Epilogue: Taking Children Seriously

Summary

How do we become moral persons? What about children’s active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children teach us about knowledge-making more broadly? My book explores such questions via analyzing old fieldnotes collected by Arthur and Margery Wolf in a Taiwan village (1958–60) in Martial Law Era, before rapid economic growth, industrialization and urbanization. Born from the Six Cultures Study, a landmark project in cross-cultural research, the Wolfs’ fieldwork was the first ethnographic study on ethnic Han children. Bringing to light the rich texts of systematic observation, interview and projective tests, I combined ethnographic interpretation with NLP and machine learning techniques, behavioral coding and social network analysis. I explain how children defied parental commands and violated cultural precepts. I trace how they navigated cooperation, conflict and the gray areas in between, with complex moral sensibilities and gendered expressions, and highlight the role of peers and siblings. I connect the two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of social cognition, and urge all of us to take children seriously.