Response to Gert Biesta’s Review of Childhood and the Philosophy of Education: An Anti-Aristotelian Perspective

Abstract

I would like to thank Gert Biesta for his generous and thoughtful review. While I would always caution against mistaking the author’s intentions for the meaning of a text, I am impressed by how exactly Biesta has captured my intentions in writing Childhood and the Philosophy of Education at many points in his review. Whatever can be made of the remarks that follow, we have certainly not approached the text with radically different assumptions. The review raises a number of queries and concerns. Most of these are minor, and many can be responded to with a simple mea culpa. A few of these have a little substantive significance. I shall respond to these minor issues first, before addressing the one point on which I feel an argument needs to be constructed in response to the criticism in the review: this is the ‘dualism issue’, which Biesta and I have, I think, approached from significantly different positions. Regarding all these concerns, I am humbled by the description of the book as ‘kaleidoscopic’, because on one level it implies a broad sweep and ambition and on another, a light irony in the implicit realisation that a book of this length cannot adequately cover all the areas it delves into. Perhaps in this response I can begin to fill some of the holes left by such a whistlestop tour across a landscape that deserved greater savouring. The reviewer is very kind in praising me for having ‘educational questions’ in the front of my mind, questions of ‘learning, upbringing and schooling’. Unfortunately, I feel this is a little over generous, for my intention was even broader and more diffuse than that: I was interested in what a view of ‘living and learning as semiotic engagement’ (Stables 2005) might have to contribute to the history of conceptions of childhood. The downside of this, perhaps, is that the book does little more than speculate about what this might mean for educational policy and practice (the charge of political naivety at the end of the review is well made, in that sense); the upside is that I am interested in the genuinely philosophical questions raised by all this—hence my concern to devote a few sentences at the end of this response to the dualism issue rather than, say, the direct implications for schools and teachers. For what it’s worth, I tend to view teachers as graduates who should be able to make up their own