History of Education as history of Childhood. The example of Buenaventura Delgado

Buenaventura Delgado with Historia de la infancia (Ariel, 1998) widened the turning carried out by international studies during the years 1990-2000. In that fertile decade, his approach contributed furthermore to develop this field of studies in Spain in a comparative and multidisciplinary way. This essay underlines in his investigation the practices, the concepts and the emotional rules that have modified the perception and the education of childhood across the different historical periods. As a matter of fact, the book outlines rigorously a wide range of phenomena, heterogeneous attitudes, reforms and beliefs attending the exclusion or the acceptation of children during the western and eastern history. Through this focus point, which inaugurates the history of infantile rights, Delgado remodels «from the bottom» the real life of educative relationships between adults and minors. The appeal to the respect of children’s rights and individuality implies finally an intense ethic and civil involvement: human species’ future and his sense of humanity are defined through the childhood.