This entry concerns ruptures and continuities in the modern Western child as it shifts from what is now called natural philosophy to political philosophy to psychology, a shift which enabled developmental psychology to become the dominant discipline for inscribing the child in educational discourse over the twentieth century.
In Sight and Out of Mind: Descartes’ Child
And here the first and principal cause of all errors can be recognized. For in childhood, our mind was of course so closely bound to the body that it did not apply itself to any thoughts other than those by means of which it was aware of those things which affected the body: and it did not yet relate those to something situated outside itself; but merely felt pain when something disagreeable occurred to the body; and pleasure when something agreeable occurred (Descartes 1983, p. 32, art.71).
For Descartes (1596-1650), the first and principal of all errors (in arriving at Truth) lay in a near mind-body fusion inscribed as...
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Baker, B. (2016). Child. In: Peters, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_298-1
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