Lessons from the history of education for a “century of the child at risk”

摘要

This introductory article provides the conceptual framework to integrate the following international contributions and their various historical, regional, institutional and cultural contexts. It does so by focusing mainly on three aspects: (1) Childhood and youth as social constructs, the varying classifications of these life phases, their concomitant ambivalences, tensions and social expectations, and the potential for conflict and risk these create. (2) The history and usage of the term, 'at risk' - a designation currently in widespread use despite (or because of) its excessively broad and fuzzy connotations. (3) The reconfiguration of childhood triggered by the normative construction of bourgeois childhood development, especially with a view to the procedures of normalisation and conceptions of normality that emerged in Western thought on this field.