The Death of Child Nature: Education in the Postmodern World.

Abstract

Mr. Elkind reviews the modern and postmodern conceptions of the child and the educational practices that follow from those conceptions. Becoming postmodern in education, he concludes, often means gaining a truer and deeper appreciation of the educational innovators of modernity. Every child, to paraphrase Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry Murray, is like all other children, like some other children, and like no other child.(1) Children are all alike in that they are members of the same species and share the same biological and physiological characteristics, walk upright, have the potential for speech, and so on. In this species sense, we can reasonably speak of the biological child who is like all other children. It is also true that only subgroups of children share the same language, culture, and physical environment. When considering children who are like some other children in this cultural/environmental sense, we can speak of the social child. Finally, each child is different from every other in his or her unique genetic endowment and in the particular circumstances of his or her upbringing. When we speak of children in this unique, individual sense, we might speak of the psychological child. Although it is unlikely that many would quarrel with this description of the three senses in which the term child may be used, the three are often confused, most notably in discussions of education. That is to say, individual psychological characteristics of children are often treated as biological universals. In the past, the belief in a universal psychological child (which I will simply refer to as a belief in child nature) had some positive consequences. It contributed, for example, to the provision of free public education. Today, however, this very same belief in a universal child nature has become a barrier to achieving an individually appropriate pedagogy for children in all their personal, ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity. In this article I attempt to substantiate this thesis. The critique of transcendent realities and overarching generalizations is a major thrust of the movement called postmodernism.(2) Although different writers define this movement in different ways, there is general agreement that many of the assumptions that fueled the modern view of the world were romantic ideals that now stand in need of correction. Postmodern critiques are already common in the arts, in architecture, in science, and in industry, but they are only now beginning to be heard in the social sciences and in education.(3) Even without invoking postmodernism, a few contemporary education reform initiatives challenge the conception of normative education tailored to the needs of a uniform child nature.(4) Likewise, a number of contemporary educational practices reflect postmodern conceptions. Nonetheless, the modern assumption of an archetypal psychological child dies hard and underlies practices that are contributing to educational dysfunction among large numbers of children. In the succeeding pages, I will try to illustrate some of the educational practices that derive from the modern conception of a common (psychological) child nature and that impede, rather than further, children's academic achievement. In preparation for that discussion, however, let me first briefly describe the major tenets of modernism and postmodernism and show how these differing paradigmatic assumptions about the world are reflected in the modern and postmodern conceptions of the child and in some of the educational practices that flow from them. That discussion will provide the context for a critique of those contemporary educational practices that remain wedded to a modern conception of a common child nature. Such practices miseducate children in the sense that they place them at risk with no purpose. Modernity, Child Nature, And Modern Education Modernity was built on three unquestioned assumptions about the word. …

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