RE-FOUNDING CHILDHOOD EDUCATION: PASSAGES IN PRESENCE.

AuthorWright, Bryan
PositionForum on Public Policy

Abstract

Childhood represents the passage into and through constrained notions of spatio-temporal identity and normative constructions. The role of education is too frequently understood as the shaping of life and purpose in the service of democratic ideology. I propose another examination embracing historical anthropologies of education troubling normative constructions of childhood and education through deconstruction. Re-reading the philosophical foundations structuring primary education in the 21st Century opens the question of difference and social justice towards equitable purpose honouring the passage of childhood in presence beyond ascription. Drawing on foundational critiques of education in Derridean logos and Deleuzean inscription, I will interrogate our common conceptualisations of the philosophy of childhood education as a "space of transformation" where the self/subject escapes on "lines of flight" facilitating becoming. This is an enfolding of connectivity resisting prescription and chronos unfolding on diverse planes of immanence. Childhood then is not the passage to adulthood through pedagogical engagement, but rather the opportunity to explore episteme and connectivity in passage, in presence.

Re-thinking the paradigm of Childhood Education in Presence is an engagement with the other in difference at the nexus of human relations, teaching, and learning. I posit an-other paradigm arrives when we as educators begin to honour the subjectivity of the individual student-learner in presence. Oxford University as citadel of learning, marks the heart of education and offers a unique setting for our travels to other planes of understanding. (1) The possibility of a renewing education invites all educators/teachers to re-position themselves in subjectivity, in the inversion of subjectivity. I invite you to join me in a "thinking through thinking" experience whereby collaboratively we consider difference as the centre, or hub of a proposed "Aesthetic Presence" transforming educational endeavour and possibility. Our opportunity unfolds on Deleuzean (1987) "planes of immanence" affording diverse engagements between the self and other. Michael Peters (2004) expounds on Deleuze, postulating "the plane of immanence constitutes the absolute ground of philosophy--'the prephilosophical' or image of thought that casts a sieve over chaos" (219), in a new interpretation of the moment and event of the arrival.

Initially our journey begins in the promise of Derridean (1967, 2007) logos following Emmanuel Levinas' (1969) secular meta-ethics. My theoretical framework begins in post-structural arenas of thought that repositions the role of subjectivity in educational endeavour. Levinas (1969, 2000) offers ethics as first philosophy whereby subjectivity, or the nature of my representation(s) of a self to other(s) is contested and becomes the question in the aporetic other; following another ethics con-scribing my obligation due (Critchley 1999, Wright 2013, 2014). In the arrival of the third (or other other) (2), the diachrony of the self and other is exposed as insufficient and requiring a response beyond ethics that would acknowledge the infinitude of the other in fundamental otherness, alterity, or infinity (Levinas 1969, 51) re-orienting the focal point of obligation, as ethical ground(ing) for an arriving paradigm of youth and childhood education. For Derrida, the invention of the other, is the question of subjectivity.

Subjectivity then, bound in the limit of logos is revealed in Derridean deconstruction (Trifonas 2000). Jacques Derrida introduced the performative notion of deconstruction as a way of reading through the semio-linguistic terrain of the archive and the narrative of the discourse on education adducing a passage through the subjectivity of the self in the presence of the other always, already present. Education of children and youth today re-presents the challenge of meeting across metaphysical chiasm, or divide (Wright 2014) as noted recently in the journal of Studies in Philosophy and Education. Joanna Haynes and Karin Murris (2013), in a special issue of the journal on childhood education introduce the reader to a deeper examination of the Child as Educator stating "shifting the emphasis in thinking about education through the lenses of individualistic notions of subjectivity such as personal feeling, value and emotion, mobilises educative relationships where the teacher can educate 'even' when s/he is very young" (224).

Haynes and Murris' interpretation of subjectivity aligns well with that of the educational practice of Reggio Emila, which I shall explore in the latter section of this article. Deconstruction affords possibility at the limit of human rationality, opening subjectivity in the chiasm of the onto-meta-theo-logical affording another plane for epistemological flight. Further, the logos of Derridean (2007) inscription reads "the other is indeed what is not inventable, and it is therefore the only invention in the world, the only invention of the world, our invention that invents us" (45, emphasis in original). Herein the us is the creation of the self, as and in relation to the fundamental other, "for the other is always another origin of the world and we are to be invented. And the being of the we, and being itself. Beyond being" (45, emphasis in original).

Thus I begin in the middle and at the end (ala Derrida) by way of introduction, a passage of inquiry wherein you and I, the reader, and writer, (and reader as writer) may consider the bondedness of childhood and education as performative engagement towards the affirmative goal to be ethically present with Other. Our collaborative inquiry will be the passage by and through the following probative questions:

  1. What philosophical terrain best illuminates the education of the child/youth?

  2. What concepts are imbricated, or bound within, in our rational constructions of childhood, youth, and education?

  3. What telos, or end may arrive? Be expected?

  4. Who may make this determination?

    Indeed numerous other questions may arise and I strongly encourage each reader to note them and wrestle with their possibilities while considering their respective linkages to the key concepts under review in this article: childhood, education, and educational philosophy.

    The landscape of education has changed substantively in recent decades with dramatic shifts in key socio-psychological concepts on the global terrain of thought in the waning modern era. Herein I offer a propitious excavation of educare, (3) or childhood and youth education. As Farquhar and White (2014) acknowledge, early childhood education has been an important concern of "government economic and social policy ... [assuming] an increasingly formative role in the way the child and family can be conceptualized in contemporary and future society" (822). With caution Farquhar and White remark the terrain stating "our concern is not with the known approaches per se--indeed, we would argue for their legitimate place within educational scholarship--rather, it is with the limitations of relying on one particular set of theories bound to one philosophical orientation to the exclusion of others" (823). Heeding these concerns, I proffer another reading of the philosophical groundings of early and primary education towards equitable purpose honouring the individual self/subject--the student/learner in classrooms today beyond the bounds of neoliberal narratives.

    Deconstructing educational paradigms

    Education in the North American settings of Canada and the United States has been framed in many ways with particular foci (e.g. democratic citizenship or global citizenship education, multicultural education) during specific reformative stages throughout the twentieth century. Primarily, public education serves democratic ideology as a process molding citizenship through constructivist approaches, to which I turn next. Interrogating the re-formative constructions of educational paradigms in the North American settings, Woodrow and Press offer another lens through the Australian experience of educators and students reading constructivism as a reframing of educational endeavour (2007, 313). Citing an Australian early childhood campaign slogan: Early childhood Education--preparation for life, the authors adduce the "construction of children as in a state of becoming rather than being. Implicit in the notion of a child as becoming are ideas of the child as 'not yet competent', [or complete in self/subjectivity,] life as something that occurs later, and a denial of agency to children" (316). As previously argued by Trevor Norris (2011), the commercialisation through commoditisation of children/youth/students acts as a deliberate dismissal of the respective identity and subjectivity of the person (Woodrow and Press, 2007) as deficit, due to chronological limit.

    Commoditisation of children and youth as students, while not a new concern for educators in the new millennium, surfaces a growing concern around the consumption of being (Giroux 2005, 2011) within instituted formal education systems. In the moment of consumption of students (re-member these are persons to which we as educators/teachers have a greater duty towards) (4) as the other with approbation of polis, the individual self/subject is de/con-fined within utilitarian frame. At this juncture, our rational constructions of childhood, youth, and education come to the fore in contrast to the commercialisation of being, revealing foundational purpose in teaching and learning.

    Re-reading the promise in the Other towards another understanding opens the question of difference and social justice as equitable purpose in education honouring the passage of childhood in presence (being there fully) beyond a/con-scription. Educators and teacher educators are well placed to address the search for deeper meaning and deontic, or moral purpose, in the...

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