Experience, Childhood and Peasant Culture: A Benjaminian Philosophical Reading

Abstract

This article examines the recovery of traditional games and popular play in early childhood education as cultural practices that are decisive both for children’s formation and for the preservation of peasant culture. Its objective is to understand how such ludic practices may function as formative mediations capable of reactivating collective experience and strengthening the intergenerational transmission of knowledge within rural communities. The study is based on bibliographical research grounded in the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, particularly his reflections on childhood, experience, memory, and tradition. From this theoretical framework, it is argued that the progressive disappearance of traditional forms of play, under the determinations of modern capitalist society, is part of a broader process of impoverishment of experience and dissolution of communal modes of cultural transmission. The analysis demonstrates that, within the peasant context, popular games constitute not merely recreational activities but historical forms of sedimented collective memory, through which childhood actively participates in the symbolic continuity of the lived world. Finally, the paper contends that the critical recovery of these practices in early childhood education does not represent a nostalgic return to tradition, but rather the reactivation of an experiential dimension capable of confronting the fragmentary logic of modernity and reinscribing childhood formation within the horizon of shared memory.