The crucible of consent : American child rearing and the forging of liberal society / James E. Block.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Block, James E.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Children and politics--United States--History.

Children and politics.

Child rearing--Political aspects--United States--History.

Child rearing.

Liberalism--United States.

Liberalism.

Citizenship--United States.

Citizenship.

Consensus (Social sciences).

Agent (Philosophy).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (462 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

A democratic government requires the consent of its citizens. But how is that consent formed? Why should free people submit to any rule? Pursuing this question to its source for the first time, The Crucible of Consent argues that the explanation is to be found in the nursery and the schoolroom. Only in the receptive and less visible realms of childhood and youth could the necessary synthesis of self-direction and integrative social conduct-so contradictory in logic yet so functional in practice-be established without provoking reservation or resistance.From the early postrevolutionary republic, two liberal child-rearing institutions-the family and schooling-took on a responsibility crucial to the growing nation: to produce the willing and seemingly self-initiated conformability on which the society's claim of freedom and demand for order depended. Developing the institutional mechanisms for generating early consent required the constant transformation of child-rearing theory and practice over the course of the nineteenth century. By exploring the systematic reframing of relations between generations that resulted, this book offers new insight into the consenting citizenry at the foundation of liberal society, the novel domestic and educational structures that made it possible, and the unprecedented role created for the young in the modern world.

Contents:

Introduction: is consent credible?

The hidden dynamic of childhood consent

Part I. The dream of revolutionary erasure

Part II. Framing liberal child-rearing in the early republic: from factionalism to mainstream: the emerging consensus on agency socialization; constituting the voluntary citizen; socializing society: popular education and the diffusion of

Agency; educating the agent as liberal citizen

Part III. Consolidating the postwar agency republic: the "self-made" citizen: the science of agency and the erasure of socialization; a superfluous socialization? shaping the self-realizing child; divided we stand: education in the emerging organizational age

Coda: from dewey to discord-the twentieth-century crisis of the consensual society.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674062610

0674062612

OCLC:

776587011