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Reconceptualisation of Childhood for Promoting Justice in an Open Society

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Book cover Childhood, Philosophy and Open Society

Part of the book series: Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects ((EDAP,volume 22))

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Abstract

The construction of children as incompetent in the sense of lacking maturity or independence – hence their inferiority and subjection to adults – by certain influential philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists, or simply by adults, does not do justice to childhood. To return justice to childhood, childhood should be viewed as a self-contained state with distinctive features that are worthy of consideration in their own right rather than as an incomplete state of incompetence relative to adulthood that is considered a complete state of humans, while adulthood should be viewed as a never-ending process of becoming mature that includes rather than excludes childhood. Accordingly, instead of a preparatory stage for adulthood, childhood should be regarded as a vital component in society in whose continuation and evolution it has an important part to play. When exploring how public policies, including those on research, law, and education, can be developed to bring about change in the understanding and experience of childhood, it is noteworthy that these policies should not be founded on taken-for-granted but problematic ideas about childhood, for example, the Piagetian model of child development; otherwise, they run the risk of being counter-productive. In contrast, they should be built on theoretical frameworks that fairly reflect the role played by children in society, such as relationism (on the relationship between structures and agency), the divested power model (on the power relationship between adults and children), socially interdependent theory (on the conception of citizenship), and the theory of communicative action (on the concept of deliberative democracy).

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Lam, CM. (2013). Reconceptualisation of Childhood for Promoting Justice in an Open Society. In: Childhood, Philosophy and Open Society. Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 22. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4451-06-2_5

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