The notion of nature associated with the child tends to naturalize the child and a series of expected behaviors in terms of her development. Too often, argues Jenkins, childhood is imagined “as a utopian space, separate from adult cares and worries, free from sexuality, outside social divisions, closer to nature and the primitive world, more fluid in its identity and its access to the realms of imagination” (Jenkins 1998, 3). This image was historically produced as part of a politics of nostalgia, as a search for a lost paradise in which the hopes for the future, and its government, were engendered. The notion of nature was produced as an entity that should be self-authenticating when associated with terms such as the child, race, gender, or sexuality, and in opposition to culture and the human. In the nineteenth century, the search for the nature of the child was the aim of psychological and educational studies, which was also a governmental purpose, to produce the rational adult and citizen of the western nation.
The civilizing project of modernity was based on the potential transformation of children and of those that were classified as ‘Others’ according to a set of norms that were seen as rational and universal, and that would define what was to be fully human. However, these norms were fabricated as attending to the nature of those that had to be educated, being it the normal child, the abnormal child, the ‘primitive’, the ‘savage’, women, queer beings, lower classes, abnormal children, insane adults, criminals, among other kinds of people that were emerging through classifications. Inherent in this thought of a potential-to-be was the evolutionary reasoning and a new notion of nature as opposed to culture. The nature of those to be educated would inform the path to their transformation, which was governed by an evolutionary, normative and, therefore, disciplinary, and corrective ideal. Educational practices should follow each case, which meant the nature of each child.
The question of the production of a knowledge about children's nature put into action the binomial described by Michel Foucault as the interrelationship between power and knowledge.
C.M.