Full Description
Offers a sweeping review of conceptions of and approaches to childhood.
In this wide-ranging work, David Kennedy undertakes a philosophically grounded analysis of the history of childhood, the history of adulthood, and their interrelationship. Using themes and perspectives from the history of childhood, mythology, psychoanalysis, art, literature, philosophy, and education, the author locates the experience of childhood across all stages of the human life cycle, and thereby weighs its transformative potential for human culture. He offers a nuanced approach to child study that raises issues about how adults see children and how children see themselves, which could lead to a qualitatively different system of teacher preparation-a system that views the child as participant rather than object in the structure of social reproduction. This sweeping review of conceptions of and approaches to childhood yields a profound vision of what schooling should be like.
Contents
Preface
1. Questioning Childhood
Whose Child?
Which Adult?
The Western Construction of Childhood
Theorizing Childhood
Adult-Child Dialogue
The Child Before Us: Education, Parenting, and the Evolution of Subjectivity
2. The Primordial Child
The Divine Child
The Romantic Child
Romanticism, Education, and the New Humanity
3. The Invention of Adulthood
Adultism and Models of the Self
The Evolution of Adulthood/Childhood
The Evolution of the Adult-Child Relationship
4. Childhood and the Intersubject
Boundary Work
The Ego Dethroned
The Emergence of the Intersubject
Psychogenic Theory of History and the Present Age
The Dialectics of Reason and Desire
The Privileged Stranger
5. Reimagining School
The Purposes of Schooling
The Space of Dialogue
The School as Laboratory of the Third Way of Living
The Dark and the Light
Notes
Bibliography
Index
