Introduction
Since the publication of the influential book by Philippe Aries in the 1960, ‘Centuries of Childhood’, it caused a major topic of interest for historians. For many years, oral history has become a predominant technique used by historians to help gain further understanding of the lives people lived in the past. The Oral History Society stated that oral history is the recordings of an individual’s memories and experiences. This suggests that it is almost viewed as a technique which enables historians or researcher to gather information based on people’s unique memories and their lifestyle which enables them to reconstruct the past. Therefore to gain in-depth information, this technique was used to explore types of childhood experienced by people of different time periods and culture. Hence this technique was used to explore and obtain information based on childhood experiences of those born in the 1950s compared to those born around the 1980s. Issues such as family life, leisure and education will be explored because they are considered as factors which heavily influence the type of childhood a child will experience as well as predict the outcome of their future. These areas are considered to be important because they play a major role on the childhood experience of an individual.
Procedure
Secondary literature such as textbooks and websites were explored which provided insights to what was actually occurring at the period in which each interviewee was born into. This also assisted with developing questions for the interview and to gain a basic understanding of the type of childhood and education the interviewee must have experienced.
Prior to the interview, a semi-structured interview, with open ended questions, was d...
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The study of children and their development is a new interdisciplinary field unifying research from sociology, anthropology, development psychology, law, and healthcare. Childhood studies emerged from the universal need to understand children’s development, their susceptibility to external factors, and what it means to be a child from the child 's perspective. Children differ depending on many factors, such as place, time, social status, religion, and tradition, and each of these aspects
Mao’s Cultural Revolution was an attempt to create a new culture for China. Through education reforms and readjustments, Mao hoped to create a new generation of Chinese people - a generation of mindless Communists. By eliminating intellectuals via the Down to the Countryside movement, Mao hoped to eliminate elements of traditional Chinese culture and create a new form Chinese culture. He knew that dumbing down the masses would give him more power so his regime would be more stable. This dramatic reform affected youth especially as they were targeted by Mao’s propaganda and influence. Drawing from his experiences as an Educated Youth who was sent down to the countryside Down to the Countryside movement, Ah Cheng wrote The King of Children to show the effects of the Cultural Revolution on education, and how they affected the meaning people found in education. In The King of Children, it is shown that the Cultural Revolution destroyed the traditional incentives for pursuing an education, and instead people found moral and ethical meaning in pursuing an education.
Views on childhood have and still continue to change (Waller, 2009). The contemporary view that children are empty vessels (Skinner, 1974) is being disregarded as children are no longer perceived as passive recipients in an adult world (O’Kane, 2008...
The world has experienced many changes in past generations, to the present. One of the very most important changes in life had to be the changes of children. Historians have worked a great deal on children’s lives in the past. “While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.”- Author Unknown
Papalia, Diane E, Sally W. Olds, and Ruth D. Feldman. A Child's World: Infancy Through Adolescence. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2004. Print. The author is a child development and psychology professor. This is an anthology with strictly objective information. The content is broken down into physical, cognitive, and psychosocial developments of different stages of childhood.
Child- rearing practices in the 1500’s and 1600’s were very different from modern times. During the 1500’s and 1600’s, children were raised in various ways due to conditions such as mortality rates. There was a shorter life expectancy during these times, due to illnesses caused by rodents hygiene, and the disposal systems for waste products, which gave parents a precise reason to make their children grow up quicker than normal. The goal for most parents when raising their children during these times was to raise their young adolescents into mature adults with the help of harsh punishment and religion to get their children to decipher right from wrong.
James, Jenks and Prout (1998) argue that childhood is characterised by sets of cultural values whereby the ‘…western childhood has become a period of social dependency, asexuality, and the obligation to be happy, with children having the right to protection and training but not to social or personal autonomy’ (James, Jenks and Prouts 1998 pg. 62). Here, childhood is described in sets of distinguished features and these features imply that the concept childhood may vary from place, culture and time. Therefore suggesting that there is no fixed or universal experience of childhood, for example, childhood in the medieval UK will be extremely different to the childhood in modern UK and therefore it varies over time, place and culture. Since the definition and state of childhood may vary depending on our cultural and historical background, some sociologist claim that childhood is not just biological, but must have been socially constructed for a specific society needs at a particular time. In this essay, I will attempt to explore ways in which childhood is said to be socially constructed by looking at historical childhood and how it has led to construction of modern childhood in the modern society. I will also explore the agency of children as competent social actors able to construct their social world.
Hurd, G.E & Johnson, T.J (1963) Education and Development. Journal of The Sociological Review. Vol 15, No.1, pp59-7.
There are proponents of the debate that childhood is disappearing which will be discussed in this section which include Postman (1983), Elkind (1981) and Palmer (2006). In considering these points of view which are mostly American, one must firstly set in context what is meant by the disappearance or erosion of childhood. This key debate centres on Postman (1983) who wrote “The disappearance of childhood” which is a contentious book about how childhood as a social category which is separate from adulthood is eroding. He defines a point where childhood came into existence, which was treated as a special phase in the middle ages based on the work of Aries in his book “Centuries of childhood” (1962, cited in Postman 1983). According to Postman, a major influence on how childhood was perceived differently to adulthood was the invention of the printing press and literacy in the mid sixteenth century. That is to say children had to learn to read before the secrets of adulthood in particular sex and violence was available...
Dr Sam Wass, Dr Elizabeth Kilby and Psychologist Paul Howard Jones take a look at children from the age of 4, 5 & 6 years. In particular they observed differences in how they socially interact, communicate with peers, and learn to share, stand up for themselves and find their place in new social groups. This takes place through hidden cameras and microphones, this enables them to oversee it all in the background and evaluate the situations throughout the documentary.
Parents tell their children to think first and act second. Most people forget this as illustrated in Yann Martel’s satire “We ate the Children Last,” written in 2004. It starts out with an operation and humans are given a pigs digestive tract to cure cancer. Because the operation made people eat garbage, they gave it to the poor At this point everybody wants to have this operation. When people started going cannibalistic, the government puts them together to eat each other. This started out as a good thing by curing cancer. After that everybody from the poor to the people administering the operation didn’t pause long enough to consider the consequences. Real world examples of people not pausing to consider the consequences are seen frequently, whether, it be on a small or big scale. Yann Martel is saying that
The documentary Century of Self Documentary written, directed and produced by Adam Curtis, goes to explore how Freud's developed theories were used by his nephew in order to manipulate the people. Edward Bernays was truly the father of public relations. He associated products with desires and got everybody hooked on consumerism. Edward Bernays was smart to investigated and applied techniques of mass-consumerism. He believed that deep down into all humans there is fear, using that tactic to control the minds of the American people.
Over the years, childhood has changed in many ways. With the invention of the printing press and the spread of a print culture, this culture became the causal agent of the rise of childhood. When the print culture was replaced with an electronic medium, it became the primary agent in the decline of childhood (Postman, 1994).
...M., Robinson, C., Fraser, S., and Ding. S. (eds) The Reality of Research with Children and Young People, London: Sage in association with The Open University.