On the margins of adulthood: towards a pedagogical reading of the childhood-adulthood dialectic

Abstract

This article offers a pedagogical reading of the adult gaze that permeates discourses on childhood, shaping the definition of needs, policies, and trajectories of intervention. Starting from a critique of adultism, understood as a system of power operating through practices, attitudes, and institutional dispositives, the analysis shows how people under the age of 18 are constructed as human becomings, subordinated to normatively prescribed future outcomes and thereby placed in a naturalized minoritarian position. It also highlights how this adultist futurity is reproduced through educational dispositives and through discourses on children’s rights. In this direction, the article argues for the need for an epistemological and pedagogical repositioning capable of transforming this order and of opening, in the present and the future, spaces of possibility for all childhoods.