ABSTRACT
Societies and people organize themselves into interacting moral orders: families and schools, rich people and poor people, the educated and the uneducated, the child and the adult. Relationships between them are grounded in assumptions that justify the various social evaluations. Childhood is conventionally seen as a time of carefree, disorganized bliss. Children find themselves under constant surveillance. The fact that many children's games are often spontaneously produced, yet are passed on from generation to generation, and that their songs and stories are made to fit special selves must indicate the child's ability to be a serious, accountable actor. Insofar as a child is a member of the social life of the preschool, the more adultlike will be his, or her, behavior. The social life of the school, then, makes the child into a small adult. Name games - which take many forms - reveal another side of the child's serious self.
