Childhood as Education, Youth as Exploration: The Concepts of Childhood and Youth in Christian Felix Weibe's Works for Young Readers

摘要

This dissertation examines developments in the concepts of childhood and youth in late eighteenth-century Europe as reflected in the works for young readers by one of the earliest and most popular German children's authors of the time: Christian Felix Weisse (1726-1804). Building upon the debate surrounding the claim popularized by French historian Philippe Aries that the concept of childhood itself was "discovered" in the late eighteenth century, this project aims to illustrate one highly influential individual's own concept of childhood and his related concept of youth, as well as to investigate both the relationship and the boundary between these two concepts. In order to accomplish this, the project presents a thorough comparative analysis of two periodicals written respectively for children and for young adults: Der Kinderfreund (1775-1782) and Briefwechsel der Familie des Kinderfreundes (1784-1792).;Both periodicals chronicle the lives of a father and his four growing children and consist of numerous vignettes, in each of which a particular case or situation is used to illustrate a more general moral or lesson. Weisse's Kinderfreund ultimately presents childhood as a non-stop period of education in which every aspect of a child's life contributes to his or her academic, social, or moral education under the guidance of a parent or teacher. In contrast, Weisse's Briefwechsel depicts youth as a period of self-education during which young people, no longer in need of a mentor, begin to use their developed faculties of reason to monitor their own behavior and guide their decisions for the future. Thus, Weisse depicts not a biological boundary between childhood and youth, but rather a functional one---namely, the transition from guided instruction to independent self-instruction.;Finally, this dissertation situates Weisse's concepts of childhood and youth within the pedagogical discourse of his time by offering a comparison of Weisse's works with Rousseau's Emile (1762). This comparison demonstrates not only the broad spectrum of ideas concerning childhood in the eighteenth century, but also the intensity of the discourse on childhood--and its overall significance--for the time.