Nation and Childhood

The nation-state is the prime organizing political and social force since the industrial age, creating institutions, such as modern childhood, the school, or welfare, and seeking to deliver materially better lives for citizens. During the formation of nation-states, the newly established science of sociology created a conceptualization of the nation as a living organism, with developing children being one of its most crucial components. The nation-state needed a citizenry that can bear political responsibilities and rights. The founding of the secular government school system, welfare institutions, and the family (mothers) had been given major roles in the formation of a citizenry from children. One of the most important roles of schools even today is to create a citizenry that is loyal to the nation and feels belonging to the nation as a community upheld by some commonalities in identity, ideals and values, and practices. Childhood and nation are both constructs—they are an idea, a social boundary, and a social institution. Both constructs are in continual change and require continuous tending. There are at least four ways nation and childhood intertwine. First, a major intersection of nation and childhood is that children are socialized into a national identity; therefore, one cannot not be a citizen of a contemporary nation-state and still have some form of legitimate identity. Second, nation and childhood intertwine along the notion of development. The notion of development transforms the development of children into as a resource, and parallel with the progress of nations, development makes them less or more advanced or less or more primitive. In this way, the future of the nation, both real and imagined, is intertwined with the future of children and childhood. In debates about the future, childhood stands in the crosscurrent of various competing cultural and political projects that are formed at the intersections of gender, race, class, citizenship, culture, religion, and nation. Third, notions of childhood help in reproducing certain views about nations, and certain views about the nation shape childhood and define children’s experiences. The fourth intersection is how children relate to the idea of the nation, how they define their subjectivities in relation to its terms and reproduce or recreate the nation and nationalist projects of which they have been the objects in their own terms. Childhood socialization, experiences, and memories function as resources for nationalist sensibilities.