This article explores a set of texts written by Marcel Gauchet and devoted to education and childhood, in view of his overall work. In the first part, some texts showing his progressive elaboration of an image of the child in democratic modernity are chronologically presented. In the second part, we show that a renewed childhood-related wisdom can be sketched out through the prism of vulnerabilities of autonomy, which precipitate in the relationship to the child. To conclude, the contribution of this approach to a wisdom of individualism and a renewed humanism is synthesized.