Revisiting the functions of immaturity: a reflection on the concepts relevance for Childhood Education

Abstract

Understanding the nature of childhood may be critical for several areas of research and application. The last decades have witnessed the deconstruction of childhood concepts, based on historical, anthropological and psychological research work, which demonstrate significant social and cultural variability of societies and historical epochsconceptions about childhood and child upbringing. Meanwhile, its increasingly consensual that early education is important and that schools are childrens privileged place, detached from the world of adults and particularly from the world of labor. These notions are partially due to pragmatic motives - the need to prepare children for their future insertion in a competitive labor market - and also to theoretic considerations: the assumption of radical socio-cultural and environmental perspectives which construe developing human beings as endowed with unlimited plasticity and liability to immediate and historical environmental contingencies. This paper aims to question these standpoints and to suggest an alternative research agenda on childhood as a bio-psycho-social phenomenon. Human immaturity is focused from an Evolutionary Psychology perspective, as well as recent studies on cognition and metacognition, learning, play and self-esteem, among other themes approached from this perspective. Questions related to childhood education in Brazil, its implicit and explicit curricula and its compatibility with a bio-psycho-social conception of childhood are discussed.