ABSTRACT
We have already discussed the way that, as a reflective move, choice has been an integral part of modernity, reinforced by moral principles of freedom. And we have seen how, pace Kant, these principles have to be inculcated by the cultivation of the perfect self-will developed through the practice of spiritual self-purification and self-clarification (Hunter, 1995: 13). It should not surprise us that a problematisation of self-will has been an important aspect in the moral training of
children since the Enlightenment, or as one commentator puts it ‘from Locke to Spock’ (Hardyment, 1983). In seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, for example, the self-will of the child was explicitly recognised as a major problem which had to be controlled. In a letter from his mother outlining the ‘correct’ methods of child-rearing, John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, was reminded that self-will had led Adam astray and was at the heart of sin and misery in the world. Wesley’s mother’s advice on child-rearing was to ‘break their [children’s] wills . . . begin this work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, perhaps before they can speak at all’ (Cleverley and Phillips 1976: 22).
