ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the controversies concerning children's autonomy in the field of education, and more specifically on those surrounding the notion of “structured” or “guided” autonomy, introduced by cognitive neuroscience, the most influential scientific approach in this field since the 2000s. Cognitive scientists are faced with opponents who denounce them as denying child autonomy and contributing to an authoritarian turn in education that imposes a highly directive pedagogy on students, parents, and teachers. Consequently, cognitive scientists are compelled to argue that it is not the idea of an autonomous child that they criticize but a particular kind of autonomy that has prevailed in the educational field over the last decades. Doing so, they elaborate an alternative definition of autonomy (“structured autonomy”) compatible with strong cognitive constraints on learning. The empirical study of the category of autonomy in the field of education shows that a sociological approach of autonomy today is not only about studying a set of well-defined practices, but also about analysing a moral principle and a social norm that structure and mediate the relations, and in particular the power relations, between individuals and social groups.
