The Well of Being: Childhood, Subjectivity, And Education

by Kennedy, David

• ISBN13: 9780791468265
• ISBN10: 0791468267
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-07-06
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

David Kennedy is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
1. Questioning Childhood	1	(26)
Whose Child?	1	(4)
Which Adult?	5	(3)
The Western Construction of Childhood	8	(5)
Theorizing Childhood	13	(1)
Adult-Child Dialogue	14	(7)
The Child Before Us: Education, Parenting, and the Evolution of Subjectivity	21	(6)
2. The Primordial Child	27	(36)
The Divine Child	27	(17)
The Romantic Child	44	(12)
Romanticism, Education, and the New Humanity	56	(7)
3. The Invention of Adulthood	63	(42)
Adultism and Models of the Self	63	(12)
The Evolution of Adulthood/Childhood	75	(10)
The Evolution of the Adult-Child Relationship	85	(20)
4. Childhood and the Intersubject	105	(46)
Boundary Work	105	(11)
The Ego Dethroned	116	(4)
The Emergence of the Intersubject	120	(12)
Psychogenic Theory of History and the Present Age	132	(4)
The Dialectics of Reason and Desire	136	(6)
The Privileged Stranger	142	(9)
5. Reimagining School	151	(36)
The Purposes of Schooling	151	(7)
The Space of Dialogue	158	(7)
The School as Laboratory of the Third Way of Living	165	(18)
The Dark and the Light	183	(4)
Notes	187	(24)
Bibliography	211	(18)
Index	229