The Roads of Chinese Childhood

"This is a book that I’ve gone back to again and again over the years. Charles Stafford is trying to give you a sense of the ordinary, everyday processes of learning in a fishing village in Taiwan, so at a very localized level. The everyday practices are very focused on building a sense of filial responsibility and duty towards your family, about reciprocal roles and obligations. That’s how you become a moral person. It’s not done through explicit teaching, it’s done through ‘ostensive learning.’ Cultural acquisition through everyday interactions is key. As a route to adulthood, he contrasts that ordinary knowledge with the explicit knowledge that’s taught, in a much more organized fashion, in school contexts — where they’re trying to teach children to be a part of a nation. For me, this shows, again, how agile children are from a very young age. They’re integrating the very formalized way of doing things at school with this much more informal process — and there are tensions between the two. They’re not necessarily proposing the same moral values. This is a feature of so many children’s lives in the modern world. Education is increasingly based on academic accomplishment, globalized measures are being used to measure children’s attainment at school. That’s very different from what is valued and reinforced, informally, at home. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The book is a real micro study. It involves intricate observation and is very much in the anthropological tradition. I wanted to have, as one of these books, at least one ethnography which shows, at the grassroots level, how children learn to become moral beings in their society. Just seeing things done in certain ways, teaches you how you ought to be. Which is very different from the world of policy which comes in with ideas, often imported from overseas, imposed by governments from above, which then have an enormous impact on children’s lives. The children’s rights discourse, which effectively came out of the West, became globalized through the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the Young Lives study, we’re seeing what happens when you have a set of values that are imposed from above and another set of values which bubble up from the grassroots. The two come together, and one child may be faced with both sets of values. In Ethiopia, for example, children are getting teachers to intervene in family life when the parents say that it’s time for a girl to get married. Girls will tell the teacher they want to stay in school, and the teacher will tell parents, ‘It’s illegal for a girl under the age of 18 to be married.’ That’s in line with national legislation in Ethiopia, and in line with international guidelines, but absolutely not in line with traditional values. Intervention can bring about positive change for children. However, when things are imposed they often have unintended adverse consequences, which is what I like people to be more aware of when they’re trying to impose globalized values. This book isn’t showing an inherent contradiction between school education and informal learning, but it does show you the ambiguities and the tensions, the different modes of childhood, in a small village, and gives you a sense of the complexity of lived reality for children."