A Marxist defines childhood as a social construct to what our society develops of those humans which we name as children since it is us who rules them in terms of exercising authority and power upon them regarding matters pertaining to their personal lives. Therefore, children, in return, are perceived as ignorant, inexperienced, and incompetent by adults. These child-adult relations are deeply embedded within the consciousness of not only adults but also children and results in a class phenomenon that influences childhood. This notion of childhood, when exercised upon children, makes them think to be inferiors in front of their elders while at the same time develops a sense of superiority or inferiority among them while depending upon their social class status, and in comparison with other children of the same age. This way, childhood gets influenced in terms of physical and mental power relations through their elders, which the passage of time reverses into the favor of those adults, which were once children.
Childhood develops relationships. In fact, it would be better to say that they are taught relationships since they are born. First, in the form of a parent/child in which the mother or the caretaker looks at the child and knows its needs without articulating them. Without the parents’ affection, the child’s world is one of chaos and of a fear of drowning in the bombardment of sensations and experiences that assault the growing infant. Then the child gradually is bounded by other relations which grow through the passage of time, like siblings, the relationship between husband and wife, and so on.
The Marxist school of ideology in early childhood institutions considers the perspective of the child and pedagogical practice as child-centered. Though it seems to be a concrete and unproblematic concept, in practice, it is abstract and rather problematic. The very term child-centered might be thought to embody a particular modernist understanding of the child as a unified, verified, and essentialized subject at the center of the world that can be viewed and treated apart from relationships and context. However, the postmodern perspective, in contrast, decentralized the child, viewing the child as existing through its relations with others and always in a particular context.
Understanding a child first requires his social conception of intelligence in the light of cultural differences in childhood which often helps us to understand the young child and the child-centered practice. From a postmodern perspective, there is no such thing as ‘the child’ or ‘childhood,’ an essential being and state waiting to be discovered, defined and realized so that we do not possess the opportunity to define childhood or children. Instead, children and childhood are dependent upon our perceptions which are each constructed by our understandings of childhood and what children are and should be. We are unable to rely on the scientific knowledge to tell us who the child is, but we have choices to make about who we think the child is, and these choices have enormous significance since our construction of the child, and early childhood are productive by which we mean that they determine the institutions we provide for children and the pedagogical work that adults and children undertake in these institutions.
Marx describes the construction of the child as a knowledge, identity, and culture reproducer. The young child is understood as starting life with and from nothing-as an empty vessel. This further leads to Locke’s child who faces the challenge to have them ‘ready to learn’ and ‘ready for school’ by the age of compulsory schooling. Early childhood has some requirements which are to be fulfilled in context with knowledge, skills, and dominant cultural values which are already determined, socially sanctioned, and ready to administer a process of reproduction or transmission and to be trained to conform to the fixed demands of compulsory schooling.
Viewed from this perspective, early childhood lays down the initiation of successful progress through later life, the start of a journey of realization, from the incompleteness of childhood to the maturity and full human status that is adulthood, from unfulfilled potential to an economically productive human resource. While the child is in a continuous process of entering into adulthood, they represent potential human capital awaiting realization through the investment of knowledge. Marx views childhood as a knowledge metaphor on the road to realization and is denoted by the acquisition of appropriate skills, the accomplishment of successive stages or milestones, and increasing autonomy. Each and every phase of childhood holds a preparation, or ready, for the next and more important, with early childhood the first rung of the ladder and a period of preparation for school and the learning that starts there.
When it comes to social constructivism, educational practices must support and proceed on the basis of assumptive networks so as to sustain the preliminary beliefs about the nature of childhood, their capacities, and their relationship with the world and each other. Childhood, when embeds with education, appears with a pivotal concept of knowledge through which we define or conceptualize knowledge pertaining to educational processes. Besides knowledge, childhood as a social or natural phenomenon fulfills cultural delicacies.