Hearing the Voices of Children (PDF)

which Helsingius is referring was developed by J.V. Snellman, a philosopher and academic who lived during the .rst half of the century (e.g. Snellman, [1842] 1928), and who is nowadays recognised as Finland’s national philosopher. Based on the contemporary German theorising on the concept of the state, the three most important elements of his idea are the family, civil society and the state. Its starting point, like Hegel’s, was the notion of the individual as a moral being, and society as a community of norms. According to Snellman, social integration is dependent upon the relationship between the individual and society. Social integration culminated in everyday life relations of the family and the state. Snellman considered the nuclear family, a civilising unit of parents and their children, as a system of generational relations. To him it was the institution of the family that actually maintained the entire society by teaching its children proper habits and values; the family’s main function was to civilise future citizens of the state and thus to guarantee the morality of social life. Snellman concluded that society as a whole is based on the nuclear family and, more speci.cally, on mothers’ child-rearing practices, which he considered to be the most important task in the nation-building project.

The ideal Finnish citizen of the late nineteenth century was sober, honest, sparing and hard-working, with strict internal control and discipline (Alapuro et al., 1987). Since children were considered as helpless and wild creatures ‘in natural state’ and as ‘acting according to their natural instincts’ it was necessary that adults, and mothers in particular, introduce children to ‘truth and good’, whereas children were expected to be ignorant but loyal, obedient and thankful for the upbringing and education given to them. A typical aspect of the late nineteenth-century model of Finnish generational relations was a strict hierarchy between adults and children, as well as the implicit obedience of children. Children were the object of adults’ well-meaning activities, and childhood was a phase of life whose importance lay in its potential for the future.