Population and Pedagogy in France

Abstract

THE CONTRIBUTION OF PHILIPPE ARIES DISGUISED as demographic analyst and historiographical innovator, Philippe Aries launched his own clandestine attack on modernism twentY five years ago. As a demographic analyst, he carried on a series of perceptive interpretations of typical French populations and their evolution from the eighteenth century onward: Parisians, miners of the Northeast, Villagers of Touraine, Bretons, southerners, dwellers in the Alps all paraded past his eyepiece. As an historiographical innovator, he provided a Way of inserting demographic material directly into history. In 1946, that Was a daring thing to do. Aries also showed how family portraits, wardrObes , textbooks and other antiquarian paraphernalia, long condemned to SUPPly the comic relief for serious history, could become evidence of the deepest, longest transformations of social life. : Aries' accomplishments as demographic analyst and historiographical InnOvator are real and influential. The general message which emerges from his work is nevertheless a moral one. He portrays the disappearance of a communal world in which people were satisfied to stay in their places, and the rise of an egoistic world in which people sacrifice each other for sOcial mobility, as effective emotional life shrinks to the scale of the nuclear family. In his History of French Populations, integrated communities lose their coherence as a consequence of rampant differentiation. (1) In Centuries of Childhood, there grows a conception of the"family as an entity distinct from society, opposed to society, and seeking its own intereSts at the expense of society. (2) A new and separate conception of child-I am grateful to Priscilla Cheever and Leila AI-Imad for research assistance, and to Joan lind, Penni Snyder and Louise Tilly for suggestions concerning the presentation of the argument. Different segments of the research beneath this paper received support (rom National Science Foundation grant GS-2674, (rom a Faculty Research Grant o(the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan, and from the Mathematical Social Science Board. I offer these comments as a sympathetic outsider's proposals for future inqUiry. The text is essentially as given in February 1973 at the annual meeting of American Educational Research Association, New Orleans.

Useful and Priceless Children in Contemporary Welfare States

“…In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of scholars began to reinterpret histories of childhood and youth in Europe and its colonies (Ariés 1973;Bellingham 1988;Gillis 1981;Hawes and Hiner 1991;Johansson 1987;Mitterauer 1993;Tilly 1973). In a particularly influential contribution, Ariés argued that in past times, French children were not treated as different in kind from adults.…”

The Cultural Construction of Childhood

“…Philip Ariès, in his influential work Centuries of Childhood (Ariès, 1960), was the first to suggest that childhood as we know it was created during the early modern epoch and that this 'discovery' occurred in conjunction with the emergence of the modern nuclear family. While his thesis underwent subsequent criticisms and revisions by historians (Heywood, 1987;Pollock, 1983;Tilly, 1973), in the social sciences it became accepted as important and authoritative, a status it retains to this day (Vann, 1982).…”