Childhood, Education and Philosophy: New ideas for an old relationship

Walter Kohan

2014-10 · Routledge

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This book explores the idea of a childlike education and offers critical tools to question traditional forms of education, and alternative ways to understand and practice the relationship between education and childhood. Engaging with the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben and Simón Rodríguez, it contributes to the development of a philosophical framework for the pedagogical idea at the core of the book, that of a childlike education.

Divided into two parts, the book introduces innovative ideas through philosophical argument and discussion, challenging existing understandings of what it means to teach or to form a child, and putting into question the idea of education as a process of formation. The first part of the book consists of a dialogue with a number of interlocutors in order to develop an original conception of education. The second part presents the idea of a childlike education, beginning with a discussion of the relationships between childhood and philosophy, and followed by a critique of the place of philosophical experience in a childhood of education.

Instead of asking how philosophy might educate childhood, this book raises the question of how childhood might educate philosophy. It will be of key value to researchers, educators and postgraduate students in the fields of education and the human sciences.

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Walter Kohan is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is also a Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research of Brazil (CNPQ) and the Carlos Chagas Filho Research Support Foundation (FAPERJ), and was previously President of the International Council of Philosophical Inquiry with Children (ICPIC).