Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

644 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
killers of two-year-old Jamie Bulger in 1993 was to render them monstrous, as outside humanity,
rather than as departing from cultural norms of childhood.
There is now a significant literature on the history of childhood as largely a modern invention,
with the contrasting modalities of modernity informing early educational philosophies. The
romance of the child as natural, closer to nature, gives rise to particular problems when children
act “unnaturally.” Clearly an ideological notion of “nature” is at work that covers over the violence
of its domestication and exploitation. And this is where educational and psychological models
fit well with broader discourses of “development.” For the discourse of development relies for
its benign mask upon a model of the developing subject as passive, compliant, and grateful for
its needs being attended to. While post-development theorists have amply highlighted how this
model warrants the oppression and exploitation meted out by international aid and development
policies, child activists have shown how Euro-US models of childhood at best fail to engage with
the key issues facing most of the world’s children and young people, and often in this process
simply pathologize them further.
The naturalised, and so presumed universalised, status of childhood plays an important role
within this dynamic, while such moves effect a harmonization between individual and national
interest and well-being, as in the Human Development Index formulated by the United Nations
Development Project in 1992 and used in its subsequent annual reports to measure disparities
between more and less “developed” countries.
The concept of human development ... is a form of investment, not just a means of distributing income.
Healthy and educated people can, through productive employment, contribute more to economic growth.
(UNDP, 1992, p. 12)
This device not only commodifies individual development as a condition of national development,
but also how this abstracts specific national economic trajectories from the ravages of
the international and multinational market, thereby eschewing the latter’s responsibilities for
“underdevelopment” or impoverishment.
EDUCATING THE CHILD
So the abstraction structured into the call to, or for, childhood is inevitably disingenuous. It
functions potently: to distract or displace attention from the actual child or children under scrutiny
to some distant other, (mis)remembered place, and through this, to designate the current challenges
surrounding children and childhood as deviations from this thereby naturalized condition. Indeed
it has been claimed that the introduction of compulsory primary level education—occurring in
the late nineteenth century across Europe—owed much to public concerns over threats to social
order because of the rise of an economically active and politically engaged generation of working
class young people. This is not of course to romanticise the kind of work (including its conditions
and level of remuneration) that children and young people were (and are) engaged in, but rather
to point to other motivations for the call to educate children. Indeed the very flexibility and in
some respects social irrelevance of the definition of childhood has contributed to the difficulty of
being able to interpret historical records for children and young people’s political involvements,
in the early factory strikes for example.
This is where we see the link between childhood as an origin state—whether of innocence or
sin—and childhood as a signifier of process and potential. Pedagogies, theories of teaching and
learning, subscribe to specific models of the student (and correspondingly also of the teacher).
The schooled child, unlike the working child, was positioned as without knowledge (and so
in need of teaching). The educational project then erased or pathologized the knowledge that