Abstract
This paper critically evaluates the ways we look to children to educate us and explores how we might depart from that dynamic, exploring how a range of conceptual frameworks from historical and cultural studies and psychoanalysis might contribute to understanding the problematic of childhood, its problems and its limitations. While ‘child as educator’ may appear to reverse the typical power relations between adults and children, it is argued that this motif in fact repeats many of the same problems as any claims about what children, and especially what ‘child’, is like. Specifically, the paper first reviews analyses of what is at stake in the figure of ‘child’; second, feminist engagement with the notion of ‘intersectionality’ is discussed in terms of how it might inform debates about childhood. Finally, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic approaches, analysis focuses on the notion of misrecognition structured in the ‘as’ connecting ‘child’ and ‘educator’.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This is because children’s compliance, or willingness to go along with what they are being asked to do, is presumed by and rendered invisible within assessments of competence. Hence spurious designations of incompetence could arise as an expression of indirect forms of non-compliance. This reinforces even further the importance of engaging children in assessment and research activities, and ensuring proper consent (see also Lundy and McEnvoy 2012; Beazley et al. 2009).
It has been the role of developmental psychology to provide the answer to key questions in psychology, but even here ‘child’ becomes the route through which other questions about origins, growth and development are investigated (Burman 2008a).
Steedman argues that the girlchild occupies this status as exemplar of the state of childhood owing to her more liminal status from the social, greater physical vulnerability and gendered ambiguity as not quite boy, nor woman—and also the site of sexual interest.
‘The idea of the child was the figure that provided the largest number of people living in the recent past of Western societies with the means for thinking about and creating a self: something grasped and understood: a shape, moving in the body …something inside: an interiority’ (Steedman 1995, p 20).
The role of the ‘inner child’ as covertly mobilised within the ‘false’/‘recovered’ memory debates of the 1990 s is a case in point (Burman 1997).
This arises by virtue of the failure to engage with children’s hatefulness, a wilful insincerity that—he argues—prevents children from knowing that their aggression can be tolerated and so enabling them to know that they can be, and so become, bearable. ‘Sentimentality is useless for parents, as it contains a denial of hate, and sentimentality in a mother is no good at all from the infant’s point of view’ (Winnicott ibid, p. 202). This analysis of the need for the analyst/mother to acknowledge (rather than hide or hide from) their hate (what Winnicott calls ‘objective hate’) is taken up by Jessica Benjamin (1988), in terms of how the baby needs to know that the (m)other can survive his/her attack in order to find reassurance that their aggression is not all-destroying (and self-destroying). I have applied this framework to discuss questions of sadism and sentimentality in representations of children and childhood in charity campaigns (see Burman, 2008b, chapter 6).
This was famously expressed by the Clinton Administration Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, and it circulates throughout policy since—in the US and beyond.
Inverted commas are used around the term ‘race’ to highlight its status as a fictional (racist), socially constructed concept—in the sense that biologically distinct ‘races’ do not exist, but nevertheless the term continues to exercise some explanatory power in terms of those who are racialised as different, other and marginalised.
Although originating even earlier (in, for example, the writings of African-American feminists Angela Davies and Audre Lorde), discussions of intersectionality arose from 1990 s black feminist critiques of second wave feminist discourse (in particular, Crenshaw 1991) in relation to its inattention to questions of racialisation. This included not only the ways presumptions of whiteness and racial privilege enter into gendered identities but also how mainstream feminist discourse and agendas were complicit with racism (see e.g. Carby 1987; Lutz et al. 2011, for a review).
This is because of the ways colonial histories, the history of slavery, imperial wars and the Nazi fascism produced regionally-specific understandings of ‘race’, with significant legacies for how this is understood and which were—in significant ways—also gendered and sexualized (McClintock 1995; Lykke 2011).
The massive global preference for boy children is widely acknowledged, alongside how in contexts of poverty girl children tend to be fed less and so are less likely to survive or thrive (see Arditti et al. 1989).
…at the moment when the epiphany of the fiction appears, it is, strictly speaking, already undone… But what his [Lacan’s} “exemplary anamorphosis” implies first of all is the fact that the subject can never be present in this lucid moment. We can never consciously say that we now see and know that everything is just a signifier. When we stood before the anamorphosis and had not yet found that point from which the image can emerge, we saw nothing, “nothing” in the most banal sense of the word. Then we suddenly realize that every image emerges out of that “nothing”. However, already in this very moment we no longer see that “nothing” but an image covering it up we become aware of the possibility of its meaning or composition only as it escapes us. …Now we can understand why the consciousness that becomes aware that everything is just a signifier can only have an imaginary image as its support. For at the moment of that insight itself, it is impossible for the subject to be present (De Kesel 2009, p 246).
References
Ailwood, J. (2008). Learning or earning in the “Smart State”. Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, 15(4), 535–551.
Alanen, L. (2001). Explorations in generational analysis. In L. Alanen & B. Mayall (Eds.), Conceptualising adult-child relations (pp. 11–22). London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Alanen, L. (2011). Critical childhood studies? Childhood, 18(2), 147–150.
Alldred, P., & Burman, E. (2005). Hearing and interpreting children’s voices: Discourse analytic contributions. In S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching children’s experience: Approaches and methods (pp. 175–198). London: Sage.
Alldred, P., & Gillies, V. (2002). Eliciting research accounts: Re/producing modern subjects? In N. Mauthner, M. Birch, & T. Miller (Eds.), Ethics in qualitative research (pp. 146–165). London: Sage.
Anthias, F. (2008). Thinking through the lens of translocational positionality: An intersectionality frame for understanding identity and belonging. Translocations: Migrations and Social Change. http://www.dcu.ie/imrstr/volume_4_issue_1/Vol_4_Issue_1_Floya_Anthias.pdf. Accessed October 20, 2011.
Arditti, R., Duelli Klein, R., & Minden, S. (Eds.). (1989). Test-tube women: What future for motherhood?. London: Pandora Press.
Avis, J. (1991). The strange fate of progressive education, in Education Group II, Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham. In Education limited: Schooling and training and the new right since 1979 (pp. 114–139). London: Unwin Hyman.
Beazley, H., Bessel, S., Ennew, J., & Waterson, R. (2009). The right to be properly researched: Research with children in a messy, real world. Children’s Geographies, 7(4), 365–378.
Benjamin, J. (1988). Bonds of love. London: Virago.
Bird Claiborne, L. (2007). Beyond readiness: new questions about cultural understandings and developmental appropriateness. In J. Kincheloe & R. Horn (Eds.), The Praegar handbook of education and psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 428–438). Westport, CT: Praegar.
Blanchett, W., Klinger, J., & Harry, B. (2009). The intersection of race, culture, language and disability: Implications for urban education. Urban Education, 44, 389–409.
Bondi, L. (1993). Locating identity politics. In M. Keith & J. Pile (Eds.), Place and the politics of identity (pp. 84–101). London: Routledge.
Bruhm, S., & Hurley, N. (Eds.). (2004). Curioser: On the queerness of children. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.
Burman, E. (1991). Power, gender and developmental psychology. Feminism & Psychology, 1(1), 141–153.
Burman, E. (1997). False memories, true hopes: Revenge of the postmodern on therapy. New Formations, 30, 122–134.
Burman, E. (2008a). Deconstructing developmental psychology (2nd ed.). London: BrunnerRoutledge.
Burman, E. (2008b). Developments: Child, image, nation. London: BrunnerRoutledge.
Burman, E., & Maclure, M. (2005). Deconstruction as a method of research: Stories from the field. In B. Somekh & C. Lewin (Eds.), Research methods in the social sciences (pp. 282–292). London: Sage.
Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power. New York & London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2000). Antigone’s claim. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cannella, G., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and postcolonization. New York & London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Carby, H. (1987). Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood. In M. Arnot & G. Weiner (Eds.), Gender and the politics of schooling (pp. 64–75). Hutchinson: London.
Castañeda, C. (2002). Figurations: Child, bodies, worlds. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Cheron, B. (2008). Black boys can make it. Stoke: Trentham Books.
Copjec, J. (2004). Imagine there’s no women: Ethics and sublimation. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
Davies, B. (1989). Frogs and snails and feminist tales. London: Allen & Unwin.
De Kesel, M. (2009). Eros and ethics. New York: SUNY.
De Vos, J. (2009). Now that you know, how do you feel? The milgram experiment and psychologization. Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, 223–246.
Dhamoon, R. (2009). Identity, difference politics. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Erel, U., Haritaword, J., Gutierrez Rodriguez, E., & Klesse, C. (2011). On the depoliticisation of intersectionality talk: Conceptual multiple oppressions in critical sexuality studies. In Yvette Taylor, Sally Hines, & Mark Casey (Eds.), Theorizing intersectionality and sexuality (pp. 56–77). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fendler, L. (2001). Educating flexible souls: The construction of subjectivity through developmentality and interaction. In K. Hultqvist & G. Dahlberg (Eds.), Governing the child in the new millenium (pp. 119–142). New York & London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Ferguson, K. (1991). Interpretation and genealogy in feminism. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16(2), 322–339.
Fine, M. (1994). Working the hyphens: Reinventing self and other in qualitative research. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 70–82). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Gallacher, L. & Gallagher, M. (2008). Methodological immaturity in childhood research? Thinking through “participatory methods”. Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, 15(4), 499–516.
Gordo Lopez, A., & Burman, E. (2004). Emotional capital and information technologies in the changing rhetorics around children and childhoods. New Directions in Child and Adolescent Development, 105, 63–80.
Gordo Lopez, A., & Parker, I. (Eds.). (1999). Cyberpsychology. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Griffin, C. (1985). Typical girls? Young women from school to the job market. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Guarcello, L., Lyon, S., & Rosati, F. (2008). Child labor and education for all: An issue paper. Journal for the History of Education and Youth, 1(2), 254–266.
Hankivsky, O., & Cormier, R. (2011). Intersectionality and public policy: Some lessons from existing models. Political Research Quarterly, 64(1), 217–229.
Hankivsky, O., Reid, C., Cormier, R., Varcoe, C., Clark, N., Benoit, C., et al. (2010). Exploring the promises of intersectionality for advancing women’s health research. International Journal for Equity in Health, 9 (5). (http//www.equityhealth/j.com/content/9/1/5. Accessed 15 Aug, 2011.
Haraway, D. (1985). A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology and social feminism in the 1980s’. Socialist Review, 15(March–April), 65–107.
Haraway, D. (1991). Situated knowledges: Feminist epistemology and the privilege of partial perspective. In Simians, cyborgs and women. London: Verso.
Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_Oncomouse. New York & London: Routledge.
Harding, S. (1993). Rethinking feminist standpoint epistemology: What is strong objectivity? In L. Alcott & E. Potter (Eds.), Feminist epistemologies (pp. 49–82). London: Routledge.
Hardyment, C. (1983). Dream babies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hendrick, H. (1990). Constructions and reconstructions of British childhood: An interpretive survey, 1800 to the present. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood (pp. 35–59). Basingstoke, Hants: Falmer.
Holland, P. (1992). What is a child?: Popular images of childhood. London: Virago.
James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. Oxford: Polity.
Kaplan, E. A. (2005). Trauma culture: The politics of terror and loss. New York: Rutgers University Press.
Katz, C. (1996). Towards minor theory. Society & Space, 15, 487–499.
Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.
Lacan, J. (1986/1992). The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII (translated with notes by D. Porter). London & New York.
Lacan, J. (2006). Ėcrits the first complete edition in English. (translated with notes by B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg). New York: Norton.
Larsson, B., Andersson, M., & Osbeck, C. (2010). Bringing environmentalism home: Children’s influence on family consumption in the Nordic countries and beyond. Childhood, 17(1), 129–148.
Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (2011). Introduction: Voice, agency and the child. In K. Lesnik-Oberstein (Ed.), Children in culture, revisited: Further approaches to childhood (pp. 1–17). London: Palgrave.
Lister, R. (2005). Investing in the citizen workers of the future. In H. Hendrick (Ed.), Child welfare and social policy (pp. 449–462). Bristol: The Policy Press.
Lundy, L., & McEnvoy, L. (2012). Children’s rights and research processes: Assisting children to (in)formed views. Childhood, 19(1), 129–144.
Lutz, H., Herrera Vivar, M. T., & Supik, L. (Eds.). (2011). Framing intersectionality debates on a multi-faceted concept in gender studies. London: Ashgate.
Lykke, N., (2011). Intersectional analysis: Black box or useful critical feminist thinking technology. In H. Lutz, M. T. Herrera-Vivar &V. L. Supik (Eds.), Framing intersectionality debates on a multi-faceted concept in gender studies. (pp. 207–221). London: Ashgate.
MacDonald, A. (Ed.). (1978). Chambers twentieth century dictionary. Edinburgh: Chambers.
Mansbach, A. (2011). Go the F**k to sleep. New York: Akashic books.
Marks, D. (1996). Constructing a narrative: Moral discourse and young people’s experience of exclusion. In E. Burman, G. Aitken, P. Alldred, R. Allwood, T. Billington, A. Gordo-Lopez, C. Heenan, D. Marks, & S. Warner (Eds.), Psychology, discourse practice: From regulation to resistance (pp. 114–130). London: Taylor & Francis.
Mazzei, L. (2007). Inhabited silence in qualitative research: Putting poststructural theory to work. New York: Peter Lang.
Mazzei, L., & Jackson, A. (Eds.). (2009). Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research. London: Routledge.
McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: ‘Race’, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. London: Routledge.
Mirza, H. (1992). Young, female and black. London: Routledge.
Mirza, H. (2009). Race, gender and educational desire. London: Routledge.
Morss, J. (1990). The biologising of childhood. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Nadeson, M. (2011). Governing childhood into the 21st Century. New York & London: Palgrave.
Nash, J. (2008). Re-thinking intersectionality. Feminist Review, 89, 1–15.
Neill, C. (2005). An idiotic act: On the non-example of antigone. The Letter., 34, 1–28.
Newson, J., & Newson, E. (1974). Cultural aspects of childrearing in the English speaking world. In M. Richards (Ed.), The integration of the child into a social world (pp. 53–82). London: Cambridge University Press.
Nieuwenhuys, O. (2007). Embedding the global womb: Global child labour and the new policy agenda. Children’s Geographies, 5(1–2), 149–163.
Penn, H. (2011). Travelling policies and global buzzwords: How international non-governmental organisations and charities spread the word about early childhood in the global South. Childhood, 18(1), 94–113.
Phoenix, A., & Pattynama, P. (2006). Intersectionality. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13, 187–192.
Piaget, J. (1957). The child and modern physics. Scientific American, 197, 46–51.
Pilcher, J. (2011). No logo? Children’s consumption of fashion. Childhood, 18(1), 128–141.
Powell, M., & Smith, A. (2009). Children’s participation rights in research. Childhood, 16(1), 124–142.
Prentice, S. (2009). High stakes: The “investable” child and the economic reframing of childcare. Signs, 34(3), 687–710.
Shallwani, S. (2010). Racism and imperialism in the child development discourse: Deconstructing “developmentally appropriate practice”. In G. Cannella & L. Diaz Soto (Eds.), Childhoods: A handbook (pp. 231–244). New York: Peter Lang.
Shuttleworth, S. (2010). The mind of the child: Child development in literature, science and medicine, 1840–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Singer, E. (1992). Child-care and the psychology of development. London: Routledge.
Singer, E. (2005). The liberation of the child: A recurrent theme in the history of education in western societies. Early Child Development and Care, 165(6), 611–620.
Smith, K. (2012). Producing governable subjects: Images of childhood old and new. Childhood, 19(1), 24–37.
Steedman, C. (1995). Strange dislocations: Childhood and sense of human interiority, 1780–1930. London: Virago.
Sylvester, C. (1998). Homeless in international relations? ‘Women’s ‘ place in canonical texts and feminist re-imaginings. In A. Phillips (Ed.), Feminism & politics (pp. 67–92). Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Taefi, N. (2009). The synthesis of age and gender: Intersectionality, international human rights law and the marginalisation of the girl-child. International Journal of Child Rights, 17(3), 345–376.
Taylor, Y., Hines, S., & Casey, M. (Eds.). (2011). Theorizing intersectionality and sexuality. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Thorne, B. (1987). Re-envisioning women and social change: Where are the children? Gender & Society, 1(1), 85–109.
Thorne, B. (2007). Crafting the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. Chidlhood, 14(3), 147–152.
Ueno, C. (2004). Nationalism and gender. Melbourne: Transpacific Press.
van Nijnatten, C. (2010). Children’s agency, children’s welfare. Bristol: The Policy Press.
Vittachi, A. (1989). Stolen childhood: In search of the rights of the child. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Walkerdine, V., & Lucy, H. (1989). Democracy in the kitchen: Regulating mothers and socialising daughters. London: Virago.
UNICEF. When you educate a girl, you educate a nation. www.ungei.org/…/unicef_gebackgrounder_110406.pdf. Accessed August 20, 2011.
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour. Birmingham: CCCS University of Birmingham.
Winnicott, D. (1949). Hate in the countertransference. International Journal of Psycho-analysis, 30, 69–74.
Woodhead, M. (1999). Reconstructing developmental psychology. Children & Society, 13(1), 3–19.
Yuval-Davis, N. (1998). Gender and nation. London: Sage.
Yuval-Davis, N., & Anthias, F. (Eds.). (1989). Woman-nation-state. London: Macmillan.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Burman, E. Conceptual Resources for Questioning ‘Child as Educator’. Stud Philos Educ 32, 229–243 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9353-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9353-0