Postdevelopmental Conceptions of Child A

Postdevelopmental Conceptions of Child and Childhood in Education
Postdevelopmental Conceptions of Child and Childhood

in Education
Karin Murris, Kaitlin Smalley, and Bridget Allan
Subject: Educational Purposes and Ideals Online Publication Date: Apr 2020
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1425
Summary and Keywords
Conceptions of child and childhood have been variously (re)constructed by adults

throughout history, and yet systematic questioning of the epistemological, ontological, po
litical, and ethical assumptions informing these conceptions remains a relatively new field
of academic inquiry. The concepts of child and childhood are philosophically problematic
because, although children can be biologically and physiologically categorized, the nor
mative values attached to these categories matter politically and ethically in educational
practices and theory.
The philosophy of childhood is therefore concerned with the following: questions about
adults’ claims to knowledge of childhood and child subjectivity; the limitations and impli
cations of the notion of “development” structuring theoretical claims about child and
childhood; the construction of various alternative and intersecting figurations of child;
the examination of the socio-historical, philosophical, and biological bases of these figura
tions, and their ethico-political implications—particularly for education.
Furthermore, more radically, contemporary postcolonial, postdevelopmental, and posthu

man theorists deconstruct traditional adult–child binaries by claiming that understanding
the logic of childhood is reflected in, and socio-historically situated in relation to, colonial
ism. This same logic used to justify the silencing and structural oppression of children is
applied to Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial states. Postdevelopmental conceptions of
childhood problematize the very notion of development on which psycho-social scientific
theories of childhood depend.
By drawing on disciplines other than academic philosophy, in particular childhood studies

and early childhood education, a wide range of conceptions of child and childhood can be
mapped that shape educational theories and practices in all phases of education: “devel
oping child,” “scientific child,” “psycho-social child,” “subhuman child,” “superhuman
child,” “philosophical child,” “postdevelopmental child,” “savage child,” and “posthuman
child.”
Keywords: developmentalism, postdevelopmental, childhood, philosophy of childhood, philosophy with children,

logic of childhood, decolonizing education, posthuman child, developmental psychology
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Childhood as “Trivially True”

The concepts of child and childhood are not only historically contingent but also cultural
ly and philosophically problematic (Matthews, 1994). However, few academic philoso
phers in the history of Western philosophy have reflected systematically on the concepts
of child and childhood—with the notable exceptions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John
Locke (Turner & Matthews, 1998, p. 1). The often “unphilosophical manner” in which the
concepts of child and childhood have been presented in the history of Western philosophy
is attributable to their classification into “the category of the obvious,” that is, “trivially
true” and “not susceptible to rational doubt” (Turner & Matthews, 1998, p. 1). Susan
Turner and Gareth Matthews (1998, p. 2) argue that relying upon “science” and adult
“experience and folk wisdom” when philosophizing about child and childhood is compara
ble to long-held prejudicial assumptions about women and people of color. On the whole,
Western philosophy has “relegated children to the status of seldom-mentioned, non-par
ticipant in philosophy,” with the exception of appearances in the works of more recent
Western philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari
(Costello, 2013, p. xiii). Hence, an overview of the brief appearances of child and child
hood in the Western philosophical tradition, such as Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hobbes,
Rousseau, Kant, Mill, or Wittgenstein (as, e.g., in Turner & Matthews, 1998) would be in
sufficient. Not only are the answers to child and childhood given by these philosophers
lacking, not least by their almost exclusive focus on the rights or rationality of children,
but the very legitimacy of the questions themselves are at stake in the light of contempo
rary geo-political thought and increased awareness of socio-epistemic injustice.
Empirical Children and the Concepts of Child

and Childhood
In his seminal article “Philosophy and Children’s Literature” (1976), Gareth Matthews in
augurated “Philosophy of Childhood” as an area of philosophical study. Matthews’s focus
on the figure of “child as philosopher” has been influential in contemporary academic
philosophers’ investigations into the epistemological, political, aesthetic, and ontological
dimensions of the concept of childhood.
Other contemporary philosophers have also attempted to define child and childhood. Sig
nificantly, these philosophers focus on the referent of the concept “children” as a human
being, a person in space and time and a physical being in the world and philosophize,
e.g., about the moral and legal rights of these young humans (see, Brennan, 2002; Han
nan, 2018; Shapiro, 2001). In contrast, some continental philosophers trouble such empir
ical analyses of the concepts that assume that children are developing beings in linear
time (see, e.g., Bohlmann & Hickey-Moody, 2019; Kennedy & Kohan, 2017).
Various attempts have been made to decouple ability from age, e.g., when arguing that
the concept of child(hood) is too general and requires more subtle distinctions through
the use of concepts such as “infants,” “young people,” “teenagers,” or “adolescents.”
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However, younger persons nonetheless are still measured in reference to, according to
the concept “adulthood,” and by adults (as in, e.g., Archard & MacLeod, 2002, p. 14). The
routine use of developmental and chronological criteria when distinguishing child from
adult demands an ontological investigation about the “is” in the question “What is child?”
Child and childhood as concepts are not only core to the philosophy of childhood, they are
also central to the epistemologies and methodologies of childhood studies and early child
hood education. From within these overlapping bodies of knowledge, postcolonial theo
rists on childhood connect the concepts of child and childhood as the logical source of bi
naries such as premodern–modern and savage–civilized, which in turn informs colonizing
notions of development and progress. This intersectional and transdisciplinary approach
makes it possible to map the various conceptions of child and childhood that shape educa
tional theories and practices: “developing child,” “scientific child,” “psycho-social child,”
“subhuman child,” “superhuman child,” “philosophical child,” “postdevelopmental child,”
“savage child,” and “posthuman child.”
Child(hood): Concept, Conceptions, and Bio

logical Metaphors
So what is it that makes the concepts of child and childhood philosophically problematic?
In educational theories and practices, the concepts of child and childhood are overtly
used and simply assumed to signify the “young human being” in the world. But while
child can be biologically categorized by, for instance, height, weight, neurological state,
linguistic or motoric distinctives (Kennedy, 2006, pp. 1–2), the normative values and treat
ment of children that are attached to these categories have salient political and ethical
implications.
An explicit historical dimension can be found in Philippe Aries’s seminal work in the soci
ology of childhood, Centuries of Childhood (1962), where he argues that childhood is a so
cio-cultural and historical invention. His scholarship paved the way for the influential idea
that children are more than “fleshy” empirical subjects in the “here” and “now”—that
they are not mere biological “givens” as objects of science, but socio-cultural construc
tions with historical particularity (Oswell, 2013, p. 9). The idea that children are historical
subjects through the creation of the concept “childhood,” rather than scientific objects
(“child[ren]”), is instrumental in understanding adult–child relationality. Despite profound
critique (see, e.g., Pollock, 1983; Shahar, 1992), Aries’s ground-breaking work loosened
the grip of biological metaphors in imagining childhood (Kennedy & Bahler, 2017, p. xvi
ii). However, as Archard (2004) warns, it would be a simplification to claim that childhood
is a mere social construction—a concept that can be deconstructed and reconstructed
across different cultures and historical periods.
Inspired by political philosopher, John Rawls, Archard makes a helpful distinction be
tween concept and conception (Archard, 2004, pp. 27–31). He argues that the concept of
childhood is necessarily linked to that of adulthood, wherein childhood is considered the
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absence of adulthood. It is also necessarily linked to age—“children are young human

beings” (Archard, 2004, p. 29). His argument is that understanding children’s develop
ment as a theory of progress—e.g., from wild savage to mature scientist, or a theory of a
gradual demise of imaginative, metaphorical, embodied, and original thinking (Egan,
1992)—is dependent on one’s conception of childhood. Moreover, for Archard, childhood
is also a biological phenomenon. “Biology,” here, should not be understood as a set of
brute facts of the given, immutable across time and space, but as “represent[ing] the
claims of particular scientific discourses” (Archard, 2004, p. 26). He outlines that “social,
political, geographical, and economical factors” have caused the construction of “immatu
rity,” that is, “a child’s physical nature relative to adults” (Archard, 2004, p. 26). Thus,
while all societies have a concept of childhood, their conceptions differ. These conceptual
differences concern duration (When does childhood finish?), nature (What exactly consti
tutes the difference between child and adult?), and the significance adults attach to these
differences (Archard, 2004; Matthews, 1994).
Philosophy of child(hood) is an epistemological inquiry into what adults claim they know
about children, with the notion of “development” structuring theoretical claims about
child and childhood and their enactment in educational practices and policies. However,
it also explores the implications of such epistemological claims for the ethics of adult–
child relationality in education and investigates the ontological implications of these epis
temologies (e.g., an atomistic or relational ontology).
Developing Child
Salient in adults’ expectations of children as thinkers, and at the heart of adults’ claim to
knowledge about childhood, is the notion of “development,” which informs global educa
tional policies, practices, and curricula (File, Basler Wisneski, & Mueller, 2012; Hatch
2012, p. 34), as well as the ways in which we adults struggle to listen to children’s knowl
edge claims. This latter challenge is also apparent in the Millennium Development Goals,
Education for All, UNICEF, and the World Bank. The major objective of early childhood
education (ECE) is to make young children “school-ready” for later phases of education,
with the developmental aims at its core being: physical motor, socio-emotional, cognitive,
language, creative, and cultural identity development. “School readiness” has become a
global neoliberal marker for “quality” education, which includes technologies of evalua
tion (Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 2013; Nxumalo, 2016).
A good example is the South African Birth to Four curriculum. This new curriculum has a
child-centered orientation with the figuration of the holistic child featuring strongly and
as goal-meeting the socio-economic challenges of the 21st century (Murris, 2019). Howev
er, its conception of “school readiness” is narrow and unilinear, and its measure of a
child’s achievements is framed almost exclusively in terms of their likelihood to be able to
find future success in a neoliberal society. It is claimed that child’s learning needs to be
“scaffolded” or “mediated” by the adult expert “within the developmental phases” or
“from one developmental phase to another,” using spiraling or linear stepping stones “to
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wards the exit level outcomes” (Murris, 2019, p. 3). The developmental orientation to
childhood is also foregrounded in children’s legal right to development as formulated in
the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). It protects eight do
mains of children’s development: physical, mental, moral, social, cultural, spiritual, per
sonality, and talent. Article 6 mentions the child’s right to development, but what does
children’s development actually mean? And what does the concept presuppose in terms of
children’s capabilities and what we claim to know about children and childhood? In what
way might the concept belittle children in that the child-centeredness of the children’s
rights discourse camouflages adult-centrism? Answering these complex questions re
quires investigating the concept of “development.”
Psycho-Social Child Development

Children’s development tends to be exclusively understood in psycho-social terms with
the right to development interpreted as the child’s right to become an adult. This posi
tions child as passive, weak, vulnerable, and in need of protection, as well as silencing
children’s voice and ignoring their agency (Peleg, 2013, pp. 524, 526). The psycho-social
orientation is informed by a number of theories about physical and psychological develop
ment, including Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and Gesell’s theory of matura
tion (Linington, Excell, & Murris, 2011). The purpose of Piaget’s “genetic epistemology”
is to describe the structure and modes of children’s thinking that is claimed to be both
natural and universal (Jenks, 2005, p. 21). While Piaget’s intention was not to prescribe a
theory of cognitive development by which children’s abilities could be measured and
found wanting (Aslanian, 2018, p. 418), the simplified, popularized, and normative uptake
of Piaget’s scientific theory in education assumes that children gradually develop to think
and reason correctly—namely, like or according to an adult (Aslanian, 2018, p. 419). Chil
dren are supposed to develop innately, according to general laws, through clearly identifi
able stages of intellectual growth1 that are chronologically ordered and hierarchically
arranged. Progress in thinking is made along a continuum that proceeds from “low sta
tus, infantile, ‘figurative thought’ to high status, adult, ‘operative’ intelligence” (Jenks,
2005, p. 22), unless a child has been diagnosed with some kind of
“abnormality” (Dahlberg et al., 2013, p. 49). In other words, the child’s maturation
process and the project of genetic epistemology are completed when the child’s mind is
scientific and rational, that is, thinks like an adult.2 Hence, “development” means the in
dividual “child-becoming-adult” climbing a hierarchical “ladder,” and accomplishing suc
cessive stages or milestones (rungs on the ladder) with increasing “autonomy” (Dahlberg,
et al., 2013, p. 48).
Development as a Scientific Concept

Piagetian-inspired theories of cognitive development are prime examples of developmen
talism and routinely inform what we claim to know about children and childhood. Devel
opmentalism is grounded in the Aristotelian idea (Stables, 2008) that the individual
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child’s mind/psyche (and body) is in a process of being formed according to its innate po
tential, in the same way that an acorn flourishes (eudaimonia) when it becomes an oak
tree. However, when a child’s development is regarded in this way, as a mere “natural”
process, it becomes difficult to see or appreciate the active role children can play in their
own development (Peleg, 2013, p. 528).
Developmentalism has undergone transdisciplinary critiques for many decades now, with
many theorists arguing that developmentalism lacks methodological validity (Donaldson,
1978, p. 23; Sutherland, 1992, p. 15), is normative, not descriptive (Egan, 2002, pp. 79–
80), and involves complexity reduction (Dahlberg et al., 2013, p. 49; Moss, 2014, p. 42).
Especially relevant for White settler countries (e.g., South Africa and Australia), is the
claim that developmentalism prepares children for a capitalist economic workforce (Bur
man, 1994), has an evolutionary bias, and is in essence colonial (Burman, 2008). It is ar
gued that developmental theories demonstrate an inherent “evaluational
bias” (Matthews, 1994, p. 16) by assuming that the goal of the process of development is
maturity, insofar as each stage of the process is followed by a “better” and more “mature”
stage that is preferable to the last. Moreover, developmentalism is a recapitulation theo
ry: the child’s intellectual development is compared with (“recapitulates”) the develop
ment of the species (with the child as nature, as the origin of the species’) from “savage”
to “civilized.” These colonizing dimensions of developmentalism are further explored.
Psycho-social theories of childhood tend to turn children into objects of scientific studies
to be “measured, compared, controlled and actively formed” (Cregan & Cuthbert, 2014,
p. 11). In the same move, adults distance themselves not only from children but also from
their own childhood selves (Matthews, 1994, p. 66). Instead of belittling children through
this kind of scientific research, Matthews suggests that adults should engage with indi
vidual children as rational, active, collaborative participants in knowledge construction as
their “simple directness” often “bring[s] us back to basics” (Matthews, 1994, p. 67). Un
doubtedly, generalizing about children’s abilities fails to do justice to the capacities of in
dividual children, especially their imaginative meaning-making capabilities when philoso
phizing (Haynes, 2014; Haynes & Murris, 2013; Murris, 1997). Accordingly, the following
section explores how this sensitivity toward children’s philosophical thinking impacts how
we regard them epistemically and the subsequent implications for conceptions of child
hood.
Philosophy and Child Development

Developmental psychology controls the educational landscape and, as Kennedy and
Bahler (2017, p. x) put it, herds children into developmental categories that “[treat] dif
ferences as instances of the same.” These philosophers of childhood challenge the “psy
chosocial coloni[s]ation of childhood through either demonization, sentimentalisation or
scientific objectification” (Kennedy & Bahler, 2017, p. x) and open up the possibility of re
configuring child as philosophical. For Matthews, the philosophical child is very much un
like the scientific, cognitive child. His argument is that having more knowledge can actu
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ally hinder doing philosophy. The better handling of philosophical questioning is not guar
anteed by simply growing up and/or by gaining knowledge. Maturity, Matthews argues,
often brings “staleness” or “uninventiveness” to the exploration of philosophical ideas,
whereas children are often “fresh and inventive thinkers” (1994, p. 18). Matthews’s seem
ingly unusual connection between childhood and philosophy has proven influential in the
field of philosophy of childhood.
Academic philosophy, for Matthews, is the epistemological pursuit of “starting all over
again,” that is, the finding out for one’s self “that I really do not know whatever it is I
claim to know” (1994, p. 18). It is in that way that academic philosophy benefits from lis
tening to child philosophers. Throughout Matthews’s work, children are regarded as “nat
ural” philosophers, in contrast to adult philosophers who must work to cultivate that
sense of wonder often associated with young children. He writes that philosophizing
adults “try to be little children again—even if only temporarily” (Matthews, 1994, p. 18).
For Matthews, philosophy is naïve perhaps, but it is a profound naïvety (1994, p. 34) with
out utilitarian ends or advantage, and simply for its own sake (Adler, 1983, p. 64). For
“Philosophy for Children” pioneer Matthew Lipman (1993, p. 141), making space for phi
losophy of childhood as a legitimate field of academic philosophy might help adult
philosophers acknowledge the significant role the philosophical beliefs they held as chil
dren played in shaping their adult philosophies.
Subhuman Child
In contrast to Matthews and Lipman, some contemporary philosophers of childhood ques
tion the idea that children have less knowledge and object to the romanticizing notion of
children as “natural” philosophers (see, e.g., Murris, 2016). It is also found to be of con
cern that the legitimization of children doing philosophy is, under these accounts, from
the perspective of adults’ gain. It has been argued that each generation has to find its
own answers to philosophical questions (Van der Leeuw, 1991, p. 13); therefore philoso
phy itself, as a discipline, could in fact have something to learn from children doing phi
losophy (Haynes, 2008; Haynes & Murris, 2012; Kohan, 2002, 2015). According to devel
opmentalism, child is understood in a nature–culture dichotomy of “innocent,” “ignorant,”
or “developing” by nature, which leads to cultural (adult) responses for “protection,” “in
struction,” or “development.” Hence, the actual position of child in the social world can
be conceived as “marginalised subject,” “property,” “economically disenfranchised,” “on
tological other,” and “epistemically incomplete” (Kennedy, 2006, pp. 1–2).
David Kennedy (2006, p. 2), argues that children are subjugated through and by virtue of
their bodies by traditional Western patriarchal power—a subjugation comparable to that
of women, ethnic minorities, racial minorities, and/or the economically oppressed. This
manifests itself in the “ghettoization” of children into schooling institutions, the disap
pearance of play spaces for children and the usage of children as “raw material” for eco
nomic, military and political uses. The figuration of children as “becoming-adults” (and
so, subhuman) is structured by their status as “ontological other,” not-a-fully-fledged-hu
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man-being-yet, only having the potential to become a complete human being (“a White ra
tional male adult”), which perpetuates their harmful marginalization. As argued by many
childhood scholars after Ashis Nandy (1987, p. 56): “there is nothing natural or inevitable
about childhood.” As Toby Rollo (2016, p. 3) puts it:
Children are not simply human beings with different ways of interacting with the
world and others, they are a lesser, deficient, or otherwise incomplete form of hu
man being. . . . Despite shifting conceptions of childhood inferiority, the child has
been consistently understood as a subordinate and only partially human being
who must be guided into maturity through education.
Consequently, the dominant narrative informing the goals and methodologies of child
hood education around the world revolves around the normative idea that adults need to
aid children in their becoming-adult. From this perspective, education is effectively a one-
way street, which sees adults teaching children what they need to know and how they
need to act as part of a developmental process. Furthermore, Rollo (2016, p. 3) points out
the apolitical nature of our conceptions of childhood: “[f]rom its earliest formulations
adulthood is viewed as an inherently political existence understood in opposition to a
child’s non-political or pre-political way of being.” This Western conception of child as
pre-political, as unable to deal with complexities and as requiring protection (see, e.g.,
the UNCRC), connects the concept of childhood with colonization.
Superhuman Child
While it might be legitimate to sometimes treat children differently from adults—e.g., to
stop a child from eating something poisonous or to protect a child from a predatory adult
—it is an altogether different issue when children are routinely and systemically silenced
inside the current mainstream Western education system. This is evidenced by events
such as the prime minister of Australia’s flippant dismissal of school children’s organized
protests (Baker, 2018). In order to be a political agent, it is assumed that childhood has to
first “naturally” progress toward an adulthood of cognitive, rational, and moral agency
with adult (“cultural”) guidance (Murris, 2016, pp. 186–188). The adult is the “transcen
dental signifier” of a mature, complete subject, while child is considered inferior on ac
count of their continuing development (Nandy, 1987, p. 56). Child exists in a binary of
childlikeness and childishness (Haynes & Murris, 2013, p. 247), and this correlates with
two opposing conceptions of philosophy (Kohan, 2017). In society, childlikeness is valued
as “lovable, spontaneous, delicate” and compatible with adult logic, while childishness is
disapproved of as “dependent, unreliable, willful” and independent of adult construction
(Nandy, 1987, p. 56). The first conception of childhood correlates with Western philoso
phy as a way of life and an endless search for truth grounded in an epistemic position of
uncertainty with the figure of Socrates as its inspiration. In the second conception of
childhood, child is structurally and ontogenetically vilified as epistemically “deficit,” so
that child is the “irrational other,” “magical thinker,” or “native” (Kennedy, 2006, p. 5).
This is grounded in the opposing view of philosophy as Platonic: philosophy as the
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process of securing certain knowledge and child as gradually transformed into a mature,
political adult (Kohan, 2017). In this latter conception of childhood, Foucault understands
child as “a docile body that may be subjected, used, transformed, and
improved” (Kennedy, 2006, pp. 5–6). Comparatively, child is also epistemically “privi
leged,” romanticized as a “natural state of genius” or the “divine child,” such as the
Bronze Age childhood god or the Christian infant Jesus (Kennedy, 2006, p. 5). Ultimately,
it is argued that neither child as subhuman nor child as superhuman captures the real
child, since both maintain an adult projection of child as physically, linguistically, and be
haviorally other (Kennedy, 2006, p. 5).
Child as Empty Concept

The existing set of concepts held in developmental, psycho-historical, social construction
ist, and postmodernist understandings of childhood privilege the interests of the valued
adult as the societal norm (Kennedy, 2006, p. 21). Critical, poststructuralist accounts in
the sociology of childhood have “forced the signifier child into quotation marks,” render
ing it an empty concept (signifying the insignifiable) and replacing it with the notion of a
plurality of childhoods (Kennedy & Bahler, 2017, p. xii). Concepts such as “child” and
“childhood” are defined by those in power and inform our epistemic practices of knowl
edge acquisition—our capacity to speak and make sense of our own experiences—and,
Miranda Fricker (2007) would argue, ground epistemic agency or a lack thereof. While
Fricker applies her notion of “epistemic injustice” to gender, class, and race, Murris
(2013) demonstrates that it can and should be extended to children who are discriminat
ed against because of identity prejudice (see also Kotzee, 2017). Identity prejudice is neg
ative in form and based on “social identity”; for instance, “when negative stereotypes and
biases lead to people being undervalued in their capacity as knowers, this is clearly
prejudicial” (Fricker, 2017, pp. 27–28).
Child as Stranger
Children are subject to two distinctively epistemic forms of injustice: testimonial injustice
and hermeneutical injustice (Fricker, 2007, p. 1). First, child is subject to testimonial in
justice when the adult (hearer) attributes to the child (speaker) a credibility deficit by
virtue of their age. This means that child is epistemically silenced in her capacity as a giv
er of knowledge and subsequently essentialised as incapable of speech (Haynes & Murris,
2013, p. 248). This systematic testimonial injustice “ ‘track[s]’ the subject through differ
ent dimensions of social activity—economic, educational, professional, sexual, legal, polit
ical, religious” (Fricker, 2007, pp. 1, 27). Second, child experiences hermeneutical injus
tice, and as such a structural epistemic wrong, when structural identity prejudice im
pedes her ability to understand the world and constrains her own experience based on
the prejudicial structure of interpretative resources (Fricker, 2007, pp. 148–155; Murris,
2016, p. 135). While in pedagogical spaces, teachers require epistemic authority to teach,
equally an epistemically and ethically just knowledge exchange requires that “the learner
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needs to have and be accorded a degree of epistemic receptivity—itself a form of epis

temic authority?—in order to be liable to be taught” (Kotzee, 2017, p. 329). Child occu
pies a position comparable to the feminist standpoint theory term of “valuable ‘strangers’
to the social order,” wherein the location of child within the social-natural world affords
them an “epistemic privilege” (Harding, 2016, pp. 124, 131). The “epistemic privilege” of
child is unavailable to adults because child exists outside the adult instinctual economy
and, as such, is inherently transgressive to “interplay” (Kennedy, 2006, p. 16). Undoubt
edly, satisfying epistemic justice requires changing our philosophical gaze beyond tradi
tional educational models that enforce the adult as privileged knower as in teacher-cen
tered education while simultaneously denying child’s capacity as a knower (Murris, 2013).
Otherwise, we risk homogenizing the epistemology of children as being the same episte
mology as adults when, “on the contrary, that would be yet another way of silencing
them” (Kohan, 1998, p. 7).
Pedagogies and knowledge acquisition are shaped by how we understand childhood and
children. In many educational theories and practices, children are subject to a distinctive
ly epistemic injustice by virtue of adults excluding, silencing, or discrediting child’s ca
pacity as a “knower” (Haynes & Murris, 2013, p. 245). In pedagogical spaces, exchanges
between the educator (adult) and student (child) are structured by an assumption that
students are passive participants that are educated by the teacher with the main focus on
academic qualification and socialization (Biesta, 2010, 2014).
Philosophical Child
The reconstruction of child in education into competent subjects as well as deeply philo
sophical beings opposes dominant societal assumptions that epistemically silence child
and assume children are incapable of “doing philosophy” (Kennedy, 2006, p. 21; Reed-
Sandoval, 2018, p. 4). The idea of children as natural philosophers was introduced by
Gareth Matthews to create a new branch of philosophy: philosophy of childhood. Children
can raise philosophical questions, imaginatively engage in philosophical reasoning, and
resourcefully respond to such questions (Matthews, 1994, p. 2) and an academic field in
its own right has established itself around the figure of the philosophical child (Gregory,
Haynes, & Murris, 2017). However, Kohan (1998, p. 7) aptly warns against the tendency
to compare child philosophers with adult philosophers in order to give credibility to the
former, arguing: “Children will build their own philosophies, in their own manner. We will
not correct the exclusion of children’s philosophical voices by showing that they can think
like adults.”
Discouraging children from asking “subversive” philosophical questions no one knows de
finitive answers to gives adults a political advantage over children (Matthews, 1976), and
listening to children’s own philosophies, as Kohan (1998) puts it, helps combat epistemic
injustice. Whether “natural” or “cultivated,” adult philosophers and children share a de
light in “conceptual play” and “whimsical speculations or find themselves puzzled about
how things stand in the world,” as opposed to people who tend to “know” how things
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stand (Lipman, 1982, p. 350). As aforementioned and explained by Fricker (2007), epis
temic injustice creates and explains the barrier for—in the case of children—hearing their
philosophical wonderings. This injustice is more than a social injustice; it is also an onto
logical injustice, as it is based on identity prejudice in relation to child’s very being of a
particular age3—an onto-epistemic injustice, in fact (Murris, 2016). Prejudices of deficit
are often held “unchecked” in the collective social imagination and do their damage, es
pecially, when child is not only young, but also female, black, and lives in poverty. These
prejudices operate “beneath the radar of our ordinary doxastic self-scrutiny” (Fricker,
2007, p. 40) and are not only damaging but also hard to detect on account of being insti
tutionalized. Ageist prejudices are directly related to the nature–culture binary, which
separates child from adult and positions child as an ontological, colonized “other.” This
link between childhood and colonialism, which has gained prominence in the work of
childhood studies theorists, leads to our final exploration in the following section, namely
how conceptions of childhood are always political and how they work to perpetuate deep
inequalities between children and adults.
Logic of Childhood: Logic of Colonialism and

Development
The realm of discourse about childhood which asks ontological questions about the con
cepts “child” and “childhood” also examines how these concepts are the logical source of
binaries such as premodern–modern and savage–civilized and explores how they have in
formed colonizing notions of development (and therefore progress). Decolonizing educa
tion is currently high on the agenda in South Africa and involves an examination of the
various ways in which coloniality manifests itself in the production and communication of
knowledge and meaning-making (Patel, 2016). As Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007, pp.
243–244) points out, “[n]ew identities were created in the context of European coloniza
tion,” coloniality remains when colonial administrations have left but continue to dictate
long-standing everyday hierarchical patterns of power, and “superiority is premised on
the degree of humanity attributed to the identities in question.” Colonialism has instilled
a non-relational ontology and competitive, individualized subjectivity in some education
systems that continues to regard people, land, and knowledge as property (Patel, 2016).
However, decolonization tends to focus on racism, sexism, and classism in its socially just
pedagogies, and not on childism or ageism. An appreciation for intersectionality—that is,
the idea that multiple forms of social and political discriminations are intimately entan
gled—allows one to see that decolonization might require a consideration of discrimina
tions based on age as well as those based on sex, gender, race, class, and ability.
As mentioned in the first section, developmentalism is a recapitulation theory: child’s in

tellectual development is compared with (“recapitulates”) the development of the species
(with the child as nature, as the origin of the species) from “savage” to “civilized.” This
process of “racial differentiation” underlies our modern understanding of the child and is
influenced by the natural sciences, and in particular physiology and medicine (Oswell,
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2013, p. 24). It is significant that colonialism and cognitive theories of child development
emerged at the same time in Northern Europe (Nieuwenhuys, 2013, p. 5). However, the
intricate connection between imperialism and the institutionalization of childhood (see,
e.g., Burman, 2008; Cannella & Viruru, 2004; Nandy, 1987) is theorized differently.
One view is that enlightenment notions of progress and reason have colonized people by
positioning them as in need of recapitulating the development of the species. In this way,
like Indigenous peoples, children are regarded as a category of people who are simple,
non-abstract, immature thinkers. Children are therefore in need of age-appropriate inter
ventions in order to mature into autonomous, fully human rational beings, and they can
not, correspondingly, be granted political agency. In other words, the terms “colonizer”
and “colonized” take on a double meaning in the context of childhood (Cannella & Viruru,
2004, p. 87). Developmental theories position child as the property of the adult, “the last
savage” (Kromidas, 2014, p. 429). So, whether childhood is seen as a phase in the life cy
cle of a human life, or a species, or a nation, chronological improvement to independence,
autonomy, and rationality is assumed—that is, the logic of colonialism. The concept of
progress makes it possible to describe, explain, predict, and control the “lesser” human.
Child as a being that has not attained a “human substance” is a proto-teratology attribut
able to those outside the bracket of an “adult” (Kennedy, 2006, p. 4). As Janusz Korczak
(1993, p. 141) explains, children are considered incapable of being able to either under
stand, discriminate, nor judge the adult world of duty and material constraint.
Another view (related to the first) is that the ancient conception of the degraded child is
itself a priori—that childhood is the internal logic that has made colonial superiority (the
colonial denial of full humanity) and the notion of the ontological “other” possible (Rollo,
2016, p. 2). Rollo (2016, p. 2) explains: “The idea of a telos of progress from animal child
to human adult is both a historical and conceptual antecedent of the idea of European civ
ilization, prefiguring its stories about maturation and progress from cultural ignorance to
enlightenment.” An example of this is how the metaphor of childhood was used to legit
imize British colonialism in India, wherein Britain became the “mature-intellectual” that
guided the “immature” and “primitive” Indian society toward “maturity” and
“enlightenment” (Nandy, 1987, pp. 56–58).4 Moreover, a consequence of these coloniza
tion efforts meant that colonized groups were regarded as falling into the “ ‘epistemic
trap’ that compelled them to think, question, understand, worship and create like
Europeans” (Reed-Sandoval, 2018, p. 3). Here, both child and colonized subjects are re
garded as passive—acted upon by others—and not as knowing subjects acting within and
as part of the political world.
Postdevelopmental Child
So, in what way could a postdevelopmental conception of child and childhood unsettle de
velopmentalism?5 Would a solution to some of the institutional effects of developmental
ism so far discussed be to include children as political agents in democratic classrooms
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and “give” them a voice in education? Nell Rainville (2000, p. 69) points out that this
would not be enough, because
[e]ven when we set democratic goals within the classroom, children are still sub
ject to the subtle influences and pressures which shape and constrain all of our
lives. The absence of overt ridicule may be insufficient to overcome problems as
sociated with low self-esteem or the sense of futility often experienced by those
subjected to prolonged institutional oppression.
While childhood as a social construction attempts to escape the essentializing distinctions

between child and adult of developmental psychology, it problematically undermines the
difference of child’s embodied be(com)ing in the world, as compared to adult. Childhood
does not only exist discursively; childhood is more than a socio-linguistic invention or so
cial construct—it is a story about the world (as, e.g., in Peter Moss, 2018). The poststruc
turalist notion of “childhoods,” rather than “childhood,” is doing away with the notion of
“a ‘correct’ or ‘ideal’ childhood, exposing it as an indoctrinatory, fantasy
projection” (Kennedy & Bahler, 2017, p. xii). This critique creates the new concept of
child as the “real, living, breathing person of each child” in all its singularity (Kennedy &
Bahler, 2017, p. xii). For Deleuzian childhood scholars (Bohlmann & Hickey-Moody, 2019),
the concept “child” is not abstract enough. Each person (of whatever age) is more than
his or her body, always connected, embedded and embodied, dynamic and active, and dis
rupting unilinear time sequences. Philosopher of childhood Walter Kohan (2015) wonders
what a postdevelopmental conception of child could be like and what role philosophy
could play. With reference to Ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, he argues
that each conception of childhood presupposes a particular conception of time, and a con
ception of childhood as a phase of human life. This conception assumes chronos, chrono
logical time: a sequential linear time between birth and death with a “before” and
“after” (Kohan, 2015, p. 56). He turns to Heraclitus, who introduced a different relation
ship between child and time with the help of the concept aion: “Time [aion] (is) a child
childing (playing); its realm is one of child” (Kohan, 2015, p. 57). Kohan (2015, p. 57) ex
plains the double relationship between time and childhood in the Heraclitus quote:
time does what a child does (paizon: plays) and in time, as aion, childhood governs
(basilei is a power word, meaning “realm”). Thus, this fragment can be read as
showing that time -life-time- is not only a question of numbered movement
(chronos). There is another dimension of living time more akin to a childlike form
of being (aion), non-numbered. In relation to this kind of time, a child is more pow
erful than any other being. In aionic life, childhood does not statically exist on one
stage of life—the first one—but rather goes through it, powerfully, as an intensity
or duration.
So, a non-chronological experience of time and a postdevelopmental concept of child is

enabled by the concept aion. Kohan draws the important decolonizing implication (that is,
disrupting long-standing everyday hierarchical patterns of power): “Childhood may here
be understood, not only as a period of life but as a specific strength, force or intensity
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that inhabits a qualitative life at any given chronologic time” (Kohan, 2015, p. 57). Kohan
points out that Deleuze and Guattari’s new concept of “becoming-child” has little to do
with age, or a particular subject, but more to do with a flux or intensity of the unbounded
body that continuously affects and is affected. Kohan clarifies that it is not the case that a
given subject becomes a child or transforms herself into a child, nor is even childlike, but
becoming-child escapes from the system, escapes from history: “a revolutionary space of
transformation” (2015, p. 57). In other words, the concept “child” does not express an ob
ject in the world, but a particular experience of time, something all of us can have.
The implicit goal of all Enlightenment “coming-of-age” is autonomy, but with the disrup
tion of the adult–child binary, the decolonizing conception of autonomy is beyond individ
uality, for “a singular, immanent life is no longer child or adult, but becoming-
child” (Kennedy & Bahler, 2017, p. xiv).
Posthuman Child
Posthuman child theorists now also acknowledge the materiality of (child) bodies as part
of a material and discursive agential network of relations that includes humans, but also
nonhumans (Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Murris, 2016). Drawing mainly on Karen Barad’s (2007)
feminist reading of Quantum Field Theory, in a Deleuzian manner, these posthumanists
start their philosophy of childhood with relationality, rather than identity as ontologically
prior (Murris & Haynes, 2018). This ontological turn brings into existence a different
epistemology that neither is human-centered nor positions intelligence and agency in in
dividual human beings only. This philosophical position is strikingly similar to young
children’s animistic, vitalistic monism as well as the philosophies of the pre-Socratics and
neo-Platonists: being is the same as being alive (Kennedy, 1989; Lipman, 1982, p. 351).
Matthews argues that children do not only ask the kinds of sophisticated questions that
are challenging for the most reflective of adults, but their playful inquiries can also dis
rupt the binary logic of (adult) Western metaphysics.6 Matthews (N.D.) writes: “Stories
and nursery rhymes actually encourage children to think animalistically (objects and
forces are alive and have intentions, just as people do), though they are also expected to
grow out of such ways of thinking after they go to school.”
Lipman (1982) also observes that children’s philosophizing pushes at the boundaries of
what counts as philosophy by their curiosity about the fixed distinctions we routinely
draw between the natural and what humans have made (culture), although children
might be less likely to generalize or formulate rules. After all, “children do not establish
the priorities” (Lipman, 1982, p. 351). The inclusion of young children’s philosophical
thinking resonates with a posthuman ontology that theorizes humans as part of an intri
cate web of human and nonhuman fields and forces that bring individual identity into ex
istence and do not exist prior to it (Barad, 2007). The posthuman conception of childhood
disrupts the idea that childhood is temporally and spatially located (as opposed to situat
ed7) and a characteristic of a young human being of a particular age. The relational ontol
ogy of posthumanism connects with ideas existing in a variety of Indigenous and non-
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Western philosophies. As just one example, Australian Aboriginal philosopher Mary Gra
ham (2014, p. 19) explains that “[i]n the Aboriginal notions of autonomy, a place isn’t a
position. A place can’t be a position because it’s a matrix of relations, narratives, obliga
tions—it has neither rigidity nor flexibility, it has soft, inclusive structure, spirit, agency
and memory.”
Savage Child
The logic of childhood which sees the systemic oppression of child inside and outside the
Western education system is informed by and underpins the continual oppression of
Indigenous peoples in Western settler-colonial societies. Rollo (2016, pp. 15–16) makes
the connection between the “native” and “savage childhood” explicit:
To fully comprehend the dispossession of lands, removal of children from native

communities, forced schooling, the shift from religious to secular schooling, as
well as the host of institutions designed to assimilate and destroy Indigenous cul
tures, it is necessary to recognize that the image of the native as “Indian” is not
simply a racial construction but an identification of native peoples with savage
childhood.
The homology (not just an analogy) between the logic of colonialism and the logic of
childhood is routed in a common logic of domination, used traditionally by those already
in positions of authority, to continually reassert that power over others. White middle-
class people, males, straight, and cisgendered people have used, and continue to use, this
shared logic to place themselves above Indigenous people, people of color, children,
women, LGBTQI+ people, and people living in poverty and to justify their control and ob
jectification of these people (Braidotti, 2013). Rollo (2016) makes the explicit connection
of how humans as a species continually use the logic of childhood to place themselves
above nature and to justify the colonization of land and natural resources. Educational
theories and their pedagogies rely on definitions of childhood through the concept of na
ture and adulthood through the concept of culture. According to the logic of childhood,
child needs culture (education) in order to grow up into a mature adult.8 Childhood is the
land that belongs to no one—not even to itself—and has no agency. Rollo (2016, pp. 15–
16) argues that:
strategies for decolonization would do well to coalesce around a more fundamen

tal challenge to the Western homology that situates children, and by extension na
tive peoples, as the perpetual “Other” of modernity. Challenging the coloniality of
childhood may be vital to the reassertion of Indigenous nationhood and sovereign
ty.
The idea that challenging the logic of childhood might be a decolonizing education lever
is still new—even in the field of posthumanism, new materialism, critical race theory, and
postcolonial theory.
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A growing number of contemporary childhood scholars propose that children’s relational

ontologies provide the very foundation for a conception of postdevelopmental child(hood).
This conception opens up possibilities to resist the ageist impulse to regard childhood as
a sign of immaturity and young children’s ontologies and epistemologies as something
they need to be “scaffolded” or “mediated” out of through (Western) education interven
tions. Postdevelopmental conceptions of childhood problematize the very notion of devel
opment on which psycho-social scientific theories of childhood depend. The logic of child
hood permeates deficit conceptions of what it means to both be and develop into a mature
human and disrupts the binary logic that juxtaposes children with adults on which devel
opmentalism depends. In educational practice, this requires opposing forms of ageist on
to-epistemic injustice done to children and embracing postdevelopmental relational on
tologies.
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Notes:
(1.) Piaget himself was not interested in educational theories but in how the mind works;
he was less concerned with a strict application of developmental stages (see Dahlberg,
Moss, & Pence, 2013, p. 49).
(2.) Whether all adult minds meet such a characterization, and what adult “rationality”
entails, are significant philosophical questions in themselves.
(3.) Moreover, within the literature on epistemic injustice, child is marginalized. In The
Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (2017), of the 37 chapters inside this “defini
tive” guide to epistemic injustice, only one mentions childhood. And even then, the author
Ben Kotzee does not question the dominant child–adult binary.
(4.) Ashis Nandy (1987) points out it was not merely required Indian society be “chil
dren,” but that colonial Britain feared the capacity for Indian society to be like children.
(5.) There is no space here to introduce the complexity posed by unilinear notions of time
at the heart of developmentalism when reconfiguring child subjectivity.
(6.) Formal classical logic in Western philosophy works along binary oppositions implied
by three predominant laws of thought: the law of identity, the law of noncontradiction,
and the law of excluded middle. Something cannot be p and ¬p at the very same time,
e.g., living and not-living, dead and alive.
(7.) The idea that knowledge is “situated” is often used to argue for an inclusion of
Indigenous knowledge systems in curricula. Critical posthumanist Karen Barad points out
how Haraway’s notion of “situated” has been profoundly misunderstood, that is, conflated
“with the specification of one’s social location along a set of axes referencing one’s identi
ty” (Barad, 2007, p. 470; my italics). “Location” does not mean the same as “local” or
“perspective”; e.g., an e-mail address is specific on the Internet, but this net itself is al
ways fluid and becoming, and so are identities (Barad, 2007, p. 470). For Barad location is
about “specific connectivity” (Barad, 2007, p. 471) and moves away from individual, hu
man-centered notions of identity.
(8.) Posthuman and Indigenous ontologies work with the notion of transindividual and dis
tributed agency that is assigned to a relational material and discursive network of human
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and nonhuman relations. For a historical overview of how the nature–culture binary
works in education as a mechanism of colonization, see The Posthuman Child Manifesto.
Karin Murris
University of Cape Town
Kaitlin Smalley
Independent Scholar
Bridget Allan
University of Queensland
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Postdevelopmental Conceptions of Child A

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Postdevelopmental Conceptions of Child and Childhood in Education

Postdevelopmental Conceptions of Child and Childhood

Summary and Keywords

Conceptions of child and childhood have been variously (re)constructed by adults

Furthermore, more radically, contemporary postcolonial, postdevelopmental, and posthu­

By drawing on disciplines other than academic philosophy, in particular childhood studies

Keywords: developmentalism, postdevelopmental, childhood, philosophy of childhood, philosophy with children,

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 May 2020

Childhood as “Trivially True”

Empirical Children and the Concepts of Child

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Child(hood): Concept, Conceptions, and Bio­

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absence of adulthood. It is also necessarily linked to age—“children are young human

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Psycho-Social Child Development

Development as a Scientific Concept

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Philosophy and Child Development

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Child as Empty Concept

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needs to have and be accorded a degree of epistemic receptivity—itself a form of epis­

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 May 2020

Logic of Childhood: Logic of Colonialism and

As mentioned in the first section, developmentalism is a recapitulation theory: child’s in­

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 May 2020

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 May 2020

While childhood as a social construction attempts to escape the essentializing distinctions

So, a non-chronological experience of time and a postdevelopmental concept of child is

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To fully comprehend the dispossession of lands, removal of children from native

strategies for decolonization would do well to coalesce around a more fundamen­

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A growing number of contemporary childhood scholars propose that children’s relational

Aslanian, T. K. (2018). Recycling Piaget: Posthumanism and making children’s knowledge

Biesta, G. J. J. (2010). Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democ­

Biesta, G. J. J. (2014). The beautiful risk of education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 May 2020

Burman, E. (1994). Deconstructing developmental psychology. London, U.K.: Routledge.

Burman, E. (2008). Developments: Child, image, nation. London, U.K.: Routledge.

Donaldson, M. (1978). Children’s minds. London, U.K.: Fontana.

Graham, M. (2014). Aboriginal notions of relationality and positionalism: A reply to We­

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 May 2020

Jenks, C. (2005). Childhood (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Kennedy, D. (2006). Reconstructing childhood. In D. Kennedy (Ed.), Philosophical dia­

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 06 May 2020

Kotzee, B. (2017). Education and epistemic injustice. In I. J. Kidd, J. Médina, & G.

Lipman, M. (1982). Hearing children’s conversation. Review of Gareth B. Matthews. Har­

Lipman, M. (1993). Thinking children and education. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies, 21(2), 240–

Matthews, G. B. (1976). Philosophy and children’s literature. Metaphilosophy, 7(1), 7–16.

Matthews, G. B. (1994). The philosophy of childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Moss, P. (2018). Alternative narratives in early childhood: An introduction for students

Murris, K. (2016). The posthuman child: educational transformation through philosophy

Furthermore, more radically, contemporary postcolonial, postdevelopmental, and posthu

Child(hood): Concept, Conceptions, and Bio

needs to have and be accorded a degree of epistemic receptivity—itself a form of epis

As mentioned in the first section, developmentalism is a recapitulation theory: child’s in

strategies for decolonization would do well to coalesce around a more fundamen

Biesta, G. J. J. (2010). Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democ

Graham, M. (2014). Aboriginal notions of relationality and positionalism: A reply to We

Kennedy, D. (2006). Reconstructing childhood. In D. Kennedy (Ed.), Philosophical dia

Lipman, M. (1982). Hearing children’s conversation. Review of Gareth B. Matthews. Har

Nxumalo, F. (2016). Storying practices of witnessing: Refiguring quality in everyday peda

Reed-Sandoval, A. (2018). Can philosophy for children contribute to decolonization? Prec

Stables, A. (2008). Childhood and the philosophy of education: An anti-Aristotelian per