The critique of Sociology of Childhood: Human capital as the concrete ‘social construction of childhood’

Abstract

The ‘New Paradigm’ of Sociology of Childhood famously maintains that childhood is socially constructed and supposedly places a much greater emphasis on the agency of children: children should not simply be framed as the passive receivers of socialisation. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that such a ‘social construction’ of childhood is not concretely articulated and that the theoretical understanding of the ‘social construction’ of childhood is simply delegated to historiographical or ethnographic accounts. In doing so, it advances a new criticism of the New Paradigm and radicalises previous ones. Here, key is the theoretical engagement with the concept of ‘human capital’: foregrounding its critique, this article proposes the link between ‘human capital’ as a neoliberal version of labour power and the concept of socialisation. The aim is to show that the ‘social construction’ of childhood is central, but the New Paradigm uses categories that are at the same time founded on neo-liberal views and abstracted from concrete social relations. This article maintains that a concrete critique of processes of socialisation (which is here understood as the socialisation of childhood as human capital) is needed instead of abstract critique of reified childhood. Two alternative pedagogical practices are used to provide an example of such a concrete critique.

Introduction

Childhood is socially constructed, so the proponents of the ‘New Paradigm’ of Sociology of Childhood say, but what is the meaning of this formulation? What exactly is that which is ‘socially constructed’ and who is the subject/object of the construction? This article will assess the principal tenet of the ‘New Paradigm’ of Sociology of Childhood (hereafter referred to as NP), which finds its theoretical foundations especially in Jenks (1982, 1996), Allison and Prout (1997), Allison et al. (1998), and then developed in Allison (2007, 2009), Qvortrup (2009), Prout (2011) and Wyness (2012), among others. There are of course other fundamental texts, but the above texts are usually indicated as being the most important for the foundation of the NP (Ryan, 2008; Tisdall and Punch, 2012; Woodhead, 2009). As these texts form the historical and theoretical basis of the NP of Sociology of Childhood, these will be the focus of the theoretical analysis.

The NP was mainly formed in British academia (for an historical reconstruction, see Woodhead, 2009 and Mayall, 2013) and in the last couple of decades it has been hugely influential for the international development of Sociology of Childhood, to the point that it now constitutes the mainstream sociological view on childhood. Textbooks of Sociology of Childhood (e.g. Allison and Adrian, 2011; Corsaro, 2011; Qvortrup, 2009) duly report NP’s tenets as the most advanced and correct canon. It would be fair to say that in social sciences a whole generation of students has by now been formed through views on childhood that are broadly informed by the NP. Exactly for this reason, a critical review of this approach is needed. Moreover, as the ‘new insights’ of the NP ‘have informed policy and practice with children at national [Great Britain] and global levels’ (Wyness, 2012: 3), then this very influential paradigm must be theoretically interrogated, as it is now apparent that the knowledge produced by the NP is increasingly intertwined with power. In particular, the main claim coming from this article is (to paraphrase Adorno) the NP ‘calls everything into question and criticises nothing’, because its motto ‘childhood is socially constructed’ is simply a mantra and not theoretically articulated to a significant degree.

Critical views have already been articulated in regard to the NP (Ansell, 2009; Ba', 2018; Ferguson, 2017; Ryan, 2008; Tisdall and Punch, 2012), however the present critique aims to be more radical and to interrogate how exactly the social construction of childhood is supposed to happen and how this construction is concretely articulated by theory in reference to existing social processes. In particular, this article follows previous theoretical analysis (Ba', 2018), where a general critique of the NP was formulated with insights from Critical Theory and Open Marxism. Building on that preparatory ground (Ba', 2018), this article seeks to narrow the critical examination of the ‘social construction’ of childhood and how it can be shown to be a hollow claim.

The NP takes issue with the conception of the child as a ‘human becoming’: where traditional sociological theories have positioned children as in a process of ‘becoming’, the NP sought to understand children as ‘beings’ in their own right (Allison et al., 1998). The aim of the article is to show that this critique of ‘becoming’ (and of socialisation) is abstract, taking issue with the superficial appearance of the social process. This article, instead, advances the proposal that the ‘becoming’ of children is actually about becoming ‘human capital’, in other words: children are integrated in a process which tends to transform them into human capital. This article will then unpack the neoliberal concept of ‘human capital’ and show how the social forces behind this concept represents the social construction of childhood that need to be criticised.

As other studies have already uncovered (Holloway et al., 2019; Ryan, 2008), the NP’s reliance on abstract criticism also necessarily engenders a major contradiction at the core of its categories: on one hand, over-emphasis on the agency of children (Ferguson, 2017) and on the other, cultural relativism about social structures (Rikowski, 2002). However, it is not just a matter of theoretical sophistication: the aims of theoretical efforts are always practical and there is no point in reconstructing a social phenomenon like childhood without taking issue with the social forces that distort children’s (and adults’) lives (Agnoli, 2003). Thus, this article will conclude that the NP cannot constitute an adequate theoretical basis for the emancipation of children’s lives. To do so, following previous studies (Ba', 2018), the article will show that it is possible to derive critical (and concrete) categories of ‘social construction’ of childhood from alternative Italian and Swiss pedagogical practices: the practices of pedagogia dei genitori (parents’ pedagogy) and educazione lenta (Slow Education movement). This choice has been made because these alternative practices have been developed in parallel with official Italian-speaking educational systems and are not overtly politicised yet represent a collective action from the ‘grass-roots’. The choice of the Italian-speaking alternative pedagogical practices is also due to the linguistic competence and limitation of the author.

The first two sections set the main concepts used to criticise the NP and show how the concept of ‘human capital’ is key to framing childhood and its socialisation in a way that allows concrete critique. In the section “Childhood as ‘socially constructed’?”, the central point of this article is fully developed: it is shown that NP does not articulate how it can be that ‘childhood is socially constructed’. On the basis of this critique, the section “The flaws of the ‘New Paradigm’” illustrates the implications of the flaws of NP. The one proposed here is admittedly a destructive criticism (Agnoli, 2003). In the section 'Childhood as subject', two alternative pedagogical practices that emerged from Italian-speaking regions are used to provide models of concrete critique of processes of socialisation in relation to ‘human capital’. The last section observes that the principles and practices of these two movements link the concept of childhood to the narration of struggles. This section prepares for the concluding reflections on how these struggles, and the reality of struggles, may be better suited for the conceptualisation of the ‘social construction of childhood’.

Childhood, critical theory and main concepts for a critique of NP

This section sets out the main concepts to be used in the critique of the NP; the aim is to show that there is an in-determination of categories around the social reality of children which prevents the NP from grounding its claims on the social construction of childhood. The Critical Theory (CT) of Adorno (1990, 1995, 2019), Benjamin (1981) and its recent developments (Bonefeld, 2014; Holloway, 2010; Rikowski, 2002) is used to criticise this theoretical abstract level. The general foundation for this type of critique as applied to the NP has been set out elsewhere (Ba', 2018), but in this article a more advanced thesis is proposed: this thesis assumes that human capital is the specific social ‘construction’ of childhood which needs to be analysed and criticised as it implies a transformation of human relations into quantifiable relations. While the NP is correct in criticising the ‘discourse’, or ‘regime of truth’ (Allison and Adrian, 2011; Prout and Allison, 2015: 23) of children as ‘human becoming’, they nevertheless fail to see that this discourse is not just a merely cultural one: it belongs to the social dynamics of society itself.

We have here a number of interrelated concepts that need introduction in order to fully explain the thesis above; these can be presented in two dyads: socialisation and reification; human capital and labour power. These dyads are related to each other. Socialisation is about the ‘becoming’ of children into adults. The NP has a problem with the concept of socialisation, in the sense that they reject the existence of a human nature which may be distorted by this process, for fear of falling into ‘modernism’ (Prout, 2011: 8). Socialisation is simply proclaimed to be a ‘modernist’ category (Prout and Allison, 2015), ergo to be confined to the ‘dustbin of history’: in doing so, they do not explicitly define the categories through which the processes of turning children into adults become intelligible and open to critique. Conversely, within CT, socialisation is associated with the ways the ‘value form’ of capitalist social relations assumes an ever more general hold on social relationships: it becomes the historical form of social relations as relations between quantifiable values (Adorno, 2019; Bonefeld, 2014; Holloway, 2010). Understanding ‘socialisation’ in these terms, in terms of the quantifiable values constituting social structures through which social relations become conflictual (Bonefeld, 2014), means setting an antagonistic view to that of the NP. Social reality is a reality of struggles (Holloway, 2010), and childhood is inevitably involved in these struggles. In the NP, socialisation is linked to the definition of childhood as a product of ‘social and cultural contexts’ (Allison and Adrian, 2011): but these contexts are simply definitional, always left indeterminate and filled with ‘content’ only through ‘particular’ perspectives (Allison et al., 1998). Such a procedure inevitably results in ‘relativism’ (Allison et al., 1998: 212). Contra this relativistic approach, we assume that history is not a system reproducing itself through socialisation and it is not possible to exclude something qualitatively different from the outset (Adorno, 1995: 66).

Hence, this article takes into consideration the concept of socialisation under a very specific category, one of ‘human capital’, that is: the accrued capability of individuals to increasingly and more effectively bargain their economic position in capitalist society (Ba', 2018: 233). This economic ‘position’, considered in relation to childhood, has been partially examined by Marxist–Feminist scholars (e.g. Ferguson, 2017: 113). It is this ‘position’ that must be associated with the concept of labour power, which is human’s general and social capability to work, and which individually represents the potential to exchange one’s own skills for wage-work (Caffentzis, 2013; Rikowski, 2002). Following CT, the concept of labour power is used here to subvert the claims of the positive aspects of human beings having to accommodate to this economic position and children having to grow into these (‘disgraceful’, as Adorno would term it) adult conditions. Labour power conceptually represents the social struggles mentioned above: people, including children, resist their reduction to simple labour power (Holloway, 2010). In other words, labour power is the negative side of human capital.

It is through the conceptual link between human capital and labour power that here socialisation is also differentiated from reification, which is our last concept: reification is a specific process of socialisation in which relations between people are turned into relations between things (Bonefeld, 2014). It is an important concept here because it refers to the ‘value form’ mentioned above, whereby human activity is measured and valued in terms of quantities (in primis: money): the human being is then valued in terms of quantities that his/her labour power has the capacity to make. Within the ‘value form’, social relations appear as relations between quantities, between things – hence reification. Socialisation is a wider process through which reification may take place, which is always resisted and contested (Ferguson, 2017: 114), as we will see in the final sections.

Following the framing of the key concepts, this is the first critical observation to be made: as NP rejects the concept of ‘socialisation’, and thus does not engage with the possible social meanings of this concept, it ends up conflating socialisation and reification, that is: the very concept of ‘growing up’ and all the forms of social determination associated with adulthood are deemed to be distorting, or simply ‘constructing’, the ‘human being’ associated with childhood. Conversely, in our context, children are socialised in the sense that they enter, go through and resist a determined social process, which is historically relevant and concrete (Ba', 2018; Ferguson, 2017). Thus, we link reification to a precise social instance: ‘human capital’. Being explicit about the processes of socialisation and its interplay with reification is not a strong point of the NP. At the theoretical level the NP prefers to find ‘symmetries’ between agent and structure, or the sub-stratum from which the dichotomy agency–structure would emerge (Prout, 2011: 8–9), whereas CT actually investigate troubling asymmetries between these reifying processes and childhood as subject, as we will see below. To make it more explicit, the above theoretical positioning means that NP moves on a simply descriptive terrain, refraining from any specific critique of what is wrong with socialisation, whereby CT can ‘name’ the issue, yet remaining at the conceptual level (Adorno, 1995: 30).

Human capital, neoliberalism and childhood

In the previous section, we have framed the main concepts for the critique of the NP: socialisation of children into adulthood is seen as a specific process involving the reduction of social relations into quantifiable relations. In that, the above section also pointed at human capital as a concept giving a concrete determination to the reflections on socialisation: contrasting human capital with the concept of labour power further made clear that the socialisation of children as human capital is the concrete and conceptual ‘social construction’ of childhood that needs to be criticised. The NP would take this process as ‘reification’, whereby here collapsing socialisation into reification is avoided, because there is an emphasis on struggles and resistance within the process of socialisation.

Thus, the thesis is that childhood is socially constructed, but crucially socialisation must be seen as instantiating ‘human capital’ in childhood. Within the field of neo-liberal economics, ‘children are viewed as forms of human capital’ (Schultz, 1973: S5), hence the search for the ‘economic value of children and education’ (Schultz, 1963, 1973). It is important here to consider this idea of human capital (Becker, 1964, but also Foucault, 2008) because it assumes that human beings have a potential for transformation: the human being should not be thought of as wage labourer, but ‘as capitalist’. Moreover, Schultz goes as far as stating that children are ‘poor man’s capital’ (1973: S5), thus making it difficult for the NP to articulate counter-claims on the grounds of class and agency. Neoliberalism tries to decouple personhood from the reality of wage labour and reframe it in the ‘free world’ of market exchanges. The individual person should be seen as the free owner of a form of capital (Becker, 1964), which is represented by her/his capability to work and earn money through a set of skills s/he has been endowed with at birth, but mainly capable of acquiring them through the care and emotional affection of parents and through the education system (Schultz, 1963, 1973).

Education and training are the formalised moments through which childhood is socialised into human capital (Rikowski, 2002). If this is a specific ‘social construction’ of childhood, what does it follow? If ‘human capital’ is the neoliberal articulation of labour power, how is it possible to criticise the ‘social construction of childhood’? For the neoliberal framing of childhood, agency is central, as human capital is the foundation of agency (the human being should not be thought of as ‘wage labourer’). The affinity of the NP to neoliberal understanding of agency and social relations is clear when Allison (2009: 44) states that ‘agency, in the end, is an attribute of individual children’. However, following criticism (Ansell, 2009: 199), the NP strives to reformulate notions of agency, attempting to ‘decentre’ the subject and including suggestions from Foucault’s ‘regimes of truth’ (Prout and Allison, 2015: 23).

References to Foucault (2008) are important, because through his work it is possible to: (1) isolate the concept of ‘biopower’ (Lee and Motzkau, 2011), which can be linked to the NP’s features of decentred understanding of the subject and children’s agency (Holloway et al., 2019: 462) and (2) Link biopower and agency explicitly to ‘human capital’. Through Foucault’s understanding, biopower becomes an indefinite drive of social life and a vague basis for the individual resistance to social institutions. To be precise, Foucault (2008) frames human capital as the realisation of biopower into the sphere of economic production and social reproduction. However, at this point it is crucial to state again that, contra neoliberal perspectives, critical approaches establish the equation of human capital (and biopower) to ‘labour power’ (Caffentzis, 2013) and frame these concepts within existing unequal social relations where human subjects are subordinated to economic values (Adorno, 1990; Holloway, 2010).

Thus, vis-à-vis CT, the NP can only call into question the ideology that assigns to children the role of ‘learners’ and ‘immature beings’ in waiting to be educated and trained (Allison and Prout, 1997) into human capital: this is a purely formal and abstract criticism. Criticising the ideology and its alleged final product does not say anything about the process of transforming children into ‘adult individuals’, which here can be understood as human capital, the abstract capability of individuals to bargain their economic position in capitalist society. It follows that the NP focuses on the ‘reified’ features of childhood without interrogating the social process behind it (how it is socially constructed): this will be further expounded in the next section.

Childhood as ‘socially constructed’?

The NP aims to produce a break with the scientism of developmental psychology and ‘mainstream’ sociological approaches, in order to avoid the naturalisation of the child (Prout and Allison, 2015). The explicit theoretical references vary from phenomenology and broad social constructionist approaches to post-structuralist and Foucauldian concepts of ‘discourse’ (Allison et al., 1998; Jenks, 2009; Woodhead, 2009). As the NP recurs to phenomenology (Allison et al., 1998), its analysis tends to take phenomena (childhood) as they ‘are’, because the phenomenological procedure allegedly ensures that ‘thought’ may be able to access the ‘real thing’, avoiding the categories of cognition (Adorno, 1990). This may sound paradoxical, given the insistence on the idea that childhood is socially constructed. However, this is so only on the surface, because the default procedure of almost the totality of the key texts of NP is to use historical and anthropological data to ‘demonstrate’ that childhood is socially constructed (Tisdall and Punch, 2012). As there are historiographical and ethnographical studies showing that childhood appears socially and culturally different at given points in history or geography, then it should simply follow that childhood is socially constructed. So, for example: because Ariès’ famous work (1962) shows that during the Middle Ages there was another radically different concept of childhood, thus it would simply follow that childhood is socially constructed and this ‘fact’ would dispense the NP from the effort of articulating conceptually the process of social construction (Ba', 2018). Given that the NP’s conceptual procedure can only be merely abstract and empty, it simply points to the indeterminate complexity of social life throughout history and different cultures.

Despite this strong historic and cultural relativism, the proponents of the NP claim, normatively more than conceptually (Holloway et al., 2019), that social reality is constructed by capable agents, children – who are not passive receptors of socialisation. Normatively more than conceptually because the subjectivity of children is not articulated in reference to specific processes of socialisation as described in the previous sections. This specific process concerns the socialisation of children as ‘human capital’, which represents the concrete and conceptual ‘social construction’ of childhood that needs to be criticised. So, the NP tends to take the neoliberal model of free individuals acting rationally in the market (Ansell, 2009: 199), in so doing it describes actors sustaining interactions with their peers and adults who are abstractly free. However, if children are the agents of their social worlds, the role of structures of oppression has to be downplayed.

Thus, we have an aporia at the heart of the NP. The main contradiction lies in simultaneously requiring, on the one hand, strong subjectivities from the part of children (Ferguson, 2017) and, on the other hand, the need for the constraining role of social structures to explain the lack of freedom which has to be postulated for childhood’s possible emancipation (see also: Ba', 2018). So, allegedly, ‘regimes of truth’ constitute the child, which in their turn, display an agency capable to assert itself in social interaction, but actually this representation follows the abstract notion of agency and the lack of explanation for social structures that we are exposing here.

The aporia follows the phenomenological root discussed above: individuating the ‘real thing’ (childhood) outside the conceptual mediation of the kind illustrated in the section ‘Childhood, critical theory and main concepts for a critique of NP section' (such as the dialectical relation between labour power and human capital) has the effect of having to surreptitiously rely on historical and ethnographic ‘facts’. Facts such as ‘childhood in the Middle Ages did not exist’, as narrated by Ariès (1962), should be so evident to spare any other conceptual effort. However, this approach to facts leads to a relativistic outcome: ‘childhood’ becomes a ‘sign’ for a particular representation that is conventionally re-constructed within a social totality. This manner of relating representations in a totality, so that these no longer remain as abstractions, could vary in such a way that every variation would lead to a historically different totality (Psychopedis, 1995: 21). We are then presented with abstractly indeterminate realms of possibility and representations, abstracted from the concrete reality of social practices. So, if the meaning of childhood is the ‘bundle of ideas and sentiments that characterise the socially constructed nature of childhood’ (Wyness, 2012: 10), then the NP can only swing between the domain of discourse (idealism) and the indeterminate domain of positive reality.

The schematism of the NP (e.g. Allison et al., 1998: 147) is hardly modified by claims that the agency of children should be reformulated according to Actor-Network Theory or post-structuralist ideas (Prout, 2011). A ‘de-centred understanding of subjectivity’, based on a ‘performative approach to agency’, can only provide a corrective to this aporia as long as ‘the performative’ is about the implementation of individual or collective action in view of human goals. But what is it exactly that should be performed, by whom and against what social constraint? The NP shies away from theoretically formulating what is the actual critique of conditions of socialisation and reification. As explained in the previous sections, this critique can be articulated through giving a precise determination to the idea that ‘childhood is socially constructed’: human capital is the social determination of childhood as ‘human becoming’, in view of the full productive unfolding of human beings as labour power.

The lack of social determination and the normative postulate of children’s strong agency prevents the NP’s analysis from demonstrating that ‘childhood is socially constructed’. The re-construction of their object (childhood) forces their approach to simply describe this object in a historically-culturally relative manner. Given the lack of proper theorising around the social relations constituting ‘childhood’, the NP tends to shift into a simple mantra (‘childhood is socially constructed’), which, by virtue of being repeated, should obtain validity. Eventually, the problem of concrete reconstruction of the object of the NP is identified in the reflexivity of the researcher (Allison et al., 1998), in that the values of truth, authenticity, freedom and justice should be introduced externally (Ba', 2018). It is clearly a position whereby values do not find a place in the construction of the object, children’s life, but values need to be taken into the argument through a voluntarist act.

The flaws of the ‘New Paradigm’

In the previous section, we have seen the fundamental flaws of the NP: it can only postulate children’s subjectivity (their ‘being’) out of a normative necessity, while the claim about the ‘social construction of childhood’ is left unsubstantiated. The NP understands social structures as neutral backdrops unfolding along a ‘historical continuum’ which is qualitatively indifferent (for a dis-continuous understanding of history and social relations, see: Benjamin, 1981), hence the fear of ‘sociological reductionism’ (Prout, 2011), given their default inability to move a concrete critique of social processes. This positioning leads to a dualism, where the agency of children is simply postulated and where social structures are actually naturalised. This dualism is both the strength and the weakness of the NP, but at the price of assuming two realities: the system reality of social structures and the agent reality of the subject. It identifies the reification of childhood with the ever-changing flux of historical social reality. Theorisation of the NP comes to represent the description of various aspects of the social-historical formation of childhood rather than its determined critique, but ‘the critique of reification is not about reified things as such’ (Bonefeld, 2014: 69), as shown in the section ‘Childhood, critical theory and main concepts for a critique of NP'. The NP simply calls into question the determined form of childhood, its reified form.

Every historical form of childhood that is possible to identify (e.g. the ‘innocent child’, the ‘evil child’, the ‘playful child’ etc., Allison et al., 1998) is abstractly considered in its lack of freedom. Social phenomena are taken at ‘face value’ and then relativised into a particular place and time, these are then proclaimed to be socially constructed. However social relations and social antagonism cannot enter in the analysis, at least not as a constitutive part of the object of study, because the NP conflates socialisation with reification, as explained above. Conflict and social antagonism are instead of paramount importance to understand the position of children in modern societies.

This peculiar mix of post-structuralism and positivism is particularly evident in the main equations that Wyness (2012) posits at the beginning of his analysis of the contemporary culture of childhood. When observing that these cultural definitions link childhood with ‘play’ and adulthood with ‘work’, he is right, but then what should follow would actually be the critical analysis of the forms that associate adulthood with a particular version of ‘work’ (as the productive use of ‘labour power’) and how childhood is constructed in opposition to – but also in relation to – the general form of work as commodity and therefore to human capital. Wyness’ (and NP’s) analysis is then developed according to a conventional view of social roles; it calls into question that children do not have any choice than taking up the role of playful human beings, while missing the reifying reality of systems of oppression. What on the surface claims to be an astute social criticism, actually amounts to a reactionary view of adult social relations and ends up actually accepting reified views of children.

As we have seen in the section ‘Childhood, critical theory and main concepts for a critique of NP', the concept of socialisation can be critically linked to the reification processes through which the dominant social form is reproduced. This social form features human capital; the thesis of this article is that ‘human capital’ is the social determination of childhood as ‘human becoming’, in view of the full productive unfolding of human beings as labour power. So, calling into question the reified form of childhood (whether play or work) does not amount to a critique of reification processes (turning human being into human capital): in that the NP shows its lack of concrete critique and, like its post-structuralist counterparts, ‘calls everything into question and criticises nothing’ (Adorno, 1995: 37). The concrete resistance to the reduction of human life to human capital is absent in the NP and vice versa present in alternative pedagogical practices, as we will see in the sections below.

This section aimed to demonstrate that the theorisation of the NP does not capture processes of reification involving children and their transformation into human capital. The aporia between cultural relativism and over-emphasis on agency has been flagged up before, however, this section has emphasised the lack of serious theoretical work on the part of the NP which produces the outcome of abstract normative claims on one side and regressive socio-economic categories on the other. There is a hastiness to the ‘new’, to claim new areas to be colonised, to establish a new discipline, rather than interrogating an unjust society. It is then pertinent to take issue with the artificial posture of the NP, whereby all ‘previous thought on childhood’ is to be sent ‘to the dustbin’ (Allison et al., 1998: 9). As noted elsewhere (Ba', 2018), this seems a clear sign that the NP simply ‘dreams of new academic fields to conquer’, as previously Adorno (1995: 48) accused Sociology of Knowledge of doing.

Childhood as subject

The critique of the NP moved in the two previous sections shows that its ‘social construction’ of childhood is not concretely articulated and that the theoretical understanding of childhood is simply delegated to historiographical or ethnographic accounts. A concrete critique of forms of processes of reification (e.g. socialisation of childhood as human capital) is needed instead of abstract critique of reified childhood. If childhood is ‘socially constructed’, it means that it is part of the wider phenomenon of capitalist integration (Holloway, 2010) of society, as proposed in the first two sections, but it also means that children, as well as going through this process, are also against and resist their social construction (Ferguson, 2017). These ‘dialectical’ considerations are made on the basis that the system of socialisation (or construction) is never ‘total’ (Adorno, 2019): the reified social forms through which children exist are constituted by social struggles which constantly challenge the totality of the system. Contra Jenks (2009: 111), childhood is never fully part of a social totality. This has implications for the type of critique and analysis that is possible to move to forms of reification of childhood. In the following sub-sections, two alternative pedagogical practices are presented, as a practical illustration of how the critique moved to the NP may find an expression in existing educational and parental practices. The two examples are ‘alternative’ because they have been created and developed outside of and in contrast to mainstream educational practices in Italian-speaking regions (North Italy and Ticino–Switzerland). These two movements have also been chosen because of their practical awareness of the adverse effects of human capital as a form of social ‘construction’. Albeit not explicitly politicised, these pedagogical practices move from the awareness of oppression in order to arrange models of resistance based on alternative understanding of children and adults’ relationship with childhood. In the last section, these models will be then used to provide a guide for a concrete critique of the NP.

Slow Education

In Italy, the ‘Slow Education’ movement (educazione lenta) is represented by a series of isolated, marginal communities or even singular individuals, who have been in position of responsibility inside school districts (Zavalloni, 2008). Slow Education may appear a moderate movement, whose demands have no radical character and that are appealing mainly to educated urban classes. Its main aim is not only to slow down the pace of teacher–pupils interaction, but also to subvert the trend in Italian education. They antagonise the increase in test-oriented education because they link it to measures oriented to the standardisation of children’s personality (Zavalloni, 2008: 124). Consumerism is framed as social danger for both parents and children, however this issue is not posited in a moralistic frame; rather consumerism is seen as collective action of which parents and children alike are part, but a collective action that can be overcome (Zavalloni, 2008: 47). Thus, the main proposition of Slow Education revolves around the ways in which practices and materials can be diverted from consumerism, hence their emphasis on ‘the correct use’ of objects, materials and procedure (Dattola, 2009). This emphasis on ‘use’ is antagonistic to the neoliberal understanding of parents’ practices, tendentially framing these practices as time for acquiring consumer goods and processing them in private households. This time is understood as broad investment in human capital which has an economic ‘value’, more precisely: decision-making for time allocation which is ‘viewed as an application of theory of the firm in traditional economic theory’ (Schultz, 1973: S6).

The view on time allocation as ‘investment’ is opposed by Slow Education: there, we find the subversive demand that through slow education practices, the adults should revert to being children again (Zavalloni, 2008: 36). The considerations that standard education leads people astray from a ‘natural’ state of childhood (Zavalloni, 2008: 14) are not linked to a biological foundation of children’s needs and desires, but as resistance to top-down, politically motivated interventions in education. The emphasis on play and creativity is always linked to the potentiality of children’s direct contact with ‘materiality’ (Zavalloni, 2008), with learning about the immediate natural and social environment. The series of techniques suggested by this approach are focused around the re-evaluation of ‘doing’ and ‘creating’, a hands-on approach that goes from cultivating vegetable patches (orti) to crafting, through appreciation of what may be the ‘right’ materials for different uses (Zavalloni, 2008: 132 and 79). The relevance of this movement to the critique of the NP will be developed in the last section.

Parents’ Pedagogy

Parents’ Pedagogy (Pedagogia dei Genitori) is constituted by associations of Italian and Swiss parents of children with different learning abilities and migrants whose children face language and cultural barriers. Elements of cultural conservativism are part of this movement: it is against consumerism and it refers to traditional values, whereby ‘culture’ is often understood as ‘high culture’ (Moletto and Zucchi, 2011); in their foundational documents, they often propose the contraposition between ‘moral values’ to ‘material possessions’ (Bianchi, 2012). The aim is to design and support a holistic education approach since the early years, centralising the particularity of a child’s personhood.

They perceive ‘the family’ and childhood under the siege of consumerism and individualism, whose abstract universalism represents a direct threat to children with different learning abilities. Their analysis maintains that the sphere of education is paralysed by specialisation and bureaucracy and parents are evermore marginalised in these educational processes. The specialist knowledge and bureaucratic approach to childhood reify childhood: for this pedagogy, subjectivity is represented by the particularity of the child, but this particularity is not considered a value in itself, rather it is seen as a ‘delicate’ event emerging in the interaction with adults and institutions. This interaction is set in motion only by an ‘active’ approach of parents to private life as well as to public life: the purely private aspects of parenthood are rejected (Moletto and Zucchi, 2011).

Parents’ Pedagogy is developed through the ‘Narrative Method’: parents and children are invited to produce accounts of their particular story, stories which are usually around the ‘unconditional’ love of parents and the difficult construction of ‘itineraries of spiritual and psychological development’ (Moletto, 2007: 30). The method of narration inspires not only the parents in their interaction with children and teachers but also the interaction with health professionals (mainly neurologists and psychologists). Through this method, the task of the health professionals is transformed from that of the experts that can legislate in the area of child’s ‘normality’ to one of the educators, open to the personal ‘itinerary’ of the child (Zucchi, 2008).

The Narrative Method is taken further by Atgabbes (Parents’ Association of Children with Special Education Needs in Ticino). Parents’ and children’s narration of their diverse abilities is the starting point for early years’ intervention. The narration produces an ‘identity’, a way of negating the labelling of disabled children as abnormal. The narration produces a practical reality which establishes the particularity of the child, and which must be the starting point of any discussion around intervention and ‘integration’ (Atgabbes, 2015). Parents’ Pedagogy movement pursues the integration of diversely able children with those deemed ‘normal’, as the tension between particularity and the universal is not denied, but considered to be the driver of dialogue. The meaning of these movements for the critique is unpacked in the next section.

Struggle and the social construction of childhood

These practices imply a social and political position around the ‘construction’ of childhood; they practically understand it and oppose it in a concrete way. For the practices considered above, childhood is not regarded simply as ‘constructed’ against a neutral political and social backdrop, socialisation is not collapsed into reification and it is not thought of as an automatic process. So, the determination of practice is inscribed within the opposition to consumerism and the opposition to the marginalisation of educators’ and parents’ roles. These pedagogical movements are then practically concerned with opposing the implicit formation of children into human capital, a formation that these practices connect to specific mechanisms in operation during childhood. Indeed, the practical reflexivity of these parents and educators implies a specific knowledge of social and political mechanisms of the socialisation of children and with it, the practical devising of counter-strategies. Thus, the slowing down of teachers’ work and pupils’ learning, the rejection of educational targets and even traditional values become elements of counter-strategies (Codello, 2015). For the purposes of this article, it is possible to conceptualise these counter-strategies as struggles.

So, childhood is ‘socially constructed’ but also there is a determined resistance to forms of reification: social integration is resisted in the name of non-integrated children’s subjectivities. In these alternative practices, subjectivities are always implicated in struggles and the struggle that is possible to learn from these practices is about resistance to the reduction of human beings to human capital, the hollowing out of education and consumerism. We can take these reflections further: for these alternative practices, consumerism is the hollowing out of ‘use-value’ and their approach to adult–child interaction is an attempt to rescue values that cannot be quantified, use values generated through a type of particular creativity that cannot be integrated. In CT terms, these alternative practices point to use value and creativity ‘in, through and against’ (Holloway, 2010) the ‘value form’ as the form of socialisation (as explained in the section ‘Childhood, critical theory and main concepts for a critique of NP)'.

Particularity is the key idea of these pedagogical practices and this understanding should be linked to the re-evaluation of the spontaneous ‘nature’ of children. Here, there is not enough space to thoroughly unpack this different understanding of human ‘nature’, an understanding which is mobilised to practically contrast the homogenising tendencies of socialisation, and more in particular, the reification of children into ‘human capital’. It should suffice to say that where everything is turned ‘social’ and ‘cultural’, as in the NP’s approach to ‘social construction’, critical–dialectical approaches point at the negative aspects of socialisation (Adorno, 2019). This understanding of ‘nature’ then provides a trait d’union between these pedagogical practices and CT. It is not so much that nature is opposed to society, but that nature is understood as substantiating their struggles.

For both of these movements, the social reality where experiences of childhood take place is not characterised by peace and social cohesion: the homogeneous and empty running of time that is postulated by positivism (Benjamin, 1981) may be taken up by NP, but for these pedagogical movements, the starting point is another one. The starting point is the narration describing struggles, while at the same time advancing the notion of particularity of the child. With the narration (and practice) of struggle, there is also the implicit rejection of a system concerned about the sorting out of children according to criteria useful for the formation of human capital, while centring practical values around inclusion (Parents’ Pedagogy) and around a different use and understanding of time (Slow Education).

Conclusion

The aim of this article is the critique of the ‘New Paradigm’ of Sociology of Childhood (NP). The NP ‘calls everything into question and criticises nothing’ because its theorisation of childhood and social relations around childhood is developed in an abstract way, it implies an in-determination of concepts around the social reality of children. It follows that the relative social world of childhood is as indefinite as reality itself and receives its content only by historical and geographical contingencies: there is little conceptual endeavour in the NP’s theoretical efforts, in the end their ‘representations’ are simply descriptions. Within this framework, childhood can be said to be ‘socially constructed’ only in the abstract and its determination is only found through a positivistic reference to facts. These facts tend to make the status quo untroubled by the possibility of radical critique. We have tried to show that in NP, relativism and positivism go hand in hand, so undermining the basis of critique: it is our contention that, despite its mantra, the NP does not conceptually articulate the ‘social construction of childhood’. As far as we are aware, this critique is not advanced or fully articulated anywhere else.

At the theoretical level, this article proposes the use of the concept of ‘labour power’ to frame how human capital is articulated to create and promote the ‘economic value of children and education’ (Schultz, 1963, 1973). This framing wants to be critical in the sense that it aims to expose social forces behind the neo-liberal drive of understanding and forming the individual person as the free owner of a form of capital.

Through the concepts of ‘human capital’ as the neoliberal articulation of labour power, this article tried to demonstrate that the socialisation of children as human capital is the concrete and conceptual ‘social construction’ of childhood that needs to be critiqued. We argued that ‘calling into question’ reification (the determined form of childhood, abstractly isolated from underpinning social relations) does not get rid of reified forms of identity, but leaves mechanisms of reification unexamined (Bonefeld, 2014). Its abstract and relativistic attitude in framing the social construction of childhood can only allow recurring to values from the outside, as a voluntaristic act of the researcher.

This article has considered two pedagogical practices: pedagogia dei genitori (parents’ pedagogy) and educazione lenta (Slow Education movement). The principles and practices of these two movements link the concept of childhood to the narration of struggles. In these approaches, freedom, happiness and inclusion are part of a struggle which is embedded in the analysis of a system that demands rigidity, predictability and classification of childhood, with a view to eventually integrating children to human capital. The re-discovery of the materiality of the environment, as well as ‘nature’ itself, is recast as negation of this systematic regimenting of childhood. In particular, these pedagogical movements are formed through the determined critique of the transformation of childhood in human capital. In that we maintain that, influenced by post-structuralism, the NP is rather concerned about the non-antagonistic coexistence of differences in an abstract multiplicity of forms of social life, exactly like neoliberalism. In social sciences, an approach that follows the lines of neoliberalism cannot constitute the theoretical basis for unlocking processes of socialisation in view of children’s and adults’ emancipation.