Some of the writings written during this period understand the suppression of the children as a form of colonization and relate it to colonialism. In an essay first published in French in 1971, Swiss anthropologist and psychoanalyst Gérard Mendel claimed (Mendel, 1971: 7):
All forms of human exploitation, whether religious or economic in nature – exploitation of colonial peoples, of women, of children – have taken advantage of the phenomenon rooted in the dependent, biological and psychological relationship of infant child to adult. Hence, the destruction of our society, which occurs before our eyes, day by day in a chain of cultural Hiroshimas, goes much deeper than it appears and incorporates various aspects of all societies worldwide.
In the German-speaking world, the writings of the Austrian education scientist Peter Gstettner are particularly worth mentioning; they bear the title Die Eroberung des Kindes durch die Wissenschaft. Aus der Geschichte der Disziplinierung (‘The conquest of the child by science: From the history of discipline’; Gstettner, 1981). In this nearly forgotten text, Gstettner makes reference to the history of colonialism, and, exemplified in the newly emerging pedagogical and psychological sciences on childhood, he demonstrates a close connection to the ethnology and anthropology arising from colonization. The thesis of his work claims ‘that the academic conquest of unknown territories precedes the conquest of the childish soul’ (Gstettner, 1981: 15). He demonstrates this especially with the history of developmental psychology, but also in the conceptualization of childhood (and youth) in the corresponding scholarship as a whole (Gstettner, 1981: 8 and 85):
All dominant models of human ‘development’ today include territorial associations: populations and individual people alike are thought of in terms of political regions, as territories to be conquered, occupied, researched and proselytized. Thus, having a look at anthropology, called previously ‘Völkerkunde’, can inform us as to why academics consider ‘savages’ to be primitive, ‘primitives’ to be naïve, the ‘naïve’ to be childish, and children, to be naïve, primitive and savage. … From the outset, childhood and youth studies have focused their research interest on the idea that it must be possible to analytically grasp lost ‘naturalness’ and, in a scholarly manor, to reconstruct it as the ‘natural state’ of the child (as well as the ‘savage’). That’s why educational child and youth psychology is connected in a causal relationship with anthropological fields of research, which, despite their different ‘research subjects’, exhibit the same analytical interests – namely to separate the influences of civilization and culture from inherited predispositions; to separate ‘developed’ from ‘undeveloped’.
At the time that Gérard Mendel and Peter Gstettner formulated their scholarly ideas about the colonization and conquest of children, they could not yet refer to postcolonial theories, as they only emerged in the following years. Thus, they can be credited even more so for drawing parallels and bringing attention to the relationship between colonization and the ideologies stemming from the emerging sciences on childhood.5
Twenty years later, similar reflections were also found in a study by the two US-American early childhood educationalists, Gaile Cannella and Radhika Viruru (2004), who have so far received little attention in the field of childhood research. The authors do not limit themselves to challenging childhood studies, but they also make an effort to transfer fundamental ideas from postcolonial studies to childhood studies.
The starting point of Cannella and Viruru’s ideas is that, from a postcolonial perspective, Western dominated models of childhood reproduce hierarchies and separations, for which European enlightenment and modernization and the accompanying demand for universality can be blamed. These models of childhood, they claim, are the concurrent product of the same ideologies, which have served as justification for colonial expansion and conquest. This can especially be seen in the parallel application of the idea of the development from a lower to a higher grade of perfection. Childhood, like non-European geographical regions and populations, is classified at the lowest rung of the scale, and colonized people are equated with children, both of whom have yet to be developed. Colonization, they go so far as to say, was even executed in the name of children, whose souls were seen in need of saving and whose parents had the obligation to raise them ‘correctly’, in terms of modern conceptions of childhood (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 4).
Similar to the relationship between colonial rulers and the colonized, according to Cannella and Viruru, a strict separation between adults and children is established, and the relationship between both becomes institutionalized as a power structure, based on the force and privilege of the stronger party. This is already expressed, in that the term child is associated with a state of incompletion, dependence and subordination, thus means ‘a kind of epistemic violence that limits human possibilities’ (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 2). This power structure can also be understood, in that the ability to speak (in the widely recognized form of ‘speech’) and read written texts are the only form of communications recognized, and in which important ideas can be expressed. Based on their experiences with very young, ‘speechless’ children, Cannella and Viruru at least attempt, ‘a glimpse of the possibilities that the unspoken might offer, that the previously unthought might generate’ (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 8).6 Their (and others’) interest is quintessentially the question: ‘What gives some people the right to determine who other people are (determinations like the fundamental nature of childhood) and to decide what is right for others?’ (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 7; italics in original).
Modern childhood, seen as separate and opposite from adulthood and which in its institutionalized form isolates children into special reserves, is identified by the authors as a ‘colonizing construct’ (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 85). Thereby, ‘binary thinking’, a pioneering concept of modernity, is reproduced, which can only distinguish between good and evil, superior and inferior, right and wrong, or civilized and savage (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 88). This division puts adults in a privileged position, since their knowledge is considered superior to that of the child; children may even be denied knowledge under the pretence of protection. This child-adult dichotomy prolongs colonial power, as it is transferred to an entire population group, which is in turn labelled as deficient, needy, slow, lazy or underdeveloped (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 89). The categories of progress and development, the authors argue, devalue certain population groups, and secure one’s own superiority over people from other cultures. The idea of ‘childish development’ is transferred to adults of other cultures, thereby arguably ‘infantilizing’ them.
Like colonized people