The child and the necessity of its education into maturity are often used as a justification of our work. Nevertheless what makes this childhood is rarely gone into. So I ask myself the simple yet difficult question: what is the child? In this research I try to awaken the conceptual structure that sleeps in ‘the child’. Following Gorgio Agambens anthropological machine (Agamben, 2000) this structure is named the pedalogical machine. This is the machinery that creates that which we call the child by divisions of space and time. These divisions are summarized into three statements of which each forms a starting point of a movement of this machinery. The first movement ‘from umbilical cord to belly button’ is formed by the statement that the child does not exist, that we are all first and foremost individuals. In this movement we are all balancing on the borderline in between child and adult. The child becomes an embryo, and the adult a corpse. We are all balancing in between birth and death as a shared existential reality. The second movement ‘from belly button to milk teeth’ is formed by the statement that the child is an empirical reality. The empirical child is formed by several subsystems of division, of which I elaborate seven, namely natural sciences (growth), law (being a minor), school (being a student or working), family (to be a child or having a child), media, economy and religion. This is the main part of my research and makes way for questions concerning the disappearance of childhood (e.g. the discussions following Postman, 1982), or concerning the commodification of childhood. The third movement ‘from milk teeth to umbilical cord’ is formed by the statement that the child is a metaphysical concept. Here the child stands for everything we must first abandon to function in the world today, such as innocence, simplicity and honesty; and then must regain in one way or another to become fully human again. In this movement childhood is always synchronically present in every individual. By placing these three statements into three movements of the same machinery, it is addressed how the child can be nonexistent, an empirical reality and a metaphysical concept at the same time.

In this poster a visualization of the structure of the concept of the child is used, based on the idea of the anthropological machine by Agamben.

A visual representation of the architecture of the concept of the child is fitting to elaborate the complex structure it has. It confronts the question how the child can be nonexistent, an empirical reality and a metaphysical concept, and the relation between these types of definitions. It is thus shown that the child as a concept and as a reality urges us to elaborate a way of thinking that can deal with the contradictions and paradoxes that are laid therein. It offers a mapping, not only of the concept, but also of the different arguments in discussions concerning education, so that it can be used as a framework of analysis of these discussions.