Special Issue ETE: History of Childhood/History of Education

Guest Editors:  Moysés Kuhlmann Jr. (Universidade Católica de Santos; Fundação Carlos Chagas, Brazil) and Beatriz Alcubierre Moya (Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Mexico)

This monographic issue aims to establish a dialogue between the history of childhood and the history of education. In recent decades, the historiography of childhood has become an important area of research. In addition to the connection with the currents of the history of welfare, family and education, children have begun to be visible as social actors, inside and outside the institutions. 

The development of the history of childhood has allowed the displacement of an abstract idea of the child (understood as a category of age opposed to that of the adult) to a look that problematizes relations between age groups, which are determined from social and specific cultural contexts.

The interaction between people of all ages comes into play and dynamic conceptualisations are established that indicate and name the different age groups: children, adolescents, young people, adults and the elderly. In this way, ages are understood as part of the cycle of life, from birth to death, as well as from social and cultural production and reproduction, and not as watertight categories. These distinctions also have an impact on the different socio-economic realities that determine the existence of different childhoods within the same society.

The delimitation of ages has direct implications for the history of education. For example, in terms of the education of young children in nurseries and early childhood schools, it is noted that this story managed to occupy a space in research with great effort and is still seen marginally, as a “small” story, disconnected from the history of primary school to which greater attention is given.

At the other extreme, when we talk about poor adolescents and young people, they are considered uniformly as if they were part of childhood and not as another age group as, for example, in the case of “child labor”, the employment of adolescents or young people as equated with the exploitation of the little ones.

The recognition of different childhoods implies the need to contemplate the existence of an educational plurality, in order to overcome idealized and partial interpretations of educational systems. The history of childhood necessarily implies issues related to the understanding of educational processes within social relationships in a broad way. The history of children’s education involves the relations of society with that period of life, care, instruction and the most diverse forms and places of social and cultural production and reproduction. This makes it possible to look at the history of childhood as imbued by education, and so inseparable from the study of the condition of childhood.

Suggested topics, among others, include:

1. childhood and national and regional identities (Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe etc.);
2. the education and care of babies;
3. education and culture institutions;
4. education of children in extracurricular spaces;
5. intellectuals and childhood;
6. the production of objects aimed at the education of children (such as books and other teaching materials);
7. gender differences from an educational perspective;
8. health, hygiene and education;
9. sources