necessary to cope with ones own behavior, especially in uncomfortable situations, and also the behavior of others.
2.4.3 Childhood Childhood being a child is a broad term usually applied to the phase of
development in humans between infancy and adulthood. In many countries there is an age of majority when childhood ends and a person legally becomes an adult.
The age can range anywhere from 12 to 21, with 18 being the most common. Philippe Ariès, an important French medievalist and historian, published a study
in 1961 of paintings, gravestones, furniture, and school records. He found that before the seventeenth century, children were represented as mini-adults. Since
then historians have increasingly researched childhood in past times. Several historical events and periods are discussed as relevant to the history
of childhood in the West. One such event is the life of Jesus Christ. Christ taught
that children were to be loved and revered, a departure from the ancients attitude to children which was to be propagated in the Roman Empire during the next 400
years with the introduction of Christianity. During the Renaissance, artistic depictions of children increased
dramatically in Europe. This did not impact the social attitude to children much, however.
The Victorian Era has been described as a source of the modern institution of childhood. Ironically, the Industrial Revolution during this era led to an
increase in child labour, but due to the campaigning of the Evangelicals, and efforts of author Charles Dickens and others, child labour was gradually reduced
and halted in England via the Factory Acts of 1802-1878. The Victorians concomitantly emphasized the role of the family and the sanctity of the child, and
broadly speaking, this attitude has remained dominant in Western societies since then.
In the contemporary era Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg have constructed a critical theory of childhood and childhood education that they have
labeled kinderculture. Here Kincheloe and Steinberg make use of multiple research and theoretical discourses the bricolage to study childhood from diverse
perspectives—historiography, ethnography, cognitive research, media studies, cultural studies, political economic analysis, hermeneutics, semiotics, content
analysis, etc. Based on this multiperspectival inquiry, Kincheloe and Steinberg contend that new times have ushered in a new era of childhood. Evidence of this
dramatic cultural change is omnipresent, but many individuals in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have not yet noticed it. When Steinberg
and Kincheloe wrote the first edition of Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood in 1997 second edition, 2004 many people who made
their living studying, teaching, or caring for children were not yet aware of the nature of the changes in childhood that they encountered daily.
In the domains of psychology, education, and to a lesser degree sociology and cultural studies few observers before kinderculture had studied the ways that
the information explosion so characteristic of our contemporary era hyperreality had operated to undermine traditional notions of childhood and change the terrain
of childhood education. Those who have shaped, directed and employed
contemporary information technology have played an exaggerated role in the reformulation of childhood. Of course, information technology alone, Kincheloe
and Steinberg maintain, has not produced a new era of childhood. Obviously, numerous social, cultural, and political economic factors have operated to produce
such changes. The central purpose of kinderculture is to socially, culturally, politically, and economically situate the changing historical status of childhood
and to specifically interroge the ways diverse media have helped construct what Kincheloe and Steinberg call the new childhood. Kinderculture understands that
childhood is an ever-changing social and historical artifact not simply a biological entity. Because many psychologists have argued that childhood is a natural phase
of growing up, of becoming an adult, Kincheloe and Steinberg coming from an educational context saw kinderculture as a corrective to such a psychologization
of childhood.
2.5 Conflict
