Understanding Early Childhood : Issues and Controversies

Understanding early childhood 18/3/04 10:52 am Page 1 Understanding Early Childhood Early Understanding Penn Understanding Early Childhood Issues and Controversies Helen Penn Understanding early childhood Understanding early childhood Issues and controversies Helen Penn Open University Press Open University Press McGraw-Hill Education McGraw-Hill House Shoppenhangers Road Maidenhead Berkshire England SL6 2QL email: [email protected] world wide web: www.openup.co.uk and Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121-2289, USA First published 2005 Copyright © Helen Penn 2005 The views expressed in this publication are those of the editors and contributors and do not necessarily represent the decisions or the stated policy of the participating organizations of the European Observatory on Health Care Systems. All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd of 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1T 4LP. A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 335 21134 8 (pb) 0 335 21135 6 (hb) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data applied for Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in the UK by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow Contents Acknowledgements vii Preface ix 1 Remembering childhood 1 2 Researching reality 20 3 Not Piaget again 37 4 Genes, neurons and ancestors 61 5 On the other side of the world 90 6 Past, present and future 111 7 Children’s rights: a new approach to studying childhood 127 Priscilla Alderson 8 Hoping for health 142 Val Thurtle 9 Practice makes no difference 156 References 184 Index 194 Acknowledgements Priscilla Alderson is Professor of Childhood Studies, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, London University Val Thurtle is Senior Lecturer in Community Health Care, Faculty of Health and Social Care, South Bank University. Preface When one considers how many facts – habits, beliefs – we take for granted in thinking or saying anything at all, how many notions, ethical, political, social, personal, go to the making of the outlook of a single person, however simple and unreflective, we begin to realize how very small a part of the total our sciences – not merely natural sciences, which work by generalizing at a high level of abstraction, but the humane, ‘impressionistic’ studies, history, biography, soci- ology, introspective psychology, the methods of the novelists, of the writers of memoirs, of students of affairs from every angle – are able to take in. And this is not a matter for surprise or regret; if we were aware of all that in principle we could be aware of we should swiftly be out of our minds.1 I have written this book as a result of teaching courses on child development to undergraduates taking early childhood courses at the University of East Lon- don. I am very grateful to my students for being so patient as I explored my ideas – and prejudices – with them. The students I have taught have been mostly mature entrants, non-traditional students many of whom come from ethnic minority backgrounds. This year several students are in their fifties. Many of the students hold down jobs. They are nursery nurses or special needs assistants or childminders. They work in schools, day nurseries, family centres, neighbourhood nurseries, playgroups, or in out-of-school clubs or special schools. Some have unrelated jobs as security guards, or sales assistants, in order to finance their studies. Some have set themselves the goal of becoming teachers, and the early childhood degree offers them a route into teaching. They all have had a great deal of practical experience to draw on, but for many, there is a yawning gap between their experience and the academic expectations of a university. All the time they are concerned about relevance, the relevance of what they study to what they do. Moreover, in bringing up children all sorts of experiences matter, and ‘scientific’ understandings of childhood are only part of the story. As Isaiah Berlin’s quote above suggests, there are many facets of human experience which might be relevant in understanding everyday life. As he also said (in his very long-winded way), if understanding is confined to scientific generalizations, it misses what is most important about everyday life. It [scientific understanding] must necessarily leave out of account that vast number of small, constantly altering, evanescent colours, x PREFACE scents, sounds and psychical equivalents of these, the half-noticed, half-inferred, half gazed-at, half unconsciously absorbed minutiae of behaviour and thought and feeling which are at once too numerous, too complex, and too indiscriminable from one another to be identi- fied, named, ordered, reordered, set forth in neutral scientific lan- guage. [Yet] the more sensitively and sharply aware of them we are the more understanding and insight we are rightly said to possess.2 In this book I try to steer between two positions. I try to challenge some of the simplistic nostrums of policy and practice. I argue against the all-pervasive idea of ‘ages and stages’ or ‘developmentally appropriate practice’ that under- writes so much policy and practice in early years. At the same time, I recognize some of the important insights that have been gained by psychologists who study children directly. But I argue that child development is not enough. There is so much that it does not explain, and indeed cannot. Child development is problematical. It claims to be a science, but its scientific record is contradictory. It has not enabled us to make useful predictions about bringing up children, although it may have helped in treating highly specific disorders in children. In this account of early childhood, I aim to take a wider perspective and show what other disciplines and topics might also be relevant in studying children. In particular, children live in many different contexts, now and in the past. I have become convinced – as have many others – that child development, in so far as it exists at all as an underpinning discipline for working with children, is too narrow and confining. For example, it simply does not have the scope or methodologies to take account of the majority of the world’s children who live in poor countries. It cannot analyse the circumstances of their lives that are created by political and economic systems; and it ignores the relevance of these contexts. This distortion presents us with ethical as well as theoretical problems. It is important to know how children live in other countries, or how they lived at other times. People’s expectations of children and childhood have been, and continue to be, very diverse, and the differences are worth exploring. Every so often someone (re)discovers the brain and genetics. Perhaps these ‘hard sciences’ can help us make predictions where child development fails. Ideas about brain development and genetics have been used again and again over the past century in order to explain children’s behaviour. We are told that true understanding is just around the next corner. Brain research has been promoted in the field of early childhood in an extraordinarily propagandist manner. The claims of some psychologists are breathtaking. ‘We’ve learned more in the last 30 years about what babies and young children know than we did in the preceding 2,500 years.’ 3 Genetics too is used to explain behaviour. We are on the verge, so the PREFACE xi popular press declaims, of identifying all kinds of rogue genes that will explain good or bad behaviour, explain why we are fat, why we are thin, why we are brainy or why we commit crimes. Students of early childhood need to know the basis of these claims, if only to refute them. This book, then, takes a broad perspective about the contexts in which children grow and change. It explores some of the ideas, micro and macro, which may be of relevance in thinking about children and childhood and in working with young children. It has also left a lot out. It contains very little economic analysis. Yet inside and outside of the family, ideas about what children are worth, how that worth is rated against other expenditure, and what kinds of proofs of worth are necessary, are crucial in any arguments made for more, or better, provision for children. The position of those who care for and educate young children, the support they offer in the home or out of it, also has a value within the economy. An economy of children and childcare would make a substantial book in its own right. Nor have I included philosophy. The history and study of ideas is a basic curricular subject in every French child’s education. Philosophy was the pre- decessor of psychology and of so many of the sciences. Logic and ethics are central to philosophical enquiry. Being able to think logically and discuss the ethical implications of what you do and say are at the heart of wisdom. In the Early Childhood Development Studies Degree course at the University of East London we did at least glance at (a cartoon of) Descartes. His famous state- ment, ‘I think therefore I am’, has echoed through the centuries, and has certainly influenced how we think about ourselves and our actions.

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