Readings of the archive

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.

The sensitivity of the body was related to the ways in which the senses became a field of study and government, particularly through the ways in which physiology and experimental psychology were trying to understand how the body reacted to certain stimuli. In the eighteenth-century, physiological conceptions of the human were under scientific wars. On the one side, man is seen as a machine, on the other side, man is seen as a sensitive being.

Throughout the nineteenth-century, in Europe and in the United States, object lessons invaded the classroom, very much influenced by Johann Pestalozzi pedagogies, being configured as one path to construct knowledge through sense-training, and giving rise to a whole materiality in education, which produced educational objects and toys as part of learning commodities. The objects, being images or material objects, as part of a sensorial education were assumed as having the power to teach children unfamiliar concepts (Carter 2010).

The articulation between children and nature does something within arts education, particularly when it comes to the apology of the senses, following the premises pointed out by the ‘sensualist philosophers’ of the late seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries (Jütte 2005). The apologists of the senses believed that thinking depended on sense impressions and those were rooted in the body.

Not only this view of nature was seen as ‘natural’ and universal, as it also neglected other views. The positioning of the child close to nature, was also the necessary fiction to naturalize and assume a universal development of the child. The education of the child as part of the civilizational project of modernity was premised upon the construction of the ‘nature of the child’ as an object of study.

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).

Imagination appeared as one of the strongest threats to the development of a moral healthy temper and disposition, and, therefore, it was a ‘problem’ within the educational field. Through the powers of imagination, the child could create a world of its own, livelier than the real world. The problem was not far from complex as if imagination was natural to childhood, and if education should follow the child’s nature, then, which and where were the limits?

The Child Study movement, in the United States and Europe, was based on intensive observations of children and their performances (drawings being used as raw material to be interpreted and analyzed) in psychological laboratories, in classrooms, at home, in the playground, or in questionnaires that generated data about who was the child and who should the child become.