a scholarly perspective have become viewed as a social construction rather than biological stage. With this approach it  comes a large emphasis on that childhood is different not only between different time periods, but also between social classes and racial categories. To put it more blunt: the experience of being a child is not the same for a slave as for a king, even though both experiences took place in the same era or years. This is an argument that scientifically is hard to by-pass, and as a scholar of discourse I concur with it. 

Every person experience childhood.....
    

But, and this is a large but, Heywood then continues through the rest of the book from this perspective. In his description of parenthood this sort of fall flat, since the book comes with some judgements on parenthood were a possible reading would be that people in the past did not feel affection for their children. As a human I think that this is to oversimpfly, and also going against basic biology in which the care for ones offspring is often at the core of the evolutionary  steps. Heywood's book thus fall into the trap of over-theorizing rather than taking depature in the question of human experience. Also, his selections of examples is surprisingly small for the conclusions he sometimes presents. 

but this experience is not only defined by era, 
but also by social class.

My other critique is that the book also falls into another common trap, and that is to describe the evolution of childhood as a journey from darkness to light. In this regard the past is often presented as being less enlightened when it comes to children, but that humanity eventually overcame these obstacles. With the exception of child health and labor Heywood however fails to mention that is often the result stepwise transformation of society. 

All in all, I think Heywood's book, despite my criticism is well worth a read. I also think that the shortcomings of the book also highlights the role of the teacher. It is necessary to not only follow a book, but also bring in your own perspectives in teaching. In this regard, literature could perhaps be more seen as a point of depature rather than an objective truth. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The use of history and why historians should mind the gap

Image
 Around two decades ago we can to some extent see how a paradigm hit Swedish history science in full force. This paradigm consisted of studies on how history was used in society and often came with a theoretical luggage from the German and English tradition. After having supervised student theseses on this area I still remain somewhat doubtful as too how students, and historians, often uses these theories. Perhaps this is also due to my PhD-thesis containing a similar approach when it comes to putting the past into neat little boxes. My criticism towards this paradigm is that it have come to be utilised as a way to only package uses of history, rather than what these packages contains. Let us for instance take the form of studying uses of history as narratives or if one so wishes, tropes. The idea here is to study how certain forms are expressed as stories of trauma, grief or “from darkness to light”. What this actually is about in the more theoretical work is to study how history ...
Read more

Contemporary Sexual Politics: Efforts to Silence Sexuality in Politics

Image
Following up on last week’s post, we can ask ourselves where questions of sexuality are being challenged in politics. From a contemporary perspective, I would argue that we are currently witnessing global attempts—particularly from conservative actors—to banish issues of sexuality from public discourse. In Foucauldian theory, we can speak of several forms of the exercise of power. Foucault uses the concept of biopower to analyze social views on sex, capitalism, and power. One of the central aspects of biopower is that it often operates through the individual, who is expected to internalize social norms rather than be externally forced to accept them. Yet, in the case of sexuality, we have over the past decades witnessed rather forceful attempts to silence it, thereby making people unaware of important aspects of their own sexuality. In such cases, the effort seems to lie in banishing "unwanted" expressions from public discourse, thereby limiting the individual’s scope for a...
Read more

Contemporary Sexual Politics: a Background

Image
This is the first part in a series of three posts in which I aim to discuss contemporary sexual politics from a more theoretical and research-based perspective than in my other posts. It forms part of a broader discussion on how sexuality can—and perhaps should—be understood as constituted by a multitude of actors. Therefore, we might not be able to speak of a single contemporary politics of sexuality, but rather of a range of political positions. During the 20th century, numerous philosophers and researchers attempted to write “the history of sexuality,” but the one who has influenced me the most is the French philosopher Michel Foucault. I have actually read all three of his original works on sexuality, but I believe the first book covers the essential foundations for discussing and understanding sexuality. Broadly, this can be said to consist of two levels of particular interest to this series of posts: a) the repressive hypothesis b) the discussion on power/knowledge and the multi...
Read more