ABSTRACT
For almost a century, childhood has been considered a universal and stable category that encompasses a chronological period of our life. Since the irruption of progressive pedagogies, schools and other public institutions have been organized upon a notion of the “nature of the child.” As other contributors to this book have argued, these claims to universality have had the effect of producing particular scripts for children, enabling certain practices and authorizing specific discourses about who is to be considered a “child” while disabling and repressing other discourses and practices (Baker, 1998; Hultqvist, 1998; Popkewitz, 1998; Walkerdine, 1990, 1997). Childhood has functioned as a regulatory ideal that prescribes a “self-regulating individual and a notion of freedom as freedom from overt control” (Walkerdine, 1990, p. 19). Yet this freedom is regulated, administered through minute devices that one learns from one’s own early experiences and continues doing so throughout the whole life. In the oxymoron of an administered freedom, one can trace the paradoxes faced by modern pedagogy (Donald, 1992).
