Micha de Winter, born in Oss, the Netherlands, in 1951. Ph.D. from Tilburg University. Associate Professor of Child Care at Utrecht University.
Fellow (1 September 1997 – 30 June 1998)
During my 1997/98 NIAS Fellowship, I studied historical and theoretical developments within the twentieth-century science of pedagogy, related to processes of infantilisation, emancipation and social participation of children. Twentieth-century scientific pedagogy has often been assigned a significant, but ambiguous role in the process of infantilisation: the emergence of a separated pedagogical province or ‘Youthland’ which shielded children from the adult world for an extending period of time. Particularly pedagogies that argued for a child-centered upbringing have been blamed for the growing ‘apartheid’ of children in Western societies, and for the supposed negative individual and social effects .On the other hand the same pedagogies are believed to have contributed to the emancipation of the child. My investigations were aimed at the connections between different pedagogical viewpoints and the ambiguous concepts of infantilisation and emancipation. As the historical landscape of pedagogical science is very scattered, I focussed on some of the main polarities that have been dominating the field during this century: naturalistic versus metaphysical approaches, individual versus social orientations and assimilation versus emancipation. The study resulted in different articles, chapters and conference-presentations. The main publication, titled “On infantilisation and participation, pedagogical lessons from the century of the child”, will be a chapter in the joint book of the research group on “Historical Developmental Psychology”, to be published in 1999 by Cambridge Press.