The gardening metaphors, in terms of the education of the children’s nature were common since the eighteenth-century, but they started to be deepened in terms of their governing purposes. John Locke used gardening metaphors to speak of the undesirable behaviors which “one by one you may weed them out all and plant what habits you please” (Locke 1934, 38). And, Locke stressed, vices and faults that conducted to bad habits in children were due to the practice of educators. Affectation, for instance, was not an early fault of childhood or a product of an untaught nature. “It is not of that sort of weeds which grow up in the wild uncultivated waste, but in garden-plots, under the negligent hand, or unskillful care of a gardener” (Locke 1934, 40). Planting good habits in children implied displanting bad habits. Both sides of the gardening metaphors, to control the bad weeds and to guide the bloom and the growth of the plant, implicate a protectionist discourse in terms of which are to be considered the right childhoods. Those metaphors also imply a developmentalism rationale which activates a recapitulationist notion of the child in the process of becoming the ‘white’, male, heterosexual, able-bodied adult. The emphasis on the blooming and growing side of the educational task (the futurity inherent to the educational intervention), together with the image of the child as close to nature and a pure being, determined normative views on children and their creativity, in which the task of the educator would be to unfold what was already enfolded in them. [see gardening practices of education in the Vocabulary]
CM