Childhood as a formative experience and childhoods as its multiple concretions. A necessary clarification from pedagogy

Abstract

Childhood is an invention of modernity as the sensitivity of society and the family towards children, which leads to granting them an importance not assigned in antiquity or in the Middle Ages. Benjamin, Agamben, Marcuse, and Kohan, authors of critical theory and pedagogy, understand it as an experience of change and formation not reducible only to children. Therefore, in the singular, childhood is understood as a formative experience, and instead of being associated with reductionist conceptions of biological understanding, it recognizes anthropological, pedagogical, and historical implications such as beginning, awakening, historicity, and language, and affirms the possibility of formation through education. In the plural, infancy expresses the multiple contextual, conceptual, and biographical materializations of childhood. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to understand that from the works of Benjamin, Agamben, Marcuse, and Kohan, childhood and childhoods imply pedagogically to recognize the possibility of perfectibility - human formation from education. For this, the established methodology is a critical-reconstructive approach that allows us to unveil the authors' conception of childhood, and to establish a pedagogical critique of the society that serves as an existential container for the authors and works cited. Thus, the singular allows us to reconstruct the collective sense given by these pedagogues, and the plural serves to identify the differences according to their themes and problems.