Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
Do you remember, in that far distant time of 2019, when young people and children from all over the world were mobilizing and making their voices heard on pressing issues, such as the climate emergency? Greta Thunberg and the thousands of young people in the streets of Montreal, do we remember? Do you remember we were starting to listen to them, for real? That their power of action seemed on an upward slope?
Children and young people occupy a lot of space in the current social debate – as a subject: school closures, mental health, sacrificed youth, resilience, etc. But do we still hear them? When historians look to the archives of the pandemic in a few decades, where will they find the voices of young people? What do we lose by no longer handing them the microphone, by not involving them in decision-making, in the imagination of the “after” world?
As a childhood historian, I know that childhood – beyond being a biological, legal or psychological reality – is a historically situated experience. I know that the way in which young people have access (or not) to public space and debate fluctuates over time and between societies. This role and this power in the public space can often be understood in the light of the conceptions associated with this stage of life.
In other words, the values and ideas that a society associates with “childhood” largely determine the place it offers to human beings categorized as “children”.
In the XVIIIand century, with the Enlightenment, Euro-American societies strongly associated childhood with the idea of innocence (with multiple racial and class exclusions). In the 19thand century, we gradually began to institutionalize children, to make them “disappear” from public space (just as we did with women, for that matter): schools, boarding schools, orphanages, reform schools, etc
Subsequently, at the dawn of the XXand century, was added an idealized vision of the child in the domestic space. The child, who has become a priceless child, was invested with enormous affective importance in the nuclear family, itself in formation. The child thus valued, this innocent being, “to be protected”, “to be saved”, “to be educated”, is seen as a “potential” being and not as an individual in his own right.
The psychological sciences, emerging at this time, also contributed to this gradual shift in our conception of childhood. Historians therefore find themselves faced with a considerable mass of archives illustrating adult discourse on childhood, but they must sometimes compete in ingenuity to find archives that bear witness to the perspectives, opinions and actions of children themselves.
Where are we today ? Do we consider children and young people – “minors” in the sense of the law, those who are excluded from the right to vote, this political voice – as whole beings?
Do we find them important enough to listen to what they have to say about the pressing and fundamental issues that concern them and that we discuss without them?
I believe that even if they don’t have a master’s degree in public health, children – without idealizing them or thinking of them as a homogeneous group – have perspectives on the world that are no longer so easily accessible to us. For some also, their reflections are not yet hampered by the “naturalized” logics of capitalism. It seems to me that at present we cannot do without what they have to offer to our vision of the world and its future.