Abstract
Customarily, reflections on the need to educate sensory and bodily enactments with the world, take for granted that it is the child who must be educated. However, the educational passage of becoming 'rational' and 'grown up' often leaves the adult divorced from her own embodied self. As part of my engagement with childism (conf. Wall in Ethics in light of childhood, Georgetown University Press, Washington, 2010; The child as natural phenomenologist. Primal and primary experience in Merleau-Ponty’s psychology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2013; Child Geogr, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1668912) in this article, I ask: Who needs sensory education? In response, I propose that it is adults who need sensory education more than their temporal others (Beauvais, in: Spyrou S, Rosen R, Cook DT (eds) Reimagining childhood studies, Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp 57–74 2018) i.e. children. As Merleau-Ponty has shown, the richness of embodied perception that children experience, is relatively distant for adults (Bahler in Child Philos 11:203–221, 2015; Welsh in The child as natural phenomenologist. Primal and primary experience in Merleau-Ponty’s psychology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2013). The particular lived-experience I reflect on is the sense of temporality. Accompanied by two distinct, yet interconnected examples of encounters with Baby Ole and Captain Duke, I suggest that being-with-children can enable philosophical clearings for adults to re-cognise plural temporalities, as opposed to a singular clock-time perception of Time. (The preposition with is used in the sense of the Norwegian hos or German bei, whereby an adult intentionally positions herself as a guest in a child's world.)
Highlights
The training of children is a profession, Where we must know how to waste time in order to save it
In addition the child is spatio-temporally positioned as a ‘pupil’ in the schooling sector – a sector which is part of an upscaled and accelerated global economy where Time is equated with Money
As an indispensable part of the global education sector, contemporary schooling culture is structured through highly ordered time-slotting such that sensing Time becomes restrictively associated with the rhythm of external clocks and calendars
Summary
The notion of “temporal otherness” represents a phenomenological understanding of children and childhood that highlights the temporal asymmetry between them and adults (Beauvais 2018). Regardless of age, encounters with others are originarily positive insofar as they offer the scope for both a creative reciprocity and a playful expansion of the horizons of being an embodied self in the world From this point of view, both the adult and the child may experience each other as teachers who reveal alternative ways of sensing and being in the world (Bahler 2015; Welsh 2013). I present a reflective description through a continuum of two experiences in order to illustrate my endeavour to explore the scope for how adults can blossom philosophically with (hos/bei) children Through these reflections I unravel the sensory treasure that was lurking beyond my adultist attachment to external clock-time
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