The nature of the child and the invention of an interesting setting: the education of childhood as a technology of instinct

Abstract

This article proposes to discuss education of childhood as a technology of instinct. By technology I reveal its affiliation to the  perspectives opened by Michel Foucault, regarding power in modern societies. By instinct, I mean a set of theoretical objects, identified by the same author, which by the mid-19th century were able to enter the rules of psychiatric discourse. As such, what is intended here is to analyze how a notion of instinct could be absorbed, and work, within the medical-pedagogical discourse that marked, in an innovative way, the first decades of the 20th century. In this sense, authors that were relevant in the current debate are visited in order to discuss the ways in which by the same time the framing that would best provide child development was being organized, this was also endowed with a therapeutic character in the face of certain innate aspects, assigning education of childhood with the competences of a decisive and early field of abnormality prevention.