What Are Children? Rousseau vs Locke

Getting back on track with my Neil Postman posts.

In The Disappearance of Childhood Neil Postman compares the theories of what exactly constitutes childhood that developed during the Enlightenment. His chapter, "Childhood's Journey," is fascinating stuff and will be required reading for my Sophomore Honors class as we begin tackling Lord of the Flies next week, a novel that the French teacher at my school lovingly referred to as Golding vs Rousseau. 

In this chapter, Postman compares the philosophies of childhood of the two thinkers. Most succinctly, Postman delineates the difference as follows: 

We might call them the Lockean, or the Protestant, conception of childhood, and the Rousseauian, or Romantic, conception. In the Protestant view the child is an unformed person who through literacy, education, reason, self-control, and shame may be made into a civilized adult. In the Romantic view it is not the unformed child but the deformed adult who is the problem. The child possesses as his or her birthright capacities for candor, understanding, curiosity, and spontaneity that are deadened by literacy, education, reason, self-control, and shame.

These differences in the goal of childhood was extended into the metaphors each used to describe childhood. Locke is famous for his tabula rasa, or blank slate. Rousseau, on the other hand, compared children to plants that grow naturally and can only be minimally aided by cultivation. Postman makes clear the contrast: "Locke wanted education to result in a rich, varied, and copious book [making the blank slate filled with meaningful material]; Rousseau wanted education to result in a healthy flower." 

Postman then goes on to argue that the major educational philosophies of the twentieth century--Freud in the Lockean camp; John Dewey in the Rousseauian camp--have left us with a synthesis position between the two doctrines. In other words, we want to maintain the Lockean emphasis on education as a developing and civilizing force, but one that does not constrain the natural exuberance of children praised by Rousseau. 

The natural tension between these two positions is obvious; everywhere in our culture we see children being tugged towards these poles. On the one hand, children are made to attend government-run schools (many of which look startlingly like prisons) from 7:30 to 3:00 each day. On the other, the teachers at these schools tell them that they are unbridled vessels with unbounded potential. We agree with Rousseau that children need playtime to cultivate their natural virtues, and we schedule such playtime with Lockean precision from 4:30-5:15--after homework is completed and before soccer practice. 

It is hard, I imagine, for children to live under two dispensations. My students struggle with this all of the time. They are told to seize the day! but also get into a good college and therefore participate in 17 clubs, sports, and other civic organizations. Oh, and take 5 AP classes per year each with an hour of homework per night. But still be a kid. High school, ah, what a great time! Isn't this fun, damn't!

I might personally be more Lockean in my view of children and their education, but I think the real problem here isn't that there are competing schools of thought but that we want to have both at once. This strikes me as basic opportunity cost economics: you simply can't do everything; to adopt any theory is to say no to its various competitors. To adopt two competing theories is simply to pull yourself apart.