(Re)Membering Childhood: Memory, Crisis, and the Myth of Childhood Innocence

• In Event: Difficult Childhoods: Adult Memories of Innocence, Displacement, and Loss

Abstract

The celebration of childhood as a mythical epoch of magical moments, a notion perpetuated by corporate pedagogues like Disney, reflects an expectation for what childhood “should” be, which shapes early childhood care and educational practices. Faulkner (2010) considers this western conceptualization of childhood a response to the anxieties of modern adulthood in which children are fetishized as innocents who must be protected from social realities. That anxiety, fueled by adult nostalgia for our remembered childhoods as well as our desire to protect our children from any traumas we ourselves might have endured, drives many parents to great lengths to guard their children from sadness, stress, and even mild discomfort, which in the home and in the classroom can mean attempting to protect them from the kind of information that Britzman (1998) calls “difficult knowledge.” This fetishized, innocent child is produced through processes of memory, remembering, and forgetting that equate childhood with innocence and simplicity and define who is and is not entitled to a “normal” childhood. The term “child” is a contested one, as it operates as “a highly potent discursive tool that is invoked to shape, limit, or foreclose arguments about social and material relations between individuals and classes of people in this country” (Sammond, 2005, p. 3). That is, the concept of child “performs specific operations that shape the possible understandings available when we attempt to speak of those relationships” (p. 3).
 
This paper seeks to explore how memory, remembering, and forgetting operate to shape, limit, and foreclose arguments about social and material relations among children, and between children and adults, specifically early childhood educators. It takes up the challenge offered by Chang-Kredl and Wilkie (2016) to grapple with our “inner experiences of childhood in order to detect and perhaps interrupt unconscious links with our pasts” (p. 318). Bringing together Faulkner’s (2010) sociological work on childhood innocence with Morrison’s (2015) portrayals of childhood in God Help the Child, I consider how memory work helps us untangle our own subjective memories of the experience of childhood from our assumptions about, and understandings of, children today so that we can understand how the myth of childhood innocence operates as a form of exclusionary social practice that shapes early childhood education. Following Britzman (2014), such memory work need not refer simply to the teacher’s “regression,” but rather, an invitation to critical thought about “the ways childhood looks different to those who are children-no-longer” (p. 125).

Author

• Julie C. Garlen, Georgia Southern University