Decolonizing Childhoods. Liebel, Manfred
nations’ emancipated from the colonial rule. In this speech there is still an ambivalence inherited from colonialism, which varies between new beginnings and immaturity. Furthermore, the question arises whether the hopeful metaphorical speech of the child also corresponds to real children who do not find themselves in the colonial childhood picture, but represent a new kind of childhood, which also holds its mirror up to postcolonial societies and urges the breaking up the colonial eggshells.2
A look at the history of decolonization shows that young people, which we would call children today, have always played a driving role in liberation movements. This can be observed, for instance, from the anticolonial liberation struggles in Latin America at the beginning of the 19th century to the Intifadas in Palestine, or the struggle against apartheid in South Africa at the end of the 20th century. Even today, in the Southern world regions young people are the main players of social movements that push to continue the process of decolonization. They are facing missing life perspectives against corrupt power elites stuck to their chairs, yet also take their lives in their own hands on the path of collective self-help and by producing solidarity forms of subsistence.
In contrast to earlier child and youth movements, these movements are characterized by the fact that they do not turn away from society and are set up in a deprived world of children and adolescents, and they understand themselves as a decisive part of society, which can be transformed in their interest. They represent configurations of childhood (and youth) that go beyond the European-bourgeois pattern of a ‘not yet’ life phase, and engage in equal participation in all areas and questions relevant to them (see Casas, 1998). For these children and young people, education means more than preparing for predefined functions. They access and make use of the information (including the digital media) accessible to them, as well as the educational elements that are derived from their daily experiences (to which the school belongs today) and mix in their own responses to the problems they face.
Colonization of childhoods
The instrumentalization of the bourgeois concept of childhood for the justification of colonial conquest finds a remarkable correspondence in the consideration of childhood as a colony or as colonized object. Since the 1960s, the concept of colonialization or colonization in a broader sense has referred not only to geographic areas outside Europe and their populations, but also to the internal structure of societies and their people. In the early 1980s, for example, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas introduced the concept of the ‘internal colonialization’ of the lifeworld (Habermas, [1981]1985: 356). He assumed that, in the late phase of capitalism, the central subsystems economy and the state interpenetrate the ‘lifeworld’, understood as the independent existence of the members of a society, as ‘colonial masters coming into a tribal society’ (Habermas, [1981]1985: 355) and seize this life.3 Thus, he saw the socializing and identity-building functions of the lifeworld in danger. The philosopher Friedrich Tomberg (2003: 315) summarizes the reflections of Habermas as following:
The term ‘colonization’ is intended to make it clear that society, as a whole is not a system to which the lifeworld belongs as a sub-area, so that individuals who want to live in this society would be compelled to adapt themselves to the system. … The lifeworld should rather be viewed as an area, which is not under the rule of the system. In its core area the system is not to have anything to look for. However, if it prevails there, the existing society does not realize itself, but there is certainly an occupation by strangers, as if economically leading states, as in the past centuries, subdue the population of foreign countries by setting up colonies.
The sociologist Stefan Sacchi (1994: 327) interprets the ‘social pathology’ (Habermas) expressed in the category of colonization of the lifeworld in terms of the political economy:
Colonization is based on the economic and political subsystem, and is carried out through its specific subsystem media ‘money’ and ‘power’. From the perspective of the lifeworld, the colonization in the case of the economic subsystem is expressed in a subterfuge of ever more social areas under market laws, in the replacement of communicative relations by commodity relations. The interventions of the political system, on the other hand, show themselves above all in a legalization of social relations, as well as their substitution by means of bureaucratically organized, standardized actions.
Here is not the place to discuss the theoretical foundations and basic assumptions of Habermas’ time diagnosis and the conclusions drawn from them.4 It is only a matter of making it clear that in a certain historical period the concept of colonialization or colonization has been extended and applied to new social phenomena. This is also true of the feminist debate on women as a ‘last colony’, which came up a little later. In a publication that was first published in 1983 and re-published five years later, Claudia von Werlhof, Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen (1988) identified the women and the colonized people of the ‘Third World’ as the last resource to be exploited. They were concerned,
… to demonstrate that the subordination and exploitation of women is the foundation and the keystone of all further exploitation conditions, and that the colonization of the world, the plundering of nature, territories and people, as above all capitalism needs as a prerequisite, happens according to this model (von Werlhof et al, 1988: IX).
Similar thoughts were already formulated by the US-American feminist Shulamith Firestone in the early 1970s and transferred from women to children (Firestone, 1970). In this text, the author points to a parallel between the ‘myth of childhood’ and the ‘myth of femininity’ (Firestone, 1970: 88–9):
Both women and children were considered asexual and ‘purer’ than man. Their inferior status was ill-concealed under an elaborate ‘respect’. One didn’t discuss serious matters nor did one curse in front of women and children; one didn’t openly degrade them, one did it behind their backs. … Both were set apart by fancy, and non-functional clothing and were given special tasks (housework and homework respectively); both were considered mentally deficient (“What can one expect from a woman?” – “He’s too little to understand.”). The pedestal of adoration on which both were set made it hard for them to breathe. Every interaction with the adult world became a tap dance for children. They learned how to use their childhood to get what they wanted indirectly (“He’s throwing another tantrum!”), just as women learned how to use their femininity (“There she goes, crying again!”). All excursions into the adult world became terrifying survival expeditions. The difference between the natural behavior of children in their peer group as opposed to their stilted and/or coy behavior with adults bears this out – just as women act differently among themselves than when they are around men. In each case a physical difference had been enlarged culturally with the help of special dress, education, manners, and activity until this cultural reinforcement itself began to appear ‘natural’, even instinctive, an exaggeration process that enables easy stereotyping: The individual eventually appears to be a different kind of human animal with its own peculiar set of laws and behavior (“I’ll never understand women!” … “You don’t know a thing about child psychology!”).
Firestone speaks in the past in order to underline the historical genesis of the ‘class oppression of women and children’ (Firestone, 1970: 89). The text leaves no doubt that she was convinced that it applied to the time in which she wrote it (the readers may judge for themselves whether it has changed significantly to this day).
Firestone’s interpretations are unmistakably influenced by the writings