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Summary Children: rights and childhood door David Archard
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Summary of all chapters from David Archard's book Children: Rights and Childhood for the course Introduction to Practical Philosophy.
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Children - rights and childhood David ArchardChapter 1 John Locke’s children
The title ‘John Locke’s children’ signifies that the chapter outlines the philosophical views of
Locke on children in contradistinction to adults, on the proper powers of adults in their
control and tutelage of children, and on how children become adults. Locke is not principally
known as a philosopher of childhood, yet his work is impressive and has been deeply
influential on subsequent thinking about the topic.
John Locke (1632-1704) is one of the most important and influential figures in the history of
English-speaking philosophy. He is a progenitor of the empiricist and analytic tradition of
philosophy, and widely regarded as the ‘father of English liberalism’. He did not write a
philosophical treatise on childhood, although he did write Some thoughts concerning
education (1693) which recommends the appropriate education for a young gentleman.
These recommendations are surprisingly modern and liberal, permitting Some thoughts to
be viewed, along with Rousseau’s Émile (1762), as the earliest manifesto for a ‘child-
centered’ education.
Locke also wrote about children in other works devoted to the origins of civil government and
the foundations of knowledge. He writes of children as the recipients of an ideal upbringing,
citizens in the making, fledgling but imperfect reasoners and blank sheets filled by
experience. He is an illustrious representative of anglophone philosophy both in general and
in its thinking about childhood. Locke’s philosophical children are good ones to start with, not
least because their problems are abiding ones.
In An essay concerning human understanding (1689), Locke supplied the first full-blown,
forceful and persuasive defence of an empiricist theory of mind and knowledge. Such a
theory holds that all human knowledge derives from a single source: experience. Famously,
Locke denied that any knowledge is inborn. Humans become knowledgeable users of
reason. Since childhood is a stage in the developmental process whose end is adulthood,
children would seem to be imperfect, incomplete versions of their adult selves.
Coming to reason
Locke’s theory of civil government and parental authority seems to presume that children
lack what adult human beings possess. Children, says Locke, are ‘travellers newly arrived in
a strange country, of which they know nothing’. What makes them ‘strangers’ in our ‘country’
is their lack of both knowledge and moral sense. ‘Reason’ covers both aspects of what must
be acquired if they are to become full members of our ‘country’. Children must be educated
and brought to reason.
With regard to how human beings acquire knowledge, Locke’s empiricism holds that the
human mind may, at birth, be presumed to be a ‘white paper, void of all characters, without
any ideas’. It is experience alone which stocks the mind with its ideas, experience being both
direct sensory awareness of the world and reflective awareness of the mind’s own
operations.
Locke does not hold to the simple thesis that a newborn infant’s mind is completely empty.
He admits to the possibility of prenatal experiences, and accepts that a child has inborn
dispositions, for instance to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Locke is mainly concerned to
deny the strong innatist claim that a child is born with knowledge of such ideas, propositions
or principles as ‘2 + 2 = 4’ or ‘God exists’. He wanted to distinguish between ‘natural
tendencies imprinted on the Minds of Man’, which he granted, and ‘innate’ ‘Principles of
Knowledge’, which he rejected.
In the Essay, Locke suggests that the child’s first experiences are almost exclusively
sensory, reflection upon the inward workings of the mind being a later development.
However, in his Thoughts, Locke is more circumspect. Here he tempers his recommendation
,Children - rights and childhood David Archard
to treat children as rational creatures with the observation that such treatment should be
relative to the child’s particular capacities. The use of reason is for Locke a faculty which is
both inborn, ‘native’, and one that develops through a combination of natural maturation and
educational encouragement. This helps to explain his apparent ambivalence on an issue
which was beginning to assume prominence in contemporary debate: the relative
contributions of character of nature and nurture.
One should try to bring a child to moral maturity by working with and not against the grain of
her nature. This nature, like that of the adult she will become, has the ‘same passions, the
same desires’. Locke thought that a child was best educated by being put into situations
which discouraged the exercise of the bad character traits and kept away from situations
which encouraged them. This helps to explain Locke’s noted insistence upon the educational
value of habit. For Locke, the essence of moral education was the practice and cultivation of
the powers of moral reason, not the learning by rote of fixed moral principles: ‘Children are
not to be taught by rules. What you think necessary for them to do, settle in them by an
indispensable practice’.
Locke offers a principled objection to corporal punishment. Locke feared that the use of
beatings would only strengthen a child’s natural predilection to seek pleasure and avoid
pain. At the same time it would lead the child to associate the forbidden action with the
displeasure suffered rather than recognise the reason for its being forbidden.
Parental power
According to a simple model of parental power, parents have absolute authority over their
children, who have no rights. A major principle of Roman law was that of patria potestas.
The father as head of the family, paterfamilias, had the absolute power of life and death over
his son, the latter being released from this state only by his father’s death or by
manumission. Thomas Hobbes accorded parents total and absolute dominion over their
children. Locke’s views are notably more liberal, gesturing towards what might be seen as a
modern theory of justified parenthood.
Locke’s important legacy to political theory is his insistence that legitimate political authority
is founded upon the freely given consent of those individuals over whom authority is
exercised. For Locke, it is adult humans who make the contract, and enjoy under civil
government the protection of their rights. Children are neither parties to the contract nor
rights-holding citizens of the government thereby agreed to. Nevertheless, Locke does not
think children lack all rights, and, whilst he believes that some measure of parental power is
warranted, he does not think parents have absolute dominion over their offspring.
For Locke, children are not born in the full state of equality enjoyed by their parents, but they
are born to it. Consequently, parents have ‘a sort of rule and jurisdiction’ over their children,
albeit a temporally restricted one. Children are weak, vulnerable and incapable of providing
for their own maintenance. They also lack reason and thus cannot truly act freely. Locke
holds that freedom requires action in accordance with the law of reason, and whoever lacks
reason thereby lacks the means to be free. Locke concedes that a lack of reason is not
exclusive to children; there are adults - ‘innocents’ and ‘madmen’ - who remain in the state
that naturally defines childhood.
The condition of children - incapable of supporting themselves and of acting for their best
interests - justifies parents in acting on behalf of their children, but it also constitutes such
tutelage as a duty. Indeed, the power that parents have to bring up their children derives
from this obligation to care for those who cannot care for themselves. Although Locke
appears to assume that it is in virtue of being parents that such an obligation is incurred, he
does not think that anyone has rights over a child simply on account of being his parent. A
,Children - rights and childhood David Archard
foster parent who cared adequately for his or her chargers would have, in virtue of fulfilling
the parental obligation and in respect of the children, the same rights as any natural parent.
Thereby Locke specifically rejects the view that natural parents enjoy rights over their
children because they own them. He denies that parents own their offspring in virtue of
having produced them.
Not only does Locke reject the idea that parents own their children; he also finds cruel and
barbarous the associated idea that parents might dispose of their children as they see fit. He
is convinced that parents are naturally disposed to act in the interests of their children, that
they are bound to them by natural ties of affection and would more likely neglect their own
good than not care for their offspring.
For Locke, rights possessed in the state of nature are preserved in the passage to
government. The state cannot legitimately alienate, abrogate or abridge what are, properly,
natural rights. Now, whereas Locke sees a child’s rights as natural, he is not prepared to
concede that there is any right, as of nature, possessed by a parent in respect of her
children. Seemingly then, the scope of the state’s warranted authority in relation to the family
is constrained only by respect for the child’s interests.
For Locke, then, parental power is not natural, though normally it is assumed by natural
parents. It is derived from and constrained by the natural right of children to be cared for and
protected. Its warrant is the temporally bounded state of natural incapacity which defines
childhood. Otherwise, the terms of its justified exercise are circumscribed by no more than
the rights of the child and a confidence in the natural benevolence of parents.
Chapter 2 The concept of childhood
Article 1
One place to start defining a child is the extremely important document, the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Article 1 of the CRC states that, ‘for the
purposes of the present Convention, a child means every human being below the age of
eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier’. A
child defined by the CRC possesses rights ascribed to a child by the Convention. However,
this does not mean that being a child is an unambiguously good thing. In the most obvious
, Children - rights and childhood David Archard
and immediate sense children have children’s rights and lack adult rights.
Moreover, it also matters why rights are accorded. The CRC declares that ‘the child, by
reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care’. Hence
the child gets its own rights only because it is possessed of a nature that is arguably inferior
to and lesser than that of its later adult self.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states in Article 1 that ‘all human beings
are born free and equal in dignity and rights’ and, in Article 2, that ‘everyone is entitled to all
the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind’.
Childhood is normally distinguished from adulthood by age, yet age is not cited in Article 2 of
the UDHR as one possible manner in which humans might be distinguished.
And so to beginnings and endings - what fixes the starting point and limit of childhood?
There have been attempts to construe ‘child’ as whatever comes into being with conception,
which would mean that abortion is illegal, as ‘every child has the inherent right to life’.
International conventions of human rights generally ascribe rights to human beings at birth
and not before. Furthermore, no instrument of international law has ever been interpreted so
as to recognise the existence of fetal rights to life. By contrast, there has been recognition of
the rights of women to reproductive choice, extending to rights to terminations. Nevertheless,
it is still worth spelling out how any concept of ‘child’ might or might not encompass the
‘unborn child’. To clarify the issue it helps to distinguish three sense of ‘unborn child’.
In the first and second senses of ‘unborn child’ this is what actually exists before birth; it
identifies the being in utero. In the first sense of ‘unborn child’ this being has the same moral
status as the ‘born child’. Opponents of abortion thus believe that the destruction the ‘unborn
child’ is as morally wrong as the destruction of a child that has been delivered. According to
the second sense of ‘unborn child’ explaining what is wrong with doing something to the
being in utero can only be in terms of what might follow for that child once it is born.
The third sense of ‘unborn child’ is of a possible child, one that might come into existence as
a result of the reproductive acts and omissions of adults. This sense of ‘unborn child’ is at
the heart of a rich and intriguing literature on procreative ethics.
At the other end of childhood, when does a child cease to be a child and become an adult?
Two further points may be made in relation to Article 1’s definition of the upper limit of
childhood. First, every child is entitled to all of the rights subsequently listed in the
Convention. Nevertheless, a state can set the beginning of adulthood and the enjoyment of
adult rights, such as voting and driving, at various ages. Second, a single legal definition of
childhood, whereby all who fall below a certain age are children, can be combined
coherently with a further subdivision of that class into different groups. Subsets of children
can then be in turn identified by their ages as the different, successive stages of childhood.
Furthermore, whilst all children can have the rights of a child, each of these groups might
have further special rights.
The Ariès thesis
According to Centuries of Childhood (1962) by Philippe Ariès, the end of the seventeenth
century is central in the history of childhood. Its key claim is that it was not until the late
seventeenth century that the ‘concept of childhood’ began to emerge.
Ariès’s book has had an extraordinary impact, first upon the discipline of social history but
also in many other areas. It was the first general historical study of childhood. Its being first
has given it an apparently authoritative stature. Discussions of childhood in social, moral,
legal and political theory are often prefaced with a résumé of Ariès’s thesis presented as a
fundamental and universally acknowledged truth.
In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist. However, this has not to be confused
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