Speculative Fantasies: Infancy in the Educational Discourse in early modern Germany

If we look at current discourses related to the care of newborn infants we see the newborns firmly fixed in the hands of doctors, nurses and midwives. Medical experts can be seen as educators as well – for example they give advice to the mothers about the right way to handle their babies and show them how to hold, (breast-) feed or wash it. Later, during the prescribed checkups in the consulting rooms of the paediatricians one can also observe the pedagogical performance of doctoral consultants. The discourse of medicine seems thus to dominate the interaction between the mother and the child. Situated in this context and based on a twofold genealogy of philosophical and scientific texts and of artistic and scientific representations of children this chapter examines the works of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel about the meaning of education in very early childhood in relation to the public imagination and pictorial representation of early childhood in that time.