How did we lose the subjectivity of the child?
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The use of diagnostic constructs seems to have replaced, in some contexts starting from school, the ability to explore the child’s subjectivity. This perspective, which informs both scientific discourse and contemporary common thought, comes at the end of a hundred years during which scholars from various disciplines have investigated the child’s internal world. Psychoanalysis, pedagogy, psychology of cognitive processes have inquired the way in which the child explores the world and knows it, builds affective bonds with others, and builds emotionally connoted relationships with people, objects, events. In a sort of paradoxical effect, at the height of reflection on the child’s subjectivity in the decade between the 1980s and 1990s, there was a shift towards its “naturalization”, classification, generalization, prediction; increasingly based on criteria of conformity to expectations and distance from expectations. The space that the diagnostic approach is occupying in schools, in an increasingly extensive manner, requires a reflection on its possible unfavorable impact in one of the contexts in which the child sensitively acquires meanings about himself and the world to which he belongs.
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