Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Pedagogies and Politics 643
Before I really begin, let me clarify some methodological presuppositions for this analysis.
Firstly, I am going to be dealing with representations of childhood, or qualities accorded an idealtypical
model of the developing child. But this does not mean I am only discussing models of
childhood. I am drawing on a broadly Foucauldian understanding of the structuring of culturalpolitical
discourse such that—although I do not have space to say much about this here—
every model of the child implies equivalent subject positions for others around him or her: for
parents, teachers, other welfare professionals and, as I will endeavour to indicate, even the nation
state. Some of these positions are more clearly specified than others. Prescribed positions for
teachers and mothers, for example, are usually pretty unambiguously identifiable from any specific
pedagogical approach (usually either as negligent or intrusive), while that for fathers is often more
variable in the sense of discretionary (though ultimately also amenable to pathologization). It is
the murky character of the role of the state and transnational economic-political processes that
demands further analysis.
In pursuit of this theme, the discussion that follows traverses territory that may seem far from
education. I will be juxtaposing economic and psychological models of development and making
claims that connect political and psychodynamic notions of “investment.” While such disciplinary
border crossings may appear tenuous, my arguments precisely concern links between allocations
of financial and emotional resources. Moreover, the cultural connections between children and
emotionality speak to a set of culturally contingent but potent relations.
THE STATUS OF CHILDHOOD
The Western world is currently witnessing an explosion of concern about children—abused
children, delinquent children, children as victims, and children as aggressors. These wildly
contradictory concerns (with protecting children and protecting people from children) indicate
the cultural burden carried by children and young people as the repository of identification for
the human subject more generally. Steedman’s (1995) historical analysis traces the emergence
of the motif of the child as the personification of interiority, of a sense of unique selfhood
or individuality that lies inside the body. The economic and cultural conditions for this motif
alongside modernity implicate this model of childhood within the consolidation of the nation
state and its imperialist/colonialist projects.
From this moment the bifurcation of childhood is confirmed. And these cultural motifs still
circulate. Vulnerability, innocence, nostalgia for times past, or even nostalgia for times denied or
withheld by the actual conditions of our past childhoods—all these qualities inform contemporary
representations of childhood. In this way childhood becomes our past, beyond merely being a
period of life that all adults have gone through, but rather this comes to be filled with imaginary
investments that probably say more about the dissatisfactions with and insults of our current adult
lives under late capitalism than any childhood we actually had, or wished for as children. “Remember
that feeling of total control?” goes a car advertisement of the mid-1990s, interpellating
the subjectivity of the owner-driver to that of a little boy depicted playing with his toy car. In this
sense, there is danger in the sentimentality that surrounds representations of childhood. For it is
so replete with adult emotional investment that we threaten to overlook the actual conditions and
positions of contemporary embodied, acting children and young people.
Where these do impinge, the shattering of such ideal-typical representations can instigate bitter
vengeance. Children who transgress models of childhood suffer stigmatisation and vilification
to a degree that must tell us something about societal investments. Children who have sex, who
work, who are violent—that is, children who behave like many adults—far from being included
into the adult world are ejected from it. In Britain the public and policy response to the two child