Discourses of Childhood — the ‘Communicative Ecology’ of the Child

Abstract

An attempt to trace back the history of childhood that governs a contemporary global vision of how a child should grow up in order to become a happy, healthy and educated adult must confront the question that has been driving historians apart for some considerable time now. Did past societies perceive of younger members of the society as children or minors — that is, as a class of human beings fundamentally different from adults — and did they possess concepts of childhood similar to those prevalent in Western industrialized societies of today? Or are we rather witnessing a historically specific form of modern childhood that crystallized into a childhood norm in Western societies in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Prout and Allison, 1997: 17)?

The notion of‘discursive ecology’ follows a terminology employed by Roberts and Srikant, who claim that the discourse researcher has to become familiar with the ‘communicative ecology’ — that is the various sub-discourses and different semantic fields — of the issue-area under scrutiny through the study of context (Roberts and Srikant, 1999: 391).