The Crucible of Consent : : American Child Rearing and the Forging of Liberal Society / / James E. Block.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter E-BOOK GESAMTPAKET / COMPLETE PACKAGE 2012
• VerfasserIn: Block, James E.,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2012]; ©2011
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

A democratic government requires the consent of its citizens. But how is that consent formed? Why should free people submit to any rule? Pursuing this question to its source for the first time, The Crucible of Consent argues that the explanation is to be found in the nursery and the schoolroom. Only in the receptive and less visible realms of childhood and youth could the necessary synthesis of self-direction and integrative social conduct-so contradictory in logic yet so functional in practice-be established without provoking reservation or resistance.From the early postrevolutionary republic, two liberal child-rearing institutions-the family and schooling-took on a responsibility crucial to the growing nation: to produce the willing and seemingly self-initiated conformability on which the society's claim of freedom and demand for order depended. Developing the institutional mechanisms for generating early consent required the constant transformation of child-rearing theory and practice over the course of the nineteenth century. By exploring the systematic reframing of relations between generations that resulted, this book offers new insight into the consenting citizenry at the foundation of liberal society, the novel domestic and educational structures that made it possible, and the unprecedented role created for the young in the modern world.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: Is Consent Credible? -- 1. The Hidden Dynamic of Childhood Consent -- I. The Dream of Revolutionary Erasure -- 2. The Revolution against Patriarchy and the Crisis of Founding -- 3. Unencumbered Youth and the Postrevolutionary Vacuum of Authority -- 4. Divergent Childhoods, Different Republics: The Initial Turn to Socialization -- II. Framing Liberal Child Rearing in the Early Republic -- 5. The Emerging Consensus on Agency Socialization -- 6. Toward a Child- Centered Family -- 7. Winning the Child's Will -- 8. Socializing Society: Pop u lar Education and the Diffusion of Agency -- 9. Educating the Agent as Liberal Citizen -- III. Consolidating the Postwar Agency Republic -- 10. The "Self- Made" Citizen and the Erasure of Socialization -- 11. A Superfluous Socialization? Shaping the Self-Realizing Child -- 12. Educating the Voluntary Citizen in an Organizational Age -- Coda: From Deweyan Consensus to the Crisis of Consent -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index