ABSTRACT
Where did the modern child arise from? It was Rousseau who promulgated the manifesto of the child in modernity through Emile (1762), with its immanent, idealist, rational characteristics. Since that time western society, it is generally supposed, has not looked back. Rousseau forged an incontestable link between our understanding of the child and the emotions of the heart. He announced that humankind is naturally good and that it is only the constraints implicit in certain social structures or the corruption of some forms of social institutions that renders it bad. Children, who Rousseau regarded as the bearers of this ‘goodness’ in a primal condition, were properly to be educated and socialized according to ‘natural’ principles. Rousseau’s ‘savage’ (a being wholly without the anthropological connotations of primitiveness), is a child highly charged with dispositions to love and to learn, and equipped with the propensity to become a good spouse, parent and citizen. Such an ideal being, the very image of modernity’s child, is a stranger to avarice and is imbued with a natural altruism and
kindliness. More than this, Rousseau’s already overburdened creature is simultaneously the repository of all necessary wisdom. This child embodies an affective certainty which need not answer to objective, external criteria, and which is further insulated from scrutiny by Rousseau’s implicit relativism and thus privatization of beliefs. We witness here the distillation of the principle of ‘care’ governing the modern relationship between adults and children but more than this we see the inauguration of the powerful commitment to childhood, in western society, as a form of ‘promise’. A ‘promise’ of unimagined action, but also an extension of our own plans and a hedge against our own action as yet incomplete. Such a commitment has, for several generations, enabled us to indulge in pleasant reveries concerning tomorrow.
