No childhood and no drama. From Pinocchio to Max. The black pedagogy of childhood

Abstract

Reasoning about the child implies first of all engaging in a discourse on the perception that has historically been held of childhood, because it has been directly corresponded to the posture assumed towards it by the adult, almost always tending to “colonize” the child, conditioning its growth through what in literature is called “black pedagogy”. The subject of the contribution will be its representation in children's literature, particularly in Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio and Maurice Sendak's picturebook Where the Wild Things Are.  Texts chosen because, beyond the black pedagogies they describe, they show, layered in layers, the faces of the most authentic “paper” childhoods, thus making it possible to identify, in the intertexts of the plots, the traces of a “white pedagogy” from which to rethink relations with childhoods “in flesh and blood”.