Дитина і дитинство у ранньомодерних вченнях про цілісну освіту особистості

The study is devoted to the historical and pedagogical analysis of role and significance of the issues related to the child and childhood in the early modern philosophical and pedagogical heritage. Pedagogical ideas of child care are considered in the context of the doctrine of the holistic education of the personality. The article presents a historical and pedagogical comparative analysis of European ideas about the child and childhood during the late Middle Ages and early modern times. It is stated that the medieval public perception of the child was reduced to the metaphorical concept of a small adult. On the one hand, Europeans often did not take the child seriously, a young child meant little, and there was an indifferent attitude towards small children, especially during the period of their survival to the age of five. On the other hand, as soon as the child begun to walk independently, they were almost immediately involved in housework, and later in real work. It was found that, by proposing a new concept of education and the idea of holistic education, Renaissance humanists paid attention to the first period of personality formation – early childhood. It has been proven that the achievement of the Renaissance pedagogical discourse was the discovery of the world of the child and a fundamental change in the value-semantic representation of Europeans. Humanists approved the Renaissance vision of childhood as a "happy and pleasant age" and proposed many ideas for pedagogical support of the child, offering a number of tips on nature-responsible and individualized care for children. Based on the analysis of the works of European thinkers (Erasmus of Rotterdam, H. Vives and others), the humanistic vision of childhood is reproduced, and the methods and features of child rearing proposed by humanists are described. Attention is drawn to the fact that the ideas of child rearing proposed within the framework of the concept of holistic education were developed primarily at the level of intellectual discussion, and their implementation in practice began only with the institutionalization of educational institutions by church reformers –  Protestants and Jesuits. A conclusion is made about the exceptional civilizational role of the Renaissance-humanistic discourse in discovering the world of the child in early modern European society.