Do Children Need their Own Liberation Movement?
| The Child's Right to Respect (1929), by Janusz Korczak | ||
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Researchers have affirmed that the adult is guided by motives, the child by impulses, that the adult is logical while the child is caught up in a web of illusory imagination ... And what about the adult mess, a quagmire of opinions and beliefs, a psychological herd of prejudices and habits, frivolous deeds of fathers and mothers—the whole thing from top to bottom an irresponsible adult life. Negligence, laziness, dull obstinacy, thoughtlessness, adult absurdities, follies, and drinking bouts. |
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 Korczak, in the movie of the same name by Andrzej Wajda |
Beware: contemporary life is shaping a powerful brute, a homo rapax; it is he who dictates the mode of living. His concessions to the weak are a lie, his respect for the aged, for women’s rights and kindness toward children are falsehoods. Such homeless sentiments wander about lost, like Cinderella. Rather, it is really children who are the real princes of feelings, the poets and thinkers. Respect, if not humility, toward the white, bright, and unquenchable holy childhood. |
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Full text : When I am Little Again and The Child's Right to Respect 
janusz.pdf, by Janusz Korczak
Beware:
contemporary life is shaping
a powerful brute, a homo rapax;
it is he who dictates the mode of living.
His concessions to the weak are a lie,
his respect for the aged,
for women’s rights and
kindness toward children are falsehoods.
Is maternalist feminism the enemy of women?
The present crisis in feminist studies derives from anti-essentialist beliefs called gender theory. There can't be, according to the doxa, any natural state, any essence of Womanhood, Maternity or Paternity from which to derive oughts and shoulds in society: far from that, any call to Nature is a veiled attempt to strengthen the patriarchal oppressor.
A recent analysis described the eruption of a crisis in 70's feminists: an epidemic of childbirths in women who previously thought of childbearing and child rearing as the epitome of proletarian submissiveness: unpaid work damaging the body, done in total oblivion of the self.
Around 1980, most of these women had lost their minds and were cuddling little babies and glorifying their animal instincts (some publicly, others with shame).
This crisis led to the development of the notion of maternalism by feminists who perceive an emptiness in theories that take femininity as a totally contingent, socially constructed entity. A major heresy, a pact of suicide according to most radicals, not to mention postmodern queers, anticapitalist gender theorists, e tutti quanti. Said some trendy feminists: How dare you raise to the status of theory our Achilles' heel, maternity?
| Where do “feminism” and “puerism” come from? | ||
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Words in -ism are created when it is felt that there is a need to designate tendencies, ideological, medical or other. In fact, ‘Isms’ only really became something in their own right in the late seventeenth century (the dictionaries record the first known use of the term in 1680), but once identified, the general term soon caught on, particularly as a way of being rude about certain groups of people. By the middle of the nineteenth century, lots of new derogatory uses had become popular in the United States, convenient ways of summing up supposedly ‘do-gooder movements’ such as feminism, prohibitionism (those trying to prohibit things, especially alcohol) and above all, socialism. Most Americans hate socialism, and the word lends itself very well to a long drawn out snarl of disapproval once the letters ‘ism’ have been added. In 1856, one newspaper, the Richmond Examiner, summed it all up by running a series of fiery editorials headed: ‘Our Enemies, the Isms and their purposes’. So what to make of feminism and puerism then? The roots femin-, and puer-, denote, respectively, the woman and the child. Each of those words initially responded to quite different needs. “Feminism”, contrary to a belief amongst some feminists, was not created in 1870 by the feminist and socialist thinker Fourier (it would have been one of his last words before expiring, since he also died in 1870), but by the novelist Alexandre Dumas the son, who was a conservative and strongly antifeminist. Dumas created this word to designate an -ism that was against nature. In fact the word was uttered for the very first time in 1871 by a medical doctor, Ferdinand-Valère Faneau de la Cour, in his “Du féminisme et de l’infantilisme chez les tuberculeux” (Concerning feminism and infantilism amongst tuberculosis patients), to describe two pathological tendencies. A year later, Dumas created the adjective “feminist” in, “l'Homme-femme", a vigorously conservative pamphlet, about infidelity and divorce. Only ten years later was the term used in a sense closer to the one in use today. “Puerism” has similar, but even darker, origins. “Puerism” occurred infrequently as a synonym of “infantilism”, a regressive, pathological tendency. However, recently, puerism began to appear in texts and manifests associated, loosely or closely, to pedophilia: puerism, the ideal ideology of pedophiles. It is also encountered in discourses that oppose a postulated legal domination of the interests of the mother and the child, to the detriment of fathers: patriarchy in reverse. Still, “feminism” freed itself from its dark origins, and became a neutral term: a theory based on the idea that society is dominated by men. The strict meaning of “puerism”, however is still unheard of: a theory based on the idea that society is dominated by adults. |
Hypnotized in polarities (a danger of theorizing in an intrinsically polar field of studies, 'man vs. woman' studies), a number of feminists forgot, or pretended not to see, an even more radical problem than that of a postulated all-pervasive domination of Patriarchy in Humanity. A problem which doesn't 'belong' to women only, but that 'they' should reclaim much more. Maternalist feminists started to acknowledged the problem: that of child-rearing, or more generally, that of the definition of the child. His essence.
And how society is re-created through children.
The child: the most oppressed of all?
In child neglect stories, it is very common to hear "I did my best" uttered by 'bad parents'. (We can easily see the fallacy, when we realize that even those who do their worse do their best at it.)
But that is not the issue: the issue is that one's own 'personal best' for matters as crucial as that of a young life, cannot be dependent on any private feeling or intuition of what's best. Still, nobody would say anything different from this weak excuse. Nobody would say: I did what's best according to what's taught in Universities and valued by my fellow parents. Child rearing is a private issue, one does what feels is best.
Imagine that a population of extraterrestrials arrived en masse on Earth and were to be accepted as our hosts, despite of the fact that their brains and hormone systems are radically different from ours. We would certainly devote enormous resources to the newly created ET studies, so that Humans can live profitably with them. These ETs would lead us to analyze our comparatively more neuron-depleted, axon-enriched brains, our highly structured neural structures, our poorly functioning mirror neurons, our highly catecholaminated blood, etc.
But since kids will all become like us eventually, why bother?
| Pay-back time | ||
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We’ve grown affluent. We don’t get rich solely from the fruits of our own labour. We are heirs to an enormous fortune, shareholders, co-owners. What a lot of cities, buildings, factories, mines, hotels, and theatres we have; what an abundance of goods there is in the markets, how many ships transport them to and fro - the merchants assault the consumers to buy their goods. Let us tally it all up. Let us calculate how much of the total sum belongs to children, determine the child’s share of the profits, not as a favour nor as a charity either. Let us honestly check the amount we allocate for use by the children’s portion of the population, how much by the under-age group, and by the working class. What does the inheritance amount to; how should it be divided; have we, dishonest guardians, not disinherited, expropriated? THE CHILD’S RIGHT TO RESPECT, by Janusz Korczak  |
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Korczak himself payed the ultimate price I am sure that even in the gas chamber, as the Zyklon B gas was stifling childish throats and striking terror instead of hope into the orphans hearts, the Old Doctor must have whispered with one last effort, ‘it's all right, children, it will be all right’. — excerpt of The Pianist, by Władysław Szpilman, about Korczak's last hours. |
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