ABSTRACT
Early childhood education has been long driven by the developmental ideas of theorists such as Piaget and Erikson, resulting in the image of childhood being conceptualized within a specific Euro-American socio-cultural context (see Chapters 8, 10). The separation of childhood and adulthood has also been traced back to events in fifteenth-century Europe when the invention of ‘moveable’ print and silent reading established a boundary between the inner and outer, or private and public, lives of people (Kennedy 1997). This created a new definition of the adult as a publicly seen modern, middle-class, well-mannered, and appropriately behaved entity. By definition, the new adulthood excluded children and became more distanced from childhood. Thus childhood emerged as a bourgeoisie construct that was exacerbated by the values of the Victorian era (Polakow 1982). But the concept of a universal childhood is a myth; rather it is a changing construct – defined and shaped by the socio-cultural context in which it is situated, which is why Philippe Aries argued for the importance of conceptualizing childhood as a social construction shaped by a society’s history, economics and institutional structures like schooling (Aries 1962). So also Corsaro (2005) urges the understanding of a contextualized childhood rather than viewing it as the individualized inner development of a child; and James and James (2008) argue for an interdisciplinary approach to study childhood’s different parameters. This deeper understanding of children’s development and childhood may be accomplished when guided by the representation of children and childhood in mythology, cultural history, the history of spirituality, art, literature, and education (Kennedy 1997). The resulting image of the child tends to reflect a culture’s deeper assumptions regarding human nature and the human life cycle. Children’s developmental trajectories and milestones within culturally diverse communities are variously prioritized and measured, and may be better understood and described using theoretical lenses other than existing frameworks. Ideas on how children grow and develop in culturally different contexts are critical to gaining a truer picture of child development, a deeper understanding of adult–child relationships, and more informed decision-making about pedagogy in contextually different classrooms. Perspectives on the realities of childhoods in different cultural contexts started making forays into child development scholarship within the last twenty years by way of studies conducted on early childhood aspects such as parent–infant interactions, language development, racial identity development, the nature and expression of play, and childrearing practices. Despite this, developmental theories dominant in the ‘West’ continue to inform early childhood policy and practice around the world. To support the thesis of this chapter it would be important to provide an example of how childhood and children have been historically perceived within a non-Western context, mapping the construction of development to the overarching cultural philosophy.
