This article explores a perplexing line from Rousseau's Emile: his suggestion that the ‘most important rule’ for the educator is ‘not to gain time but to lose it’. An analysis of what Rousseau meant by this line, the article argues, shows that Rousseau provides the philosophical groundwork for a radical critique of the contemporary cultural framework that supports homework, standardised testing, and the competitive extracurricular activities that consume children's time. He offers important insights to contemporary parents and educators wishing to (...) reimagine an educational system that is currently fuelled more by familial and international amour propre than by children's interests and needs. Not the least of these is his recognition that to reimagine children's education would require a new configuration of the very terms of modern life. Problematically, however, Rousseau's alternative to mechanised clock-time depends on the labour of Sophie, whose time is also reconfigured. For the next generation of children to be educated according to natural time, Sophie's labour needs to be off the clock too, which is just as much a linchpin of her removal from the public sphere of citizenship and the paid workforce as it is of Emile's education for public life, or so the final section of this paper argues. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the material and rhetorical connection between “parental involvement” and motherhood has the effect of making two important features of parental involvement disappear. Both of these features need to be taken into account to think through the positive and negative effects of parental involvement in public schooling. First, parental involvement is labor. In the following section of this paper, I discuss the work of feminist scholars who have brought this to light. Second, parental involvement remains (...) one of the most significant ways in which citizens participate in the public sphere. While education reform projects centered on parental involvement do show some recognition that what parents/mothers do is in fact work, even as they ignore the gendered dimensions of this work and sunnily demand that parents do ever more of it, these projects resist the recognition that parents’/mothers’ involvement is also political. (shrink)

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)

This essay argues that philosophy can be combined with qualitative research without sacrificing the aims of either approach. Philosophers and qualitative researchers have articulated and supported the idea that human meaning-constructions are appropriately grasped through close attention to “consequences incurred in action,” in Dewey’s words. Furthermore, scholarship in both domains explores alternative possibilities to familiar constructions of meaning. The essay explains by means of a concrete example the approach I took to hybridizing these approaches. It describes an ethnographic and philosophical (...) study of how children made meaning of justice and solidarity through their practice of democratic citizenship in an extracurricular program called Village. At Village, children built and ran a miniature town. Their actions and conversations around the political challenges that inevitably arose exemplify meaning-making of ideals in response to actual problems. The meaning of solidarity and justice for these children emerged through the consequences of previous and present actions they took in communication with others. This essay details the methods I used for designing the study, collecting data, and analyzing my findings. (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)

In this article, Amy Shuffelton addresses school shootings through an investigation of honor and masculinity. Drawing on recent scholarship on honor, including Bernard Williams's Shame and Necessity and Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Honor Code, Shuffelton points out that honor has been misconstrued as exclusively a matter of hierarchical, competitive relationships. A second kind of honor, which exists within relationships of mutual respect between equals, she suggests, merits theorists' further consideration. In its hierarchical mode, honor is often a source of violent (...) action, but honor in its egalitarian mode can play an important role in peacemaking. Shuffelton turns to Homer's Iliad and Adrienne Rich's “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” to explore honor's potential. Linking both kinds of honor to masculinity and the issue of gun violence, this article contends that to address gun violence in and outside of schools, masculine honor needs to be “reissued” as a matter of egalitarian relationships based on honest communication. (shrink)

Although ‘new fatherhood’ promises a reconstruction of the domesticity paradigm that positions fathers as breadwinners and mothers as caretakers, it maintains the notion that families are self-supporting entities and thereby neglects the extensive interdependence involved in raising children. As a result, it cannot successfully overturn this paradigm and hampers our ability to reimagine relationships along lines that would better serve parents' and children's wellbeing. This article raises these issues through an exploration of ‘daddy-daughter dances’, which manifest new fatherhood discourse as (...) expressed in public schooling. Although the dances are in some ways peculiarly American, they exemplify tensions and inconsistencies around father's involvement in child-raising that nag most contemporary Western societies. These tensions, the article contends, concern the distribution of public resources among families as well as within them. Drawing on Kittay's theorization of dependence and interdependence, the article argues that contemporary social reconfigurations demand a new reimagination of relationships that starts with the recognition of interdependencies. (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.

Pandemic disruptions to schooling threw into sharper relief the entanglements of economy, gender norms, and education that had been there, and throughout the modern world, all along. The particular entanglement this paper aims to unravel is the reliance of education on a certain kind of attentiveness, historically provided by a feminized teaching force and mothers, that itself rests on the cultivation of particular sensibilities regarding time.

In this article, I argue that the material and rhetorical connection between “parental involvement” and motherhood has the effect of making two important features of parental involvement disappear. Both of these features need to be taken into account to think through the positive and negative effects of parental involvement in public schooling. First, parental involvement is labor. In the following section of this paper, I discuss the work of feminist scholars who have brought this to light. Second, parental involvement remains (...) one of the most significant ways in which citizens participate in the public sphere. While education reform projects centered on parental involvement do show some recognition that what parents/mothers do is in fact work, even as they ignore the gendered dimensions of this work and sunnily demand that parents do ever more of it, these projects resist the recognition that parents’/mothers’ involvement is also political. (shrink)

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)

To the conversation about relationships in education, this chapter contributes an exploration of the devaluation of dependency in the ′new fatherhood′ discourses that purport to reinvent familial relationships. Although ‘new fatherhood’ seems to promise a reconstruction of the domesticity paradigm that has positioned fathers as breadwinners and mothers as caretakers, it maintains the notion that families are self‐supporting entities and neglects the extensive interdependence involved in raising children. As a result, it cannot successfully overturn this paradigm and hampers our ability (...) to reimagine relationships along lines that would better serve parents’ and children's wellbeing. The chapter raises these issues through an exploration of ‘daddy‐daughter dances’, which manifest new fatherhood discourse as expressed in public schooling. Finally, it discusses Eva Feder Kittay's notion of ‘distributed dependency’ as a means of reimagining relationships along lines that recognise the interdependence of children and adult citizens, families and the society whose future they procure. (shrink)