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reading experience assignment
Raw
rotate.html
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<title> Rotate </title>
</head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="rotate_style.css">
<style>
</style>
<body>
<div id="stage">
<div class="shape circle"></div>
<div class="shape triangle"></div>
<div class="shape square"></div>
<div class="shape pentagon"></div>
<div class="shape hexagon"></div>
</div>
<div id="TextBox"></div>
<script>
$(".shape").click(function(){
$("#stage").addClass( "shrink");
});
$(".circle").click(function() {
$(this).toggleClass('circleMenu rotate').siblings().addClass('no-rotate').removeClass('rotate');
$("#TextBox").load("text1.html");
if($(".circle").hasClass("circleMenu")){
$(".triangle, .square, .pentagon, .hexagon").removeClass("triangleMenu , squareMenu, shrinking, shrinkh");
}
});
$(".triangle").click(function(){ //2nd text
$(this).toggleClass('triangleMenu rotate').siblings().addClass('no-rotate').removeClass('rotate');
$("#TextBox").load("text2.html");
if($(".triangle").hasClass("triangleMenu")){
$(".circle, .square").removeClass("circleMenu , squareMenu");
}
});
$(".square").click(function() {
$(this).toggleClass('squareMenu rotate').siblings().addClass('no-rotate').removeClass('rotate');
$("#TextBox").load("text3.html");
if($(".square").hasClass("squareMenu")){
$(".circle, .triangle").removeClass("circleMenu , triangleMenu");
}
});
$(".pentagon").click(function() {
$(this).toggleClass('shrinkp rotate').siblings().addClass('no-rotate').removeClass('rotate');
$("#TextBox").load("text4.html");
if($(".pentagon").hasClass("shrinkp")){
$(".circle, .triangle, .square").removeClass("circleMenu , triangleMenu, squareMenu");
}
});
$(".hexagon").click(function() {
$(this).toggleClass('shrinkh rotate').siblings().addClass('no-rotate').removeClass('rotate');
$("#TextBox").load("text5.html");
if($(".hexagon").hasClass("shrinkh")){
$(".circle, .triangle, .square").removeClass("circleMenu , triangleMenu , squareMenu");
}
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
Raw
rotate_style.css
@-webkit-keyframes rotate {
100% { -webkit-transform:rotate(360deg); }
}
@-moz-keyframes rotate {
100% { -moz-transform:rotate(360deg); }
}
@-o-keyframes rotate {
100% { -o-transform:rotate(360deg); }
}
@-ms-keyframes rotate {
100% { -ms-transform:rotate(360deg); }
}
@keyframes rotate {
100% { transform:rotate(360deg); }
}
@keyframes counterrotate {
100% { transform:rotate(-360deg); }
}
.circle{
width: 140px;
height: 140px;
border-radius: 70px;
background: #E6007E;
position: absolute;
top:25%;
left:70px;
-webkit-animation-name: rotate;
-moz-animation-name: rotate;
-ms-animation-name: rotate;
-o-animation-name: rotate;
animation-name: rotate;
-webkit-animation-duration: 4s;
-moz-animation-duration: 4s;
-ms-animation-duration: 4s;
-o-animation-duration: 4s;
animation-duration: 4s;
-webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-moz-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-ms-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-o-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-webkit-animation-timing-function: linear;
-moz-animation-timing-function: linear;
-ms-animation-timing-function: linear;
-o-animation-timing-function: linear;
animation-timing-function: linear;
}
.triangle {
width: 0;
height: 100;
border-left: 80px solid transparent;
border-right: 80px solid transparent;
border-bottom: 160px solid #F39200;
position: absolute;
top:25%;
left:290px;
z-index:1;
-webkit-animation-name: rotate;
-moz-animation-name: rotate;
-ms-animation-name: rotate;
-o-animation-name: rotate;
animation-name: rotate;
-webkit-animation-duration: 2s;
-moz-animation-duration: 2s;
-ms-animation-duration: 2s;
-o-animation-duration: 2s;
animation-duration: 2s;
-webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-moz-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-ms-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-o-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-webkit-animation-timing-function: linear;
-moz-animation-timing-function: linear;
-ms-animation-timing-function: linear;
-o-animation-timing-function: linear;
animation-timing-function: linear;
}
.square {
width: 140px;
height: 140px;
background: #FFDE00;
position: absolute;
top:25%;
left:530px;
z-index:4;
-webkit-animation-name: counterrotate;
-moz-animation-name: counterrotate;
-ms-animation-name: counterrotate;
-o-animation-name: counterrotate;
animation-name: counterrotate;
-webkit-animation-duration: 2s;
-moz-animation-duration: 2s;
-ms-animation-duration: 2s;
-o-animation-duration: 2s;
animation-duration: 2s;
-webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-moz-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-ms-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-o-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-webkit-animation-timing-function: linear;
-moz-animation-timing-function: linear;
-ms-animation-timing-function: linear;
-o-animation-timing-function: linear;
animation-timing-function: linear;
}
.pentagon{
width: 108px;
border-width: 100px 36px 0;
border-style: solid;
border-color: #91C998 transparent;
position: absolute;
top:37%;
left:758px;
z-index:4;
-webkit-animation-name: rotate;
-moz-animation-name: rotate;
-ms-animation-name: rotate;
-o-animation-name: rotate;
animation-name: rotate;
-webkit-animation-duration: 4s;
-moz-animation-duration: 4s;
-ms-animation-duration: 4s;
-o-animation-duration: 4s;
animation-duration: 4s;
-webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-moz-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-ms-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-o-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-webkit-animation-timing-function: linear;
-moz-animation-timing-function: linear;
-ms-animation-timing-function: linear;
-o-animation-timing-function: linear;
animation-timing-function: linear;
}
.pentagon:before {
content: "";
position: absolute;
height: 0; width: 0;
top: -170px; left: -36px;
border-width: 0 90px 70px;
border-style: solid;
border-color: transparent transparent #91C998;
}
.hexagon{
width: 150px;
height: 82.5px;
background: #009FE3;
position: absolute;
top:38%;
left:1000px;
-webkit-animation-name: counterrotate;
-moz-animation-name: counterrotate;
-ms-animation-name: counterrotate;
-o-animation-name: counterrotate;
animation-name: counterrotate;
-webkit-animation-duration: 2.5s;
-moz-animation-duration: 2.5s;
-ms-animation-duration: 2.5s;
-o-animation-duration: 2.5s;
animation-duration: 2.5s;
-webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-moz-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-ms-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-o-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-webkit-animation-timing-function: linear;
-moz-animation-timing-function: linear;
-ms-animation-timing-function: linear;
-o-animation-timing-function: linear;
animation-timing-function: linear;
}
.hexagon:before {
content: "";
position: absolute;
top: -37.5px;
left: 0;
width: 0;
height: 0;
border-left: 75px solid transparent;
border-right: 75px solid transparent;
border-bottom: 38.5px solid #009FE3;
}
.hexagon:after {
content: "";
position: absolute;
bottom: -37.5px;
left: 0;
width: 0;
height: 0;
border-left: 75px solid transparent;
border-right: 75px solid transparent;
border-top: 38.5px solid #009FE3;
}
#stage {
outline:1px #ccc ;
background: white;
position:absolute;
top:200px;
height:250px;
transition:all 0.5s;
transform-origin: 50% 0%; /* Chrome, Safari, Opera */
-webkit-transform-origin: 50% 0%; /* Chrome, Safari, Opera */
}
#stage.shrink{
position:static;
top:0px;
transform: scale(0.3); /* Standard syntax */
}
.shape:hover {
-webkit-animation-play-state: paused; /* Chrome, Safari, Opera */
animation-play-state: paused;
}
.no-rotate{
-webkit-animation-play-state: paused; /* Chrome, Safari, Opera */
animation-play-state: paused;
}
.rotate{
-webkit-animation-play-state: running; /* Chrome, Safari, Opera */
animation-play-state: running;
}
.no-rotate:hover {
-webkit-animation-play-state: running; /* Chrome, Safari, Opera */
animation-play-state: running;
}
.counterrotate {
animation-name:counterrotate;
}
.circleMenu{
width: 100px;
height: 100px;
background: white;
position: absolute;
top:25%;
left:70px;
border:15px #E6007E solid;
}
.triangleMenu{
width: 0;
height: 100;
border-left: 60px solid transparent;
border-right: 60px solid transparent;
border-bottom: 120px solid #F39200;
position: absolute;
top:25%;
left:290px;
z-index:3;
}
.squareMenu{
width: 110px;
height: 110px;
background: white;
position: absolute;
top:25%;
left:530px;
border:15px #FFDE00 solid;
}
.pentagon.shrinkp{
transform: scale(0.2);
position:fixed;
}
.hexagon.shrinkh{
transform: scale(0.5);
position:fixed;
}
#TextBox{
width:700px;
position: absolute;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
left: 0;
right: 0;
}
.text1{
font-family: Adobe Caslon Pro;
font-size:19px;
line-height: 32px;
text-align: left;
color: grey;
}
body{
background:#FEFDFF;
}
Raw
text1.html
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title> Childhood Definition </title>
<style>
.title{
font-family: Futura STD;
font-weight: bold;
font-size:29px;
line-height: 10px;
text-align: center;
color: #E6007E;
}
.author{
font-family: Futura;
font-weight: black;
font-size:13px;
line-height: 40px;
text-align: center;
color: #E6007E;
}
.text1{
font-family: Adobe Caslon Pro;
font-size:19px;
line-height: 32px;
text-align: left;
color: grey;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="textBox">
<p class="title">CHILDHOOD<br></p><p class="author">Karen Sánchez-Eppler</p>
<p class="text1">
"Childhood" is an ancient word in English, not a young one. The Oxford English Dictionary takes as its earliest example for "cildhad" an English gloss inserted during the tenth century between the lines of the Lindisfarne Gospels. The meaning expressed there appears consistent with the most literal strand of our contemporary usage: this passage from the Gospel of Mark ("soð he cuoeð from cildhad"; 9:21) employs childhood as a temporal marker: a father explains to Jesus that his son had been wracked by fits since the earliest years of his life. The miraculous cure Jesus performs stands as a test of belief and a compelling instance of the power of prayer. The gathered crowd, the disciples, and generations of interpreters since have voiced many questions about this scene and what it means, but no one questions the meaning of childhood. This apparent clarity-the confident unanimity over the implications and significance of "childhood"-is perhaps the most potent, and indeed dangerous, thing about this keyword. We have, it seems, a miraculous faith in childhood itself.
<br>
"The child, and stories about the child," Adam Phillips explains, "have become our most convincing essentialism" (1998). Ever since Philippe Ariès's (1962) provocative assertion that "in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist," historians of childhood, scholars of children's literature, even psychoanalysts like Phillips, have striven to dismantle the essentialism of childhood. These accounts stress the complicated relations, and often glaring contradictions, between any society's idea of childhood and the lived experience of actual children. They offer persuasive evidence both of how attitudes toward childhood have changed over time and place, and of how much the content and duration of this life stage has differed even for children in the same society but of different genders, races, or class positions. Such studies reveal that ideas about childhood frequently articulated differences of status: modes of schooling and play serve as prime markers of class identity, of differences between boys and girls even within the same family, of the transition from an agricultural to an urban/industrial economy, and of racial inequality. Changes in children's literature have not only reflected these various biases, but in many ways served to create and disseminate them. The different models of behavior and desire voiced in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868–69) and Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Story of a Bad Boy (1869) schooled their readers in gender norms, and in their realist detail these books have similarly informed historians' accounts of mid-nineteenth-century American girlhood and boyhood. The idea of the child is repeatedly made and remade in the stories told to children.
<br>
Yet despite such constructionist scholarship, the sense of childhood as a ubiquitous and fundamental category of human life has proved remarkably resilient. Belief in the universal and unchanging essence of childhood can make all sorts of cultural arrangements and power structures appear natural. The configuration of the family and of gender roles, the socializing institutions of education, class and racial formations, literary and other forms of cultural production, national security, religious and sexual virtue all tout the needs of the child. Seen this way, children appear less as the object of control than as a rationale for regulation in general. Worse, the concept of childhood dependency has frequently been used to naturalize a lack of autonomy, not only for the young, but for all sorts of subservient people. In cases of poverty, colonial status, and racial or gender oppression, analogies to childhood easily implement exclusion from civil rights. "If politics is ultimately about the distribution of power," Henry Jenkins argues, "then the power imbalance between children and adults remains at heart a profoundly political matter" (1998). The question persists: How and why do evocations of childhood succeed so often and so well in enforcing social norms and justifying social hierarchies?
<br>
I suspect the essentialism of childhood has proved this resilient and convincing because it rests, at least in part, upon biological fact. Unlike the months, or days, or even hours of dependency for most animals, human young require years of training and protection before they are capable of surviving on their own. The need for care is indeed a natural and essential aspect of children's lives, as is children's growing self-reliance. Young children everywhere must be fed, carried, taught to speak, and prepared to function appropriately within their particular social world (Stearns 2009). The complexities of the idea of childhood, and the conflicting ways this keyword has been wielded, all harken back to this sense of beginnings, to the general trajectory from dependency toward autonomy, but there consensus ends. Few areas of human life are at once so universally shared and so differently experienced and understood. Is the mewling infant darling or bestial, the roaming youth a crusader or a truant, the laboring child valued or abused, the child reader virtuous, imaginative, or indolent? Childhood may be widely recognized as a life stage that stretches from birth until the taking on of adult competence and responsibility, but its contours and meanings are deeply circumstantial, formed by the particulars of each historical and social situation, and the stories we tell about them. Perhaps it is because childhood simultaneously roots itself in both biological and ideological ground that it proves so potent a means of naturalizing cultural formations.
<br>
Changes in the status of children are notable for what they indicate about shifts in social priorities, that is, for what they reveal about alterations in the desires and behaviors of adults. Ideas of childhood, however, are not only an adult concern. Ethnographic projects with contemporary children and archival research on the diaries, letters, and school compositions that children produced in earlier periods have enabled scholars to measure the gap between children and childhood, not only interrogating how adults' ideas about childhood inform children's experiences, but also documenting children's participation in the discourses of childhood. The letters written to the Children's Aid Society by nineteenth-century street children skillfully manipulate the philanthropic rhetoric of vulnerable child waifs to serve their own, often oppositional, needs (Sánchez-Eppler 2005). Children's literature plays a powerful part in these dynamics, mediating between societal ideas and child actors. Charles Loring Brace's work with the Children's Aid Society inspired Horatio Alger, Jr.'s "rags-to-riches" tales, and the Society's lodging houses for newsboys happily stocked Alger's novels and used them to promote newsboy savings accounts and other improving habits such as reading. Ideas of childhood inform a broad array of practices, institutions, and ways of thinking about human identity; genre shifts within children's literature have both spurred and been spurred by such changes.
<br>
As the example of Alger suggests, books written for children remain one of the best gauges we have for a particular society's views of childhood, and one that we know children themselves engaged with directly. The books written for children instruct the young in how their particular culture understands their role. Literacy primers, school books, and conduct manuals were produced for young readers since at least the late Middle Ages, but until the eighteenth century most childhood reading was gleaned from books primarily intended for adults. The publication of literature explicitly for children burgeoned into a flourishing wing of the publishing business with John Newbery's line of "toy books" in the 1740s (Avery 1995). The success of Newbery's offerings depended upon a new conception of childhood, which presumed that children should be sufficiently literate and leisured to make use of such volumes, that children's skills and taste as readers would differ enough from that of adults to warrant such separate publications, and that enough parents would be interested in pleasing and instructing their children to make such a specialized line profitable. The collection of illustrated alphabet cards and other reading aids, including home-made story books, which Jane Johnson carefully created for her four children, predates Newbery's commercial publications by a few years and attests to the intense desire in such affluent households for materials that would make reading instruction pleasurable (Arizpe and Styles 2004). Thus the very notion that there should be books produced specifically for child readers in itself indicates a great deal about the evolution of the idea of childhood.
<br>
The gloss in the Lindisfarne Gospel treats childhood as an easy temporal marker, but the "when" of childhood has in fact proved remarkably variable. In medieval Europe the notion of the "ages of life" provided a familiar symbolic frame, neatly dividing the human life span into distinct periods with specific social roles and clearly defined expectations. Infancy and childhood inaugurated these iconic series, but such life stages were not understood as tightly correlated to chronological age (Ariès 1962). Gary Dickson (2009) argues that the twelfth-century "Children's Crusade" served as a means of marking the passage from pueri to adulthood in a social world in which merely growing older did not necessarily enable a shift of status, especially for the rural poor. Later bureaucratic and institutional structures would increasingly depend on the more precise divisions offered by years, flanking childhood with the question, "How old are you?" (Chudacoff 1989). Whether through the increasingly rigorous recording practices of parish and state registers of birth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the age groupings of graded classrooms that would become standard educational practice in the mid-nineteenth century, or the exacting calibrations of developmental psychology in the twentieth, chronological age-gauged in years, not skills or activities-has gradually become a bulwark of identity.
<br>
This attention to age has resulted in ever more normative claims about the temporal limits of childhood, although the slightest prodding reveals them to be shallow claims indeed. The child mill-workers and miners of the Industrial Revolution, whose small, dexterous fingers and capacity to squeeze down shafts too low or thin for adults turned these five and six year olds into arduous and cheap workers, labored during the very period when children in the middle and professional classes began taking on more years of schooling before employment (Tuttle 1999). Still, the conviction that childhood can be measured in years is one of the ways that assertions about the nature of childhood gain authority and the aura of universality. Anna Barbauld's Lessons for Children from Two to Three Years Old (1778) demonstrates that from the first decades of children's publishing a conception of childhood measured in years structured the market, even though it would be nearly a century before schools generally divided students and their lessons by age rather than ability (Chudacoff 1989). By the nineteenth century not only child readers, but also child characters were increasingly described by age-thus we are told that Alice enters Wonderland on her seventh birthday, and A. A. Milne merges child reader and child character in the identity of years: "now we are six."
<br>
Ariès (1962) argues that during the Middle Ages and early modern period, children might have been loved and cared for, but their lives were largely undifferentiated from those of adults. His account of the "invention of childhood" as a distinct social category during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries presents it as an idea constructed by historical forces in response to more general cultural needs; thus he shows the specific utility of the idea of the child as different from adults in sanctioning the learned classes now needed to train the young, and in privatizing the family now needed to protect the innocent. Although he tends to base his arguments on other evidence (how children are represented in paintings, the gradual creation of distinctive dress for the young, the way parents write about their offspring in letters and journals), clearly the rise of children's publishing near the end of this period confirms that such a transformation had indeed been achieved. In narrating how the concept of childhood was forged in early modern Europe, Ariès does not present a narrative of progress. The alternately "coddled" and "disciplined" childhoods that emerge have in their different ways lost much of the autonomy and latitude that he identified in the lives of premodern children. Thus the vulnerabilities associated with modern conceptions of childhood prove double-edged: they elicit tenderness and care, but they also disallow agency.
<br>
Most accounts of Euro-American conceptions of childhood note how the development of these ideas has followed a general trajectory from the stern and punitive to the doting and indulgent. Yet for individual theorists, and in the daily life of culture, any such tidy history of ideas has tended to mix and muddle in ambivalent practice. The concept of "infant depravity" expressed in John Wesley's insistent plea-"Do not give up your child to his own will, that is, to the devil. Though it be pain to yourself, yet ... make them submit" (1784)-expresses an understanding of childhood as a period of innate and inevitably sinful desires, but also gives voice to a desperate concern for children's ultimate wellbeing. Thus, accounts of shifts in the history of childhood that simply veer from a cruel reliance on the "rod" to a doting array of gifts and endearments mishear the anguished cherishing in these injunctions.
<br>
John Locke's (1690) depiction of the child as a tabula rasa, not already tainted by sin but simply waiting to be inscribed by experience, presents childhood in a manner both more benign and more passive than that offered by evangelical accounts of devilish will. Victorian child-rearing manuals would make Locke's epistemological thesis into a paean of malleability and a justification of parental authority: "Like clay in hands of the potter, they are waiting only to be molded" (quoted in Kincaid 1992, 90). Jean-Jacques Rousseau inverted the assumptions of infant depravity, instead declaring adulthood corrupt and the social world a sad decline from natural innocence. In Émile, or On Education (1762), Rousseau urged parents to "leave childhood to ripen in your children" (1979), but this idealization of childhood as a period of freedom and natural goodness did not actually grant children much latitude. Émile's tutor, after all, trusts to the boy's capacity for observation and induction, but the goals of this training remain firmly in the tutor's hands.
<br>
These competing theories of childhood seeded quite different assumptions about the most appropriate stories to tell to children, ranging from didactic to playful. Locke's image of the child's mind as a "white paper void of all characters" conflates child and page in a way that seems particularly illuminating for a discussion of children's literature, since it presents ideas and identity as not only strongly marked but powerfully embodied by the pages we read as children. The ideas of childhood proffered by Locke and Rousseau melded to disrupt older strategies of child-rearing, resulting by the mid-nineteenth century in an explicitly new set of goals for children's literature: "[W]e have ceased to think it the part of wisdom to cross the first instincts of children, and to insist upon making of them little moralists, metaphysicians, and philosophers, when great nature determines that their first education shall be in the senses and muscles, the affections and fancies" (Osgood 1865). Such changes in the content and purpose of childhood reading prove formative not only for the individual but for the culture. As Gillian Brown (2001) details, Locke's pedagogical models did as much as or more than his political theories to inform American revolutionary conceptions of governmental authority and consent. Similarly, Andrew O'Malley (2003) explains the genre shifts of children's literature from didacticism to humor, adventure, and fantasy in terms of political economy, suggesting that the moralizing children's books of the eighteenth century not just reflected but actually fostered the development of industrial capitalism, training docile workers and frugal masters. Thus, he suggests, the burgeoning of imaginative children's literature can be read as a sign of the secure triumph of the middle class, finally confident enough to play.
<br>
Children themselves participate in the construction of these different ideas of childhood, and these different attitudes toward children's books. Scraps of writing left behind by two young girls in mid-nineteenth-century New England articulate the change Osgood described and demonstrate the fluidity with which conflicting ideas about childhood can coexist even for children from fairly similar backgrounds. Lilly St. Agnan Barrett, whose father owned a dye house in Malden, Massachusetts (just north of Boston), penciled this pledge on a small piece of torn card: "I will try this day to live a simple sincere serene life; repelling every thought of discordant self-seeking an [sic] anxiety; cultivating magninimity [sic] self-control and the habit of silence; practicing economy cheerfulness and helpfulness" (c. 1856). Her hesitant handwriting and a vocabulary somewhat in advance of her spelling suggest she was probably somewhat under ten years old. Lilly's pledge charts the process of socialization to a docile domesticity, as she strives to subdue any discordant aspects of her childhood self. Eliza Wadsworth, the ten-year-old daughter of a successful farmer in West Hartford, Connecticut, added sly phrases in a small penciled script after many of the lessons in her Practical Spelling-Book (1861): "Do you not love bread and milk?" concludes the lesson entitled "The Grist-mill"; "No I'll bet I don't," writes Eliza. She inserts the simple words "no yes" beneath the book's printed question "Good boys and girls try to behave well at school because it makes their parents happy. Do you do so?" Eliza may not behave well at school, but she still makes her parents happy; splitting obedience from the notion of parental pleasure, she takes pride in willful rebellion and seems to suspect that her parents will too. The differences between these girls' understanding of their childhood role, and the divergent ways they deploy their fledgling literary skills, suggests the fluidity of cultural change and the function of reading and writing in the redefinition of childhood.
<br>
The mid-nineteenth-century flourishing of children's literature as a site for fantasy and play ultimately produced a sense of childhood less as a period of preparation for adult life than as a time magically and wonderfully separate from it-a period where, as Eliza seems to feel, the rules don't really apply. Childhood from this perspective appears so different from the rest of life that it becomes another place entirely. Virginia Woolf's lovely phrase for it-"that great cathedral space which was childhood" (1939)-is loaded with awe and beauty but also (this is Woolf, after all) with ironic pieties. All the magical places of children's literature (Wonderland, Neverland, Narnia, Oz, where the wild things are) understand childhood in these topical terms as someplace else, asserting a distance ripe for nostalgia. There is obvious class bias in the luxurious abundance of these fantasies, and indeed a way in which they sentimentalize and absolve inequalities, since even Hans Christian Andersen's destitute "Little Match Girl" can feel warmed by the glow of her imagination.
<br>
The sense of childhood as a time and space of enchantment intriguingly mirrors the development of psychoanalysis (Blum 1995). Psychoanalytic theory gave a new primacy to childhood as the origin of the adult self and its inchoate desires. In particular, Sigmund Freud's account of infantile sexuality and the processes of its repression served to equate the unconscious with childhood. Carolyn Steedman (1995) goes so far as to credit the figure of the child with grounding the modern concept of the self with its personal history and individual interiority. Thus, by the late nineteenth century childhood had become a locus of memory and imagination, a "secret garden," whose characteristics are in many ways shared with those of fiction itself.
<br>
At the beginning of the twenty-first century such an idealized romance of childhood appears to many cultural critics as something lost, or on the verge of loss. The hectic pace of modern life, the stress of high-stakes testing, the juvenilization of poverty, and the commercialization of desire all seem to threaten the sacred pastoral of childhood. Television and video games besiege the golden citadel of children's literature (Postman 1994), and the ravaged figure of the child soldier explodes the myths both of childhood adventure and of childhood security (Briggs 2005). Resisting childhood's essentialism, recognizing the constructed nature of this idyll, puts the language of crises in historical perspective. Pub signs and other commercial interests infiltrated alphabet primers from as early as the seventeenth century (Crain 2000), and as William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) insists, romantic celebrations of childhood were always shadowed by grim alternatives. Anne Higonnet (1998) urges that we replace the investment in childhood innocence with the recognition of the "knowing child," a figure aware of the world's threats and desires but still deserving of adult protection. We would do better at tending to the real needs and situations of children if we were to forgo our miraculous faith in any essential and singular idea of childhood. The historical record reveals the broad array both of ideas of childhood and of children's ways of living it. Contemporary "American society is unique in its assumption that all young people should follow a single, unitary path to adulthood," Steven Mintz observes with disapproval (2004). The plural "childhoods" could prove a more honest and productive keyword, and children's literature may help inscribe this change by telling an ever wider array of new and different stories.
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<p class="title">How children learn<br></p><p class="author">Sean Macblain</p>
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<strong>John Locke</strong>
Locke saw the primary purpose of education as being that of instilling within children a real and important understanding of the need for virtue, a consideration that currently lies at the heart of much of the thinking around social reform in the UK. Locke was also far ahead of his time in that he saw that learning should be enjoyable and that children benefit from being encouraged to learn how to learn. He also recognized the important role that language played in learning. Indeed, it can be said with confidence that Locke set out many of the basic foundations upon which our current understanding of learning has been built. Indeed, others such as Pestalozzi, Froebel, Dewey and Montessori who followed Locke shared much of his thinking. We now turn to the work of another influential philosopher who, in challenging the thinking of his time, saw the importance of acknowledging the individuality of children and the potential they bring with them when they are born. In doing so, he not only advanced our understanding of learning but introduced us to new ways of conceptualizing childhood as that most important of times when individuals grow and develop socially and emotionally.
<br>
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
Despite being born generations ago, Rousseau’s ideas still hold credence today. The dominant thinking of the time in which Rousseau lived was that we are born with ‘original sin’ and a primary function of education was to purge children of this sin and the associated guilt that went with it. In contrast, however, Rousseau believed that we are all born ‘good’ and that we inherit much of what makes up our individual potential. Nevertheless, he recognized that society also played an important role in influencing children as they develop. In particular, he recognized the potential harm that aspects of society could have on children in terms of perverting their thinking and behaviours.
Rousseau set out his ideas on education in his celebrated book Emile (1911) in which he introduces us to the life of a young boy named Emile as he progresses
from infancy through to adulthood. At the time of writing Emile it was popularly
believed that children were born with internal drives, needs and impulses, which
if not addressed could lead to ‘wickedness’. For Rousseau, a central feature of
education, and especially the role of a child’s tutor was to channel these drives,
needs and impulses in a positive and purposeful way. He believed that the process of formal education should endeavour to follow the natural growth of the child as opposed to demands made by society. Rousseau viewed the role of the tutor, therefore, as extremely important and central to the process of developing positive and effective learning environments, particularly where the child is being introduced to new learning. It was through this process that Rousseau believed children came to know and understand the world within which they live. More specifically, he believed that through this process children internalize greater understandings of such vital constructs as, respect for themselves and others, right and wrong, consequences of their actions, honesty and dishonesty, and humility and empathy. For Rousseau, the core function of education was, ‘
l’art de former des hommes’ (the art of forming men) and he viewed education as the mechanism through which children should not only be given information, but a means by which they could come to benefit society through, for example, learning how to positively and purposefully relate to one another.
Although writing some three hundred years ago, Rousseau recognized how chil
dren and young people pass through stages and in doing so recognized that learning is developmental. For Rousseau, the first stage that children went through was from birth to 12 when children were predominantly influenced by impulses and by their emotions. The second stage was up to the age of 16 when, Rousseau believed, reason took over and began to replace actions led by emotions and impulses. Following this second stage, the young person then moves into adulthood. It should be recognized that Rousseau’s emphasis upon the innate development of human nature formed the philosophical basis for the views of future thinkers and practitioners, perhaps most notably, those of Pestalozzi.
We now turn to the work of one of the great giants of learning, many of whose
ideas remain with us today to such an extent that they are experiencing a significant revival. Whilst most of Froebel’s work pertained to early childhood, he nevertheless contributed significantly, as did Rousseau, to our understanding of how early learning prepares us for later development and eventually adulthood.
Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852)
It can be said with confidence that Froebel has had an enormous influence upon the practice of teachers and Early Years practitioners over the centuries and continues to do so, even today. Indeed, Miller and Pound (2011, p. 64) recently commented: Froebelians continue to influence official documents in a behind-the-scenes way ... from the Hadow report (1933) onwards, through to Plowden (Central Advisory Council for Education,
1967);
Starting with Quality
(DES, 1990);
Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage
(DfEE,
2000);
Birth to Three Matters
(DfES, 2002);
The Early Years Foundation Stage
(CCSF, 2008).
Miller and Pound (2011, p. 64) have drawn further attention to the recent emergence of Froebel training, which they report as follows:
... the Froebel Certificates have recently been re-established at Roehampton University and
are developing in Edinburgh ... the next generation of Froebelians is emerging, trained, in
the practical apprenticeship way, in reflective practice through in-service training.
Practitioners owe much to Froebel’s emphasis upon the importance of play and its role in education as well as social and emotional development. Whilst all practitioners now recognize the value of play this was not always the case, and certainly was not the case when Froebel was developing his philosophy of education and his beliefs around the value of play. Froebel felt strongly that young children could express themselves through play and the extent of his contribution to our under standing of play is today widely recognized. Tizard and Hughes (1984, p. 4), for example, commented as follows:
The value of learning through play was first put forward by the German educationalist Friedrich
Froebel ... The kindergarten and nursery school movement which developed from his writings
freed young children from the tyranny of sitting in rows chanting and writing ABC.
In essence, Froebel saw play as being central to children’s learning and development. Because of his strongly held views about the importance of play he
created a range of special educational materials that could be employed by practitioners working with young children. These materials or gifts , as Froebel called them, included, for example, a range of shaped objects such as squared blocks and spheres, which could be used with the purpose of stimulating thinking and learning. Froebel also believed that being active was central to children’s learning and development and because of this he developed a number of what he referred to as occupations.
In addition, Froebel recognized the important role that music could play in the learning of young children and, in particular, the value of children singing whilst they were playing. Froebel has left us with not just an important way of thinking about education but also a legacy of how to work, in practice, with children. In many respects Froebel set the scene for those who followed to explore further, and in depth, the inner lives of children and, importantly, those emotional, creative and cognitive aspects that underpin learning and inform education and schooling. One such follower whose ideas, like those of Froebel, continue to influence practice today is Rudolf Steiner.
Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925)
The influence that Rudolf Steiner has had on our understanding of learning and
teaching has been substantial. This said, there are those who hold a less than
favourable view of him and his work has caused, and continues to cause, controversy amongst some practitioners. He has even been referred to as, ‘a maverick Austrian scientist’ (Edwards, 2002, p. 2). Currently, there are more than a thousand Steiner schools, and over two thousand Early Years establishments around the world. Despite the original philosophy remaining constant, however, many of these schools have developed in different ways.
A central feature of the Steiner-Waldorf tradition is the belief that young children
learn by imitation. Steiner founded his first school in the city of Stuttgart after being invited to do so by a leading industrialist, Waldorf Astoria, who at the time was the owner of a very large cigarette factory. The purpose of the school was to educate the children of the workers in the factory hence the legacy by which Steiner schools came also to be known as Steiner-Waldorf schools. A central feature of the Steiner-Waldorf tradition is the belief that young children learn by imitation. Miller and Pound (2011, p.88) describe this perception held by Steiner-Waldorf practitioners thus, ‘... and whatever is happening around the child becomes part of that child as she absorbs not only the outer actions of the adults, but the inner attitudes too’. The nature of the relationship between the practitioner and the child is of the utmost importance and central to the learning of the child. Miller and Pound (2011, p. 92) have commented as follows:
Steiner practitioners observe that young children are nurtured by the security of rhythm and
repetition – within which their inherent skills and abilities can flourish ... Having well thought
through and repeated routines build habits that are useful (properly washed hands), respectful
(creating a peaceful mood at the table) and comforting (‘this is how we always do it here’).
Steiner saw the function of education as that of responding to the changing needs of children and by this he not only meant their physical needs but also their intellectual needs and, perhaps most notably, their emotional needs. Underpinning the Steiner philosophy are the following key points. In the first years of a child’s education up to the age of seven significant emphasis is placed upon the importance of play, drawing and art, and the natural world of the children, with important links made between science and art. Before the age of seven children are not formally taught reading, the reasoning being that children will come to read naturally if they have developed socially and emotionally. This is also the case with mathematics, with children being introduced to formal mathematics at a later stage than children in state schools. The Steiner philosophy also advocates that children are taught to write before being taught to read. Children in Steiner-Waldorf schools are encouraged to sing every day and also to learn to play musical instruments. In addition, children are introduced to the practice of creating their own lesson books in which they are encouraged to write and illustrate. Assessment of children takes place mainly through the teacher’s observation, with a particular focus being given to the children’s social and emotional development. Where possible each child keeps the same teacher throughout their primary schooling until they are due to transfer to the post-primary stage. The thinking behind this is that children come to value the importance of relationships, and, in addition, gain from the knowledge that the teacher has of their social and emotional development.
A further characteristic of Steiner schools is that teachers employ a ‘narrative’
approach to learning. In doing so, they place significant emphasis on listening, with the children being encouraged to internally represent characters. In this way they develop their imagination. Once introduced to material by way of a story the children may then be encouraged and supported in revisiting the content on the next day and retelling it. Here, the aim is to improve spoken language and, perhaps more interestingly, memory. As this process of listening and recalling are worked through children are then supported in writing down their stories. Observation plays an enormous part in the practice of teachers in Steiner-Waldorf schools. Nicol (2010, pp. 85–6) has indicated some of the key principles that inform the
practice of the kindergarten teacher working in Steiner-Waldorf schools who:
... understands that learning and development is of course a continuous process, and may wait
patiently to watch these unfold ... uses insight rather than measurement: the question is: ‘Who
are you?’ rather than ‘What can you do?’ ... respects and refrains from hurrying the child’s
natural speed of development ... meditates on the child, holds the child in his/her thoughts (a
process termed as ‘inner work’) ... is aware of and engaged in his or her own self-development.
It is worth considering some of these key principles within the context of current practice in primary schools and Early Years settings. Steiner-Waldorf schools are currently undergoing something of an expansion in the UK. In a recent article (2012) in the UK daily newspaper The Guardian , the journalist Jeevan Vasagar reported that:
In England, Steiner education is on the brink of a significant expansion. At present, the acad
-
emy in Herefordshire is the only one to receive state funding out of 34 Steiner schools in the
UK. In September, it will be joined by a state-funded ‘free school’ in Frome, Somerset. Two
more Steiner schools – in Leeds and Exeter – are applying for state funding under the free
schools programme.
We now turn to the work of the McMillan sisters who were instrumental in
addressing some of the major social injustices of their time. In looking at the ideas of these two sisters it is worth reflecting upon the view that much-needed social reform is still required to ensure that children are not growing up in poverty, that children are not facing neglect and abuse and that they all have access to learning opportunities that will allow them to properly develop their potential and abilities.
Rachel (1859–1917) and Margaret (1860–1931) McMillan
To properly understand the contribution that Rachel and Margaret McMillan have made to our understanding of learning requires that we also understand the social world within which they lived and worked. London at this time was a city of marked contrasts between the rich and poor. It was a time of much-needed social reform and like many other industrialized cities of the time was characterized not only by extreme wealth and privilege but also by extreme poverty, poor sanitation, high mortality rates in childhood, appalling housing, and some of the worst slums in Europe. Between 1831 and 1866 around 150,000 individuals died of cholera. Londoners living during the 1840s could have expected a life span of 30 to 40 years, whilst by 1911 they could, on average, expect to live until they were in their fifties (Hall, 1998, p. 695). It has been estimated (Horn, 1997) that between 1900 and 1950 there existed within London around 30,000 homeless children who lived on the streets. These children were typically, undernourished, uneducated and unsupervised. It was not until 1899, 10 years after Rachel had moved to London to be with her sister and the first murders of the infamous Jack the Ripper had been reported, that school attendance was made compulsory.
After a sustained campaign the sisters were successful in their quest to have free
school meals for children introduced, which followed the passing of the Provision
of School Meals Act in 1906. It is interesting that this is now a topic under discussion
by many local authorities in the UK. The sisters were also highly influential in having the government introduce medical inspections for children in schools, with the first clinic opening its doors in 1908. Rachel and Margaret were particularly outspoken in their insistence that the first years of a child’s life were of the utmost importance and, true to their belief, they founded what was to become the Nursery Movement. As part of their determination to alter for the better the lives of children, they emphasized the benefits of open-air learning. In many respects this was in response to the overcrowded and filthy living conditions experienced by the thousands of children growing up and being educated in cities. In 1904 Margaret published Education through the Imagination, and in her later years played an influential role in the training of teachers. She went on to found the Rachel McMillan College in 1930 for this purpose and as a means of improving the training of those wishing to work with young children in her nurseries. Like Margaret, Rachel believed that involving children in nurseries with caring for animals and plants was an important means of developing within them the important values of caring not only for themselves but also for others.
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<p class="title">PLAY<br></p><p class="author">Peter K. Smith</p>
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This entry reviews the main different types of play, and the kinds of developmental benefits they may bring to children. The ubiquity of play in childhood (and in most species of mammals when young) strongly suggests its benefits for development, but what these benefits are, and how important or essential they are, are still debated. Classic perspectives on the development and function of play can be found in the writings of Piaget and Vygotsky. Let us begin by tackling the issue of what constitutes play, and then turn to how it undergoes age-related changes.
<br>
Play is often defined as activity that is both done for its own sake, and characterized by ‘ means rather than ends’ (i.e., the process of the play is more important than any end point or goal). These criteria contrast play with, for example, exploration (which may lead into play as a child gets more familiar with a new toy or environment), with work (which has a definite goal), and fighting (different from play fighting as discussed later). Additional characteristics of play are flexibility (objects being put in new combinations, roles acted out in new ways), positive affect (children often smile and laugh in play, and say they enjoy it), and pretence (use of objects and actions in non-literal ways).
<br>
Although classifications differ, the following main types of play are well recognized: object play, pretend play and sociodramatic play, and physical activity play (exercise play; rough-and-tumble play). Of these, object play and physical activity play are seen widely in other species of mammals. Pretend and sociodramatic play are only seen in humans, apart from some possibly very elementary forms of pretence in great apes. Besides play, there is the related concept of games. Games with rules are more organized forms of play in which there is some goal (e.g., winning the game) and are not reviewed further.
<br>
Object play starts in infancy and may help children develop creative problem-solving skills. Researchers such as Jerome Bruner and Kathy Sylva have reported experiments with children in which they are given a chance to play with objects, then solve a task. Those with the play experience solved the task better. However, subsequent research has suggested that instruction can often be equally effective (Johnson, Christie, & Yawkey, 1999). The benefits of play need to be balanced against those of instruction, bearing in mind the ages of the children, the nature of the task, and the specificity of the learning expected - whether for specific skills or a more generally inquisitive and creative attitude.
<br>
Pretend play develops from about 15 months, with simple actions such as ‘ pretending to sleep’ or ‘ putting dolly to bed,’ developing into longer story sequences and role play. Much early pretend play can be with parents, and older siblings. In Western societies especially, it is common for parents to model or ‘ scaffold’ early pretend play actions. By 3 to 4 years, pretend play becomes common with same-age peers.
Pretend play among children is seen very widely in different societies. It is often imitative of adult roles (e.g., in rural societies, children may play at ‘ herding cattle’ with stones and at ‘ pounding maize’ with sticks and pebbles). Such play might be considered as ‘ practice’ for the adult activities concerned. However, rather more ambitious developmental benefits for pretend play have been put forward.
Leslie (1987) argued that pretend play is an early indicator of theory of mind abilities. In simple object substitution pretence, the knowledge or representation that ‘ this is a banana’ becomes ‘ this banana is a telephone.’ Correspondingly, in theory of mind, the representation that ‘ this is a banana’ is related to the representation that ‘ X believes that the banana is a telephone.’ Leslie argued that this similarity suggested that pretence might be very important in theory of mind acquisition. However, this early pretend play before 3 years is often very imitative, and it is not clear whether a young child who talks into a banana is actually having the cognitive representations that Leslie describes, or is simply imitating what older children or adults do. The nature of any relationship between pretend play and theory of mind is still disputed.
<br>
Sociodramatic play - defined in terms of social play with others, sustained role taking, and a narrative line, this is something that children from about 3 years of age engage in a lot. Such play can be quite complex, involving an understanding of others’ intent and role, sophisticated language constructions, and the development of sometimes novel (sometimes less novel!) story lines. Smilansky (1968) suggested that sociodramatic play assists language development, cognitive development, creativity, and role taking. She also claimed that pretend and sociodramatic play were less frequent and less complex in disadvantaged children. This led her and others to develop play tutoring (intervention by an adult) to raise levels of these kinds of play; adults would provide suitable props, visits, etc. and encourage the sociodramatic play of children in nurseries and kindergartens, such that subsequently they became more able to sustain this play themselves.
Smilansky's ideas about the value of sociodramatic play were tested by a number of experimental studies, including play-tutoring studies. In these, a group or class of children that received play tutoring were compared with those who did not. Generally, the play-tutored children improved more on measures of cognition, language, and creativity, apparently supporting Smilansky's views.
A number of critiques were made of these studies. Many of them pointed to flaws due to selective interpretation of results, effects of experimental bias, and the use of inappropriate control groups. For example, in the traditional play-tutoring study, the play-tutored children received more stimulation and adult contact generally, so one cannot really conclude that it is the extra play that brought about the developmental benefits. Further studies took account of these criticisms. This step included balancing play-tutoring with skills tutoring (e.g., coloring, picture dominoes) and assessing outcomes blind to the child's treatment condition. Doing so failed to reveal many differences (P. K. Smith, 1988), which suggests that benefits of socio drama tic play need not be essential for development. Nevertheless, play-tutoring does work out as equal to skills tutoring in many domains, and it is generally enjoyable and sociable for children in the preschool years, so there are sound reasons to encourage it in the nursery curriculum.
One kind of pretend play, often not encouraged in nurseries, is war play, which is pretend play with toy guns or weapons, or military action figures. Many educators believe that this play encourages real aggression, though others emphasize its pretend nature and feel that no real harm results from it.
Physical activity play
This refers to playful activity involving large body activity, particularly exercise play that includes running, climbing, and other large body or large muscle activity, as well as rough-and-tumble play, that covers play fighting and play chasing. These forms of play have been reviewed by Pellegrini & Smith (1998).
<br>
Exercise play increases in frequency from toddlers to preschool children, peaks at early primary school ages, and then declines. Young children seem to need opportunities for physical exercise more than older children, and are more likely to get restless after long sedentary periods and to run around when released from them. Boys do more of this kind of play than girls. It is often hypothesized to support physical training of muscles, for strength and endurance, and skill and economy of movement. Another hypothesis is that exercise play encourages younger children to take breaks from being overloaded on cognitive tasks (the cognitive immaturity hypothesis). The argument here is that younger children have less mature cognitive capacities, so benefits of concentrating on a cognitively demanding task decrease after a shorter time than for older children. The ‘ need’ to exercise thus helps children ‘ space out’ these cognitive demands.
<br>
Rough-and-tumble play seems to increase from toddlers through preschool and primary school children, to peak at late primary age, and then decline in frequency. It takes up some 10 percent of playground time, though varying by the nature of the surface, physical conditions, etc. Boys do more than girls, especially play fighting. Rough-and-tumble play looks like real fighting, but can be distinguished from it by several criteria.
Most children can distinguish playful from real fighting, and from 8 years give similar cues to those described in Table 1. In one study, English and Italian children were found to be accurate in judging videotapes of play fighting and real fighting, irrespective of which nationality they were watching.
During the primary school years, only about 1% of rough-and-tumble episodes usually turn into real fighting, although many teachers and lunchtime supervisors think it is as much as about 30%. However, ‘ rejected’ children (those disliked by many peers and seldom liked much) more often respond to rough-and-tumble aggressively (around 25% of episodes). So, it is possible that teachers or lunchtime supervisors are making general judgments about children, based on these ‘ rejected’ children who may be taking up a lot of their supervisory time.
Rough-and-tumble is often between friends. By early adolescence, however, there appears to be some change, with dominance/status becoming important in choosing play partners, as well as friendship, with a greater risk of play fights turning into real fights. It is hypothesized that rough-and-tumble play in younger children may (in addition to benefits of exercise play) provide practice in fighting/hunting skills, at least in earlier human societies. By adolescence, however, it may involve dominance relationships (e.g., using rough-and-tumble play to establish or maintain dominance in the peer group).
What do children learn from play?
Evolutionary arguments suggest that the propensity to play has been selected for, so we can expect there to be benefits to playing, and that these may vary by species, and by types of play. There can be a lot of incidental benefits to play such that it keeps children active and provides them with opportunities to encounter new situations. With human children, and with object, pretend, and sociodramatic play, there may be a balance to draw between benefits of playing and of instruction. Instruction can be more focused on a precise goal, but play is often more enjoyable for young children and, even if less efficient for a precise goal, may foster a more generally inquisitive and creative approach to problem-solving.
<br>
Among the theoretical issues in play research remaining unresolved, two are currently especially noteworthy. The first relates to rough-and-tumble play. We know that this is primarily friendly and non-exploitative in preadolescents, but how does this change as children move into adolescence? Does the function of this form of play then change and, in particular, is it used for purposes related to dominance, especially for boys? The second issue relates to pretend play. An earlier phase of research queried the findings from play tutoring studies, but, more recently, pretend play has been proposed as an important component of developing a theory of mind. Greater conceptual clarity and empirical evidence are called for here, together with a willingness to learn from the problems encountered in the earlier studies (e.g., experimenter bias).
Amongst practical issues, the issue of war play continues to be debated in early education. There have been moves to ban war play in many nursery schools; however, there is also a recognition that such play may be generally harmless in itself and a rather natural play format, especially for boys (Holland, 2003). Regarding educational practice through the school years, there has been a general movement toward shortening or eliminating playground breaks. However, leaving aside social benefits of playtime, the benefits for physical activity and for providing breaks between instruction (cf., the cognitive immaturity hypothesis), argue for retaining playground breaks. More systematic study is still needed in these areas.</p>
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<p class="title">Play in Early Childhood Education<br></p><p class="author">James E. Johnson, Serap Sevimli-Celik, Monirah Al-Mansour</p>
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Play in early childhood education (ECE) is a very broad topic that continues to generate much discussion and debate. Slogans such as “play is the business of childhood” or “play is the child's way of learning” are still heard but they are becoming less convincing. Voicing slogans such as these often encourages those who are opposed to play in education to dismiss it on the grounds that the idea seems too broad and vague to be a valid and useful basis for teaching and learning. It doesn't help when ECE programs claiming to be play-centered lack a thoughtful rationale for their play policies and practices or when low-level, unchallenging activities called “play” abound in their indoor and outdoor environments. This threatens the place of play in the ECE by inviting misguided attacks on it and by encouraging educators to devalue play's importance as a context and medium for development during the early years (Zigler & Bishop-Josef, 2004).
Even though play in the history of ECE has been viewed favorably as a cornerstone of learning (e.g., Froebel, 1887/1896; Pestalozzi, 1894/1915; Piaget, 1970; Vygotsky, 1978), there have always been its critics who advocate for more structured and direct instruction. Recently, however, the debate has intensified in an educational context strongly influenced by early learning standards and assessment of academic attainments (Christie & Roskos, 2007). Greater concern exists that play in ECE is slipping away and that a vigorous response is now needed to protect its important role (Miller & Almon, 2009). Three ways to make such response are to employ contemporary scholarship to better explain: (a) the nature of play, (b) the importance of play, and (c) play pedagogy.
The Nature of Play
Various attempts have been made over the years to understand play and its role in ECE, and these have assumed great importance in efforts to improve play's status in the field and in the public eye. For example, DeVries (2001) recommended that much of what children do in ECE classrooms should be called “work activities,” which would include construction, exploring, investigating, problem-solving, and experimenting. Pretending and group games remain play forms. She recommended that teachers include in the curriculum high quality, intellectually challenging projects that stimulate social, emotional, moral, and intellectual development. Also for Elkind (2001), play is not the same as work in ECE. The confusion concerning play and work to some degree may be attributed to Maria Montessori (1912/1964, p. 53), who said that play is the child's work. Play is not work, nor is it the opposite of work.
Elkind sought to correct this misunderstanding by advancing the Piagetian view that play and work are complementary, two poles of an adaption process which requires both assimilation (play) and accommodation (work). Exploration and imitation, including exploratory play and imitative play, are more accommodative or stimulus-oriented. Play is more response-oriented, where personal meaning is more important than adjusting to external realty. Typically, a child's behaviors can be described as a mixture or a sequencing of “work” and “play,” but the two states should not be lumped together or viewed as opposites. Play and work function together in serving the child in adapting to and learning from experiences. ECE activities for children have structure with degrees of play and work. Hardly ever would one label something that a child does as pure work or pure play.
Since ECE is concerned with the development of young children, a question to answer is how play can be a positive influence. To answer this question demands that play be appreciated as a complex and highly differentiated phenomenon. With its definition problematic, teachers and researchers often have used an additive model in which the following criteria are considered when judging whether play is occurring: (a) nonliterality, (b) positive affect, (c) process over product orientation, (d) intrinsic motivation, and (e) free choice. Applying these can help distinguish play from work, routines, rituals, and play-related behaviors like exploration and imitation (Johnson, Christie, & Wardle, 2005).
Analysis of play is made on the basis of what is known about contexts, children's actions, and their inferred mental states. A useful distinction to make is between play frame or context (surrounding the play episode) and play script or text (within the play episode). The ECE teacher or researcher can keep separate metaplay negotiations or play disruptions (e.g., teacher intrusions or children's conflicts) which snap the play frame, from enactments occurring during play episodes. Observing and understanding play requires recognizing its multilayered qualities and synthesizing information about person, object, space, time, and situational factors.
Play enactments can be coded with respect to levels or forms exhibited. Many systems have been used in research and teaching. Prominent exemplars include Parten (1932) for level of social participation during play (e.g., solitary, parallel, associative, cooperative, onlooker, unoccupied); and for cognitive forms of play there are Piaget's (1962) sensorimotor, symbolic, and games with rules and Smilansky's (1968) functional, constructive, dramatic, and sociodramatic play. Cross-walking level of social play and type of cognitive play is common, having been first introduced by Rubin, Maioni, and Hornung (1976). In addition to classification, play behaviors of young children can be evaluated. As an early example, Smilansky (1968) used two criteria for crediting more mature sociodramatic play in relation to dramatic play: social interaction and verbal communication. Both dramatic play and sociodramatic play included role-play with respect to self and others, object and situation transformations, and persistence (at least 10 minutes). More recently, Bodrova (2008) discussed evaluating mature versus immature play using criteria such as: (a) ability to sustain a specific role by consistently engaging in actions, speech, and interactions that fit the character enacted; (b) ability to use substitute or pretend objects; (c) ability to follow rules associated with the make-believe scenario; and (d) ability to integrate many themes and ideas and sustain play over time spans of several days or weeks. Immature play is repetitive, dependent on concrete props, lacking in role enactment, including the presence of peer conflicts, not following implicit or explicit play rules, and simple or unelaborated content in play episodes of short duration. Schemes are used to score levels of other specific play forms, such as constructive block play (Forman, 1982).
Play evaluation is needed to gauge what children are doing so that teachers can then guide them toward more mature, developmentally enriching play. Descriptions of play need to retain action sequences and contextual information. Deliberate attention must be paid to children's goals, means for reaching them, and their understanding. With careful observations of play the teacher is better prepared for deciding on appropriate interventions (Johnson et al., 2005; Van Hoorn, Nourot, Scales, & Alward, 2010).
Importance of Play
The significance of play in ECE is recognized internationally and testimonies to its place in young children's development and well-being are based on considerable theoretical and empirical evidence as well as teacher lore and ideology (e.g., Dockett & Fleer, 1999; Johnson et al., 2005; Pellegrini, 2009; Wood & Attfield, 2005). Teachers’ and parents' funds of knowledge about play and their skill in performing various adult roles to foster mature play are important factors in efforts to promote school readiness and continued learning in young children through providing them with effective play-based ECE curriculum and instruction. Teacher and parent beliefs about play and its importance have been studied over the years (e.g., Bennett, Wood, & Rogers, 1997; Fisher, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Gryfe, 2008; Kemple, 1996).
According to the neo-Vygotskian cultural-historical approach, as represented by Leont'ev (1981), pretend play is the “leading activity” in child development during the first five years (the most important activity psychologically but not the most common), but schoolwork is the leading activity for 5- to 10-year-old children (middle childhood). Hence, play and play pedagogy for the two age groups are similar but also fit differently into the child's development and learning over the range of years of ECE (birth to 8 years old). Contemporary research supports the importance of play during the early years in numerous areas of growth and development including: (a) self-regulation, social competence, and early academics; (b) physical well-being and fitness; and (c) problem-solving and creativity.
Self-Regulation, Social Competence, and Early Academics
Self-regulation is an executive function process of exercising control over one's emotions, cognitions, impulses, and actions. Mature play entails self-regulation in that it is purposeful and requires inhibition of inappropriate responses, the regulation of attention, and working memory in the service of organizing, sequencing, switching, and planning behaviors. Another component of self-regulation is theory of mind (e.g., perspective taking, emotional understanding). Vygotsky (1978) argues that play can help develop self-regulation when children create an imaginary situation, take on and act out roles, and follow rules implicit in the play scenario. Although mature role play has received a great deal of attention as a means of developing self-regulation (Bodrova, 2008), other play forms including games, constructive play, and physical play share this potential (Bodrova & Leong, 2007; Riley, San Juan, Klinkner, & Ramminger, 2008). Both social competence and early learning of academic content hinge upon the ability to be focused and maintain self-control, which themselves are strengthened by mature play.
Active experiencing found in good play stimulates the maturation of executive function occurring in the prefrontal cortex of the brain (Diamond, Barnett, Thomas, & Munro, 2007). Play can foster a sense of control and self-regulation of one's own learning. During play children set their own challenges and determine their own attention and plans. These cognitive mechanisms can contribute to effortful, intentional use of imagination, creativity, and problem solving. Children create their own zone of proximal development and are self-scaffolded in play; during play children transcend the concrete here and now and use abstract thought and build symbolic competence (Vygotsky, 1978). Recent research has documented relations among play, self-regulation, and executive function in young children.
For example, Whitebread (2010) found that self-regulatory skills could be facilitated in 3- to 5-year old children through a variety of playful activities designed by 32 teachers in England. These activities included constructing a model, dressing a doll, and playing board and card games, either with peers or adults. Behaviors were rated as higher in metacognitive or self-regulatory quality when they happened in a social context characterized by extensive collaboration and talk. Analysis of 582 play episodes showed that adult questioning had a slight positive impact on what children could say about their own learning, but this greatly depressed children's self-regulation and motivation. Supporting play in educational settings to achieve self-regulation requires a mix of adult emotional support, children's initiation and feelings of control, cognitive challenges in the play activities, and private speech and collaborative talk to bring about learning and metacognitive awareness. In an important study, Diamond et al. (2007) tested 147 prekindergarteners in state funded programs and found that the Tools of the Mind curriculum, based on 40 activities that promoted executive functioning (including mature dramatic play), led to improved cognitive control at the end of the second year of the program on the Dots and Flanker tasks, Stroop-type measures of executive function (see Diamond et al., 2007 for task descriptions).
Social competence includes ability and willingness to engage in socially responsible behavior as well as in positive social play with peers. Both involve emotional regulation and perspective taking. Elias and Berk (2002) found that middle class 3- and 4-year-olds who engaged in more mature sociodramatic play were more cooperative during circle and clean-up times than were children with lower scores on the play measures, controlling for verbal ability and initial self-control scores. High impulse children as scored at the beginning of the school year, who engaged in complex sociodramatic play, improved the most in clean-up performance over the course of the year.
Peer interactions in open-ended play also benefit social skill learning, cooperation, and building confidence in dealing with other children. Broadhead, Howard, and Wood (2010) reported that when play is thematically driven by young children and they are able to follow their own interests and plans there is more cooperation, rich language use, problem-solving, and reciprocity. Her Social Play Continuum tool is used by teachers and researchers to quantify but also locate and reflect upon peer play in the associative, social, highly social, and cooperative domains. Broadhead et al. also employed teacher-initiated and teacher-directed activities where children are shown that their play is valued. For example, if less mature social play is performed by older children, the teacher would wait until after the play is finished before engaging in discussions with them about it. This collaborative approach to play observation, intervention, and reflection aims to help teachers create a more harmonious classroom atmosphere where quality play can flourish. This sensitive child-centered approach to social play and building and respecting classroom community is similar to Rogers and Evans (2008) who used child focus groups to capture an insider's view of role-play. Child initiated and adult guided play aims to build self-regulation and social-emotional competence; mature play which is related to these two important attributes is viewed as a means to prepare children for academic achievement.
Play that strengthens self-regulation and increases social competence in young children helps them in attaining school readiness and subsequent classroom success. Play of this kind is important because it makes it more likely that children with this play background will be able to demonstrate social and emotional skills necessary for performing the student role. Taking turns, following directions, and other basics of school life depend on having these general skills. Play also is valuable during the preschool years for its benefits to emerging literacy and numeracy, and helping children do well in these high intensity academic areas (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk, & Singer, 2009).
Research over past decades supports the importance of mature play for language and early learning (Christie, 2010; Roskos & Christie, 2004). Literacy rests on language and representational or symbolic competence in general. Play benefits these foundations as well as early literacy in the areas of alphabet knowledge, concepts about print, oral language, and comprehension, and phonological awareness. Roskos and Christie (2004) reviewed considerable research on the topic and concluded that play promotes literacy because play uses language and symbols and aids in children's making connections between oral and written media. As an example from many studies that could be mentioned, Dickinson and Tabors (2001) followed 74 low-income family 3-year olds over several years, and reported significant associations between children's talk during play and their later literacy scores. Note also that the play pedagogy techniques described later in this chapter, such as Paley's narrative approach, attest to and capitalize on the close affinity among play, stories, and literacy.
The play-math connection is a second critical area that has caught researchers’ attention in recent years. Young children encounter many opportunities to acquire knowledge and develop math skills in their everyday activities, including their play. Ginsburg (2006) noted the potential for reading and book use to help children learn about perspectives, angles, covariation (e.g., the Three Bears and their bed sizes corresponding to their body sizes), numbers, and so forth. Block play invites considerable opportunities to develop spatial knowledge; play with small objects encourages counting, patterning, and grouping. Ginsberg's Everyday Math curriculum is developmentally appropriate with use of materials and physical actions, and balances play with more direct instruction. When teaching is not play per se, it can at least be playful.
Numerous other studies indicate support for the relation of play with emerging spatial and quantitative concepts in young children. Again, spontaneous child initiated play and adult guided play are shown to be valuable. Ness and Farenga (2007) cover a broad range of topics concerned with spatial concepts, including architecture. Gelman (2006) showed the motivating power of play; children learn and use math skills when they are embedded in a game more than when they are not. Ramani and Siegler (2008) showed that a relatively brief intervention with at risk preschoolers using the game “Chutes & Ladders” promoted their number line estimation ability, knowing the numerals, counting, and quantity. Worthington (2010) reported that during play young children invent math symbols and develop their imaginations and mathematical graphics, such as gestures to stand for the “take away” sign.
Physical Well-Being and Fitness
Play is an essential part of physical development and it helps to develop active and healthy bodies especially important in fighting against the obesity epidemic. According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC, 2009), obesity prevalence among low-income, preschool children has increased gradually from 12.4% in 1998 to 14.5% in 2003 and to 14.6% in 2008. In a longitudinal study, Taylor et al. (2009) described patterns of physical activity and inactivity of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. They reported an increase in screen time and a decrease in physical activity, especially for 4- and 5-year-olds. Another recent study investigated physical activity of young children and playtime practices and policies in 96 childcare centers in North Carolina. The results of the study showed that few best practice guidelines were followed by a majority of the participating centers. Only 13.7% of childcare centers in North Carolina offered 120 minutes of active playtime during the school day (McWilliams et al., 2009).
Through play and exploration of the environment, children practice physical skills such as running, jumping, hopping, skipping, and galloping. By exploring and experimenting with the movement capabilities of their bodies, young children start to be aware of their personal spaces in relation to other persons’ spaces; and children begin to gain more control over their bodies (Gallahue & Ozmun, 1998). Activities such as pulling, pushing, swinging, and hanging help children to develop their upper bodies; and their lower bodies develop through jumping, skipping, galloping, and hopping. These fundamental movement skills also improve children's body awareness (Sanders, 2002). Moreover, they have to be mastered before learning more complex specialized skills necessary for play relating to games, sports, and dance activities (Gallahue & Ozmun, 1998). For example, earlier appearing play that involves throwing and catching will contribute to later passing and shooting skills in basketball. Therefore, children exhibiting physical skills at an early age are more likely in the future to be active and participate in sports (Cliff, Okely, & McKeen, 2009).
Outdoor Play
The benefits of outdoor play on children's physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development is well known. Children who spend their time outdoors show superior gross motor skills, longer spans of concentration, and better language and collaborative skills (Fjortoft, 2001). According to Clements (2004), outdoor play helps children to develop a sense of community while enjoying sensory experiences with dirt, water, sand, and mud. Similarly, Rivkin (1995) highlighted the value of playing outdoors. She noted that when playing outdoors children experience “sensory qualities of the world” and can also experiment with “big behaviors” such as shouting, running, climbing, and jumping. Being outdoors also improves children's attention levels. For instances, Martensson et al. (2009) investigated the restorative potential of green outdoor environments for children in preschool settings. Results showed that having available areas surrounded with large trees, bushes, and hilly landscapes, reduced children's inattention. Besides nature, landscaping elements can add value to children's outdoor play. Greening the school grounds makes children more active and increases their play repertories; green school grounds invite children to jump, climb, dig, and lift (Dyment & Bell, 2007).
Allowing for a variety of physical actions during outdoor play is important for promoting preschoolers’ participation in moderate to vigorous physical activities. In their current research, Aarts, Wendel, Oers, Goor, and Schuit (2010) defined outdoor play as a “cheap and natural way for children to be physically active.” They investigated the environmental determinants of outdoor play in children. Their results showed that to be physically active children needed adequate space, diverse play opportunities, and interaction with natural elements on the school grounds. They also found that children were more active when rules, policies, and supervision allowed for noncompetitive, open-ended play, and when opportunities were present to care for the garden and other green spaces (Aarts et al., 2010).
Creative Expression
Friedrich Froebel (1887/1896) emphasized play and its use of gifts (play materials) and occupations (activities). He believed that humans are essentially productive and creative, and that fulfillment comes through developing these elements in harmony with God and the world. As a result, Froebel sought to encourage the creation of educational environments that involved practical work and the direct use of materials. Through engaging with the world, understanding unfolds, hence the significance of play understood as a creative activity through which children become aware of their place in the world. Piaget (1962) and Vygotsky (1978) also viewed children as active explorers of their world. Play is therefore an important part of the process of constructing knowledge. It enables children to control what happens, and to use what they already know to further their understanding and development (Olsen & Sumsion, 2000).
Children learn best in an environment that permits discovery, curiosity, exploration, imagination, and play. Play is closely attached to the child's physical, social, emotional, and cognitive growth (Mayesky, 2009). Research suggests that children in their pretend play perform transformational operations that may be linked with creative thought (Mellou, 1995). The use of imagination in pretend play is a form of creativity according to several authors (Russ, 1993; Russ, Robins, & Christiano, 1999; Singer & Singer, 1990). In addition, constructive play is creative in that it can be open-ended play with multiple outcomes. Play expression varies and is more likely to approach being creative when conditions for it are free, spontaneous, and unstructured with many possible outcomes. Such play encourages creative thinking and sparks imagination (Ackermann, Gauntlrtt, & Weckstrom, 2009).
However, such an outcome is not automatic. Celebi-Oncu and Unluer (2010) examined creativity in children's play and use of play materials. Results showed that most of the children were not able to express creativity with different kinds of play materials; in their play children greatly preferred to use toys as play materials. In a second study Celebi-Oncu and Unluer (2010) found that most of the children were not able to use real objects creatively as play materials. Teachers have to encourage their students to play freely with different unstructured materials in different areas and situations. Play enables children to generate a range of creative behaviors in a low cost manner, especially after they have sampled the environment surrounding them; a range of creative behaviors that might be adaptive to their specific function (Pellegrini, Dupuis, & Smith, 2006).
Encouraging reusable, discarded, and open-ended materials brings the old-fashioned play back on track, which actually helps foster creativity with its components, such as playfulness, humor, curiosity, flexibility, and originality. It is fun without a set of specific goals or predetermined outcomes. As Almon (2003) exclaimed, working with open-ended materials is particularly effective as children attempt to solve problems. Open-ended materials encourage creative and divergent thinking. There is no right or wrong way to use these materials. Children can take risks and develop confidence. Each time they use these materials, they are creating something new.
Creative play does not require expensive and fancy materials to flourish. Research suggests that even in the poorest country in the world, children were capable of playing creatively despite their poverty. A study by Berinstein and Magalhaes (2009) aimed to gain an understanding of the essence of play experience for children in Zanzibar, the poorest country in the world. They found that play experience in Zanzibar had aspects of creativity and resourcefulness. What does this finding tell Western countries? Should this be an opportunity for rethinking play? Children are born with creative potential. They observe the world and react to it using their imagination. Simple material play can prop up their imagination and enhance their creative play from within. A great example of using reusable, discarded, and open-ended materials is REMIDA the creative recycling center in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Here discarded materials become resources and here unsold or rejected stock from shops is collected so that they can be reused for a different purpose. REMIDA is where you can make the most of waste materials, using them to create a new product that shows respect for the environment (Ferrari, 2005). When we consider the global economy today, REMIDA is a great way to foster creativity at a cost of next to nothing.
Reggio teaches that the best environment encourages a layered web of relationships to develop and grow (Cadwell, 1997). This web includes relations with things. Cobb (1998) states that “in childhood, the cognitive process is essentially poetic… it is a sensory integration of self and environment” (p. 89). Cobb emphasizes that children need to develop a relationship with materials from nature and those that are man-made, to shape small worlds of their own, and to enrich their imaginations.
In sum, a great deal of research supports the value of play for learning and development across different domains during the early years. An important challenge in ECE curriculum and instruction is to create appropriate and effective ways to harness play's potential in the design of programs and activities.
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<p class="title">CHILDREN AND ETHICAL THEORY<br></p><p class="author">Laurence D. Houlgate</p>
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The distinction between “child” and “adult” is made in every society and the practice of treating children differently than adults is universal, although the nature and scope of this practice varies significantly from culture to culture. Studies of the phenomenon known as childhood, the development of children, the social role of the child, and the varying ways in which societies treat and justify their treatment of children are an important part of PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, history, and ANTHROPOLOGY.
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In the history of ethics, references to children are infrequent and usually appear as subsidiary parts of discussions of MORAL DEVELOPMENT, virtue, MORAL EDUCATION, moral RESPONSIBILITY, the ascription of RIGHTS and duties, PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS, and the FAMILY. With respect to virtue, both PLATO (c. 430-347 B.C.E.) and ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C.E.) raised the questions “What kind of person shall we raise our children to be, and how are we to accomplish this?” because they were both convinced that the cultivation of virtuous traits of CHARACTER is one of the primary functions of morality. Plato defended the notion that the education of children is primarily a matter of the training of character rather than the acquisition of information and skills. With respect to the acquisition of good character, Aristotle argued that children must acquire not merely the right moral beliefs but they must come to possess the desire and the will to put these beliefs into practice, and this can be attained only through virtuous conduct. Hence, he argued against the Socratic thesis that virtue is knowledge, that is, that knowledge of virtue is sufficient to produce virtuous action.
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Concerns about moral education are also to be found in the writings of ANSELM (1033-1109), Jean-Jacques ROUSSEAU (1712-1778), John LOCKE (1632-1704), and Immanuel KANT (1724-1804).
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During the Hellenistic period, the ancient Stoics disputed the Epicurean account of the way that children developed into adults motivated by universal moral principles. These disputes are called “CRADLE ARGUMENTS,” and they were quite common in Hellenistic ethics. CICERO (106-43 B.C.E.), for example, argued against the Epicureans that it is love of self, not PLEASURE, which supplies the infant's primary impulse to action. Through a psychological process which the ancient Stoics called oikeiosis, (endearment, attachment) the infant's interest in and affection for things that serve her self-interest eventually become the child's interest in and affection for such things independent of whether they serve those impulses, which eventually will become an affection for morally appropriate behavior. Among the modern philosophers, JOHN STUART MILL (1806-1873) endorsed the Epicurean position that a child's original desire of or motive to virtue is its conduciveness to pleasure. Rousseau took no position on this dispute, although he endorsed the idea, implicit in the Stoic account, that children pass through several age-related stages in their moral development.
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Philosophical discussions of the nature of moral responsibility refer to children in the attempt to develop theories about the mental conditions necessary for holding persons morally blameworthy. For example, Jeremy BENTHAM (1748-1832) contended that since infants have “not yet attained that state or disposition of mind” in which “the whispers of simple morality” will influence their future conduct, we ought not to blame them for their untoward behavior. Concerns about the mental capacity of children also arise in discussions about the ascription of moral rights. Writers such as Locke, Mill, and John RAWLS have tied the justification for denying to children so-called liberty rights (the right to freedom from the interference of others in making choices that affect only oneself) to their lack of reason or to the immaturity of their mental faculties. Others such as Herbert SPENCER (1820-1903) countered that all persons should have complete freedom to exercise whatever faculties they possess. The fact that children are intellectually immature means only that they have faculties that are less mature than those of an adult; it does not entail that their liberty right to exercise those faculties is or should be restricted.
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Most of the pre—twentieth-century philosophical discussions of children have been about their role in the family. In marked contrast to recent philosophical concerns about children, the central question was not about their rights but about the nature and scope of their (filial) duties: What obligations do children have toward their parents and how do these obligations arisé THOMAS AQUINAS (1225?-1274) contended that children owe GRATITUDE to their parents because their parents give them nurture and protection. Thomas HOBBES (1588-1679) claims that a child's duty is obedience because the child has tacitly agreed to obey the parents out of fear of being killed or abandoned by them. Later writers appear to accept the position that the child's duty to the parent is obedience, but they disagree that this is grounded on a contract or an agreement between parent and child. Thus, Locke traces filial obligation to the parents’ right to govern their children. Rousseau grounds filial obligation on the fact that it is necessary for children to obey their parents if they are to survive their minority.
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Although references to children sometimes occur in the context of discussions of particular topics (e.g., moral responsibility), those who have proposed ethical theories have, by and large, ignored children. Philosophical claims about those persons who have obligations toward others and those persons toward whom one has obligations have usually been restricted to adults and to strangers. This is unfortunate because facts about children and parental love may be relevant to the content and application of those ethical principles that comprise the theory. For example, Locke argues that a fundamental principle of obligation is to refrain from doing those acts that would violate the natural rights of others. However, the “others” that Locke has in mind are adults, not children, and the “natural rights” are usually assumed to be the “negative” rights to noninterference in their life, liberty, or PROPERTY. Suppose, however, that children are included in the class of those who have natural rights. Then there seems to be a strong argument for including at least some “positive” rights to protection and CARE in the list of rights. If one does not include these rights, then the theory has the counterintuitive result that an unwed mother whose unplanned and unwanted baby has died of starvation because of her neglect has done nothing morally wrong so long as she can show that she has neither promised to feed, clothe, or shelter this particular infant, nor interfered with its “attempts” to acquire its own food or shelter. On the other hand, if one does include positive rights among the list of natural rights, then either adults have the same rights to protection and care as those accorded to children, or an argument must be produced to show why adults are to be accorded only negative rights.
Parental love for their children also poses a difficulty for ethical theory. A recurring theme of Western ethics is that morality requires us to be impartial. Thus, John Stuart Mill urged that, when weighing the interests of different people, we should be “as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.” But this idea conflicts with parental love. Parental love is not only thoroughly partial, but most people think that PARTIALITY toward one's child is a parent's moral duty.
In addition to the preceding, the most compelling philosophical problems that arise when ethicists take children into account when developing their theories are these:
The nature of childhood. What do we mean by the concept of “child”? When philosophers raise this question, their interest is usually in the normative, not the conventional use of the term. Their question is: “What is a child for the purpose of ascribing rights and duties?” not “What is a child according to custom or legal tradition?” Answers to the former question have varied. Mill said that children are human beings who are not “in the maturity of their faculties,” and are “still in a state to require being taken care of by others.” Others have emphasized the child's lack of capacity to make rational decisions and the ability to be self-sufficient (Kant). This raises several secondary questions: What is rationality, maturity, self-sufficiency? How relevant are these capacities to the ascription of rights and duties? Is there any correspondence between the conventional concept of children, based on chronological age, and the normative concept suggested by the philosopher? What is the extent of childhood (how long does it last)? What is the significance of the differences that are found in the qualities that are attributed to the child and to the adult?
Do children have moral rights? This question is a logically “closed” question if one means by the term “child” one who lacks the capacity to have moral rights. However, few seem to have gone so far as to suggest that children have no moral rights at all, including, e.g., the right not to be injured or killed, although some have suggested that newborns may lack this right (because they are not capable of having an interest in their own future existence), and thus INFANTICIDE is morally justifiable.
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What legal liberty rights should be extended to children? Most of the contemporary philosophers who have discussed children's rights have been particularly interested in the legal right to liberty, that is, the right to noninterference by others with one's self-regarding behavior. “Liberationists” are those who argue that children should have all the rights that adults currently possess, for example, the right to vote, to work, to own property, to choose one's own guardian, to make sexual choices. “Caretakers,” on the other hand, are those who would deny children these rights. Leaving aside the preceding question about the normative definition of childhood, when one enters the debate between liberationists and caretakers, it is important to determine whether competence can be correlated with particular age-groups. The remaining questions are: What (if any) are the mental capacities necessary to the possession of liberty rights? Assuming that one can possess more or less of a particular mental capacity, then how much of that capacity is required to possess the liberty right? Shall we distinguish between particular liberty rights (e.g., the right to play with a toy, to play in the street, to work) and say that some of them but not others are predicated on the possession of particular mental capacities? Should competence always be required of a RIGHT HOLDER (if I am not competent to do something, e.g., tie my shoes, should I be denied the right to do it)?
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The paradox of self-determination. One of the rights that some writers have argued that children possess is the right to have their future options kept open until they are fully formed adults capable of deciding among them. But this presents a vicious regress. It is said that those persons who are fully autonomous are those who have shaped their own lives and character. This in turn implies that they already are capable of determining their own life. It seems impossible for them to have this capacity on their own, for they would have had to have a fully formed self to do that, and so on ad infinitum. Is there a way to break this regress? Second, if there is a right of self-determination that children have or will come to possess, then what constraints does this place on how their parents can treat them now?
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Grown children and filial duties. Do grown children owe anything to their elderly parents? Some philosophers have argued that grown children owe their parents HONOR and respect because their parents have reared them to adulthood. Others argue that grown children owe nothing to their parents because child-rearing is not a favor but a voluntary sacrifice of time and money for the child's benefit. A parent's voluntary sacrifice for her child does not make him indebted, although it may provide the ground for a future friendship between them.
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Some philosophers have argued that there is no grounding for filial duties in current ethical theories. Others have argued that there may be reasons other than duty for doing things for one's parents (for example, friendship). Still others have contended that the problem with grounding filial duty in current moral theory is symptomatic of problems embedded in the theories themselves, located particularly in the impartial ethical principles that comprise these theories, principles derived from and appropriate to relationships between strangers, not those in personal relationships. Recent feminist suggestions that women differ from men in approaching ethical dilemmas and social problems from a “care” rather than a “justice” perspective may point the way to an ethical theory that is better equipped to account for ethical relationships between children and their parents.
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