In this essay Amy Shuffelton considers Jean-Jacques Rousseau's suspicion of imagination, which is, paradoxically, offered in the context of an imaginative construction of a child's upbringing. First, Shuffelton articulates Rousseau's reasons for opposing children's development of imagination and their engagement in the sort of imaginative play that is nowadays considered a hallmark of early and middle childhood. Second, she weighs the merits of Rousseau's opposition, which runs against the consensus of contemporary social science research on childhood imaginative play. Ultimately, Shuffelton (...) argues that Rousseau's work offers an important cautionary note to enthusiasts of children's imaginative play, due to the potentially disruptive influence of consumer capitalism, though she also notes that imagination may play a more redemptive role than Rousseau granted it. (shrink)

Contemporary educational reformers have claimed that research on social class differences in child raising justifies programs that aim to lift children out of poverty by means of cultural interventions. Focusing on the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), Ruby Payne's “aha! Process,” and the Harlem Children's Zone as examples, Amy Shuffelton argues that such programs, besides overstepping the social science research, are ethically illegitimate insofar as they undermine the equitable development of civic agency. Shuffelton invokes Aristotelian civic friendship, particularly as interpreted (...) by Danielle Allen and Sibyl Schwarzenbach, as key to a politics that avoids relations of domination and subordination. She concludes that social justice requires that educators involved with culturally interventionist programs recognize the workings of power within schooling and society, that they accept the limits of their own perspectives, and that they remain open to what is of value in child-raising practices other than those associated with the contemporary middle class. (shrink)

“Chicago is the place to make you recognize at every turn the absolute opportunity which chaos affords—it is sheer Matter with no standards at all,” John Dewey wrote to his wife Alice on an early visit there.1 Such a city, which had become the geographical nexus of American industrial democracy, pushed Dewey to consider the problems industrial modes of organization pose for democratic theory. His reconceptualization of democracy, and the refinements and clarifications to it that he made over the years, (...) reflects an appreciation of the significance of work—of human transfiguration of chaotic matter into something useable, and of the corollary construction of human psychology as it meets with the world around it and .. (shrink)

. Philia and pedagogy ‘side by side’: the perils and promise of teacher–student friendships. Ethics and Education: Vol. 7, Creating spaces, pp. 211-223. doi: 10.1080/17449642.2013.766541.

When the debate over the value of ideal and nonideal theory crosses from political philosophy into philosophy of education, do the implications of the debate shift, and, if so, how? In this piece, Amy Shuffelton considers the premise that no normative political theory, ideal or nonideal, is of any use to human beings unless it can be affiliated with a credible educational theory that connects human beings as they are to human beings as that theory requires them to become. In (...) her response to the five articles in this symposium, Shuffelton addresses their overlapping yet varied treatments of human subjectivity as developed through education. If one accepts that ideal theory is the appropriate starting place for political philosophy because otherwise we would have no polestar by which to orient ourselves, Shuffelton concludes, a corresponding philosophy of education is required to survey the trajectory between here and wherever one aims to go. To do so, it needs to keep its feet on the ground, even as it looks to the stars. If, on the other hand, ideal theory fails to heed the Yankee truism that you can't get there from here, such that philosophers who attempt to do so inevitably get lost on back roads, philosophy of education is still necessary to chart paths to reachable destinations. (shrink)