To read the:

Kennedy, D., ''Second Nature becoming child and dialogical schooling'', Studies in Philosophy and Education, Springer, 2020.

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Abstract

This paper argues that children, as members of a perennial psychoclass represent one potential vanguard of an emergent shift in Western subjectivity, and that adult–child dialogue, especially in the context of schooling, is a key locus for the epistemological change that implies. I argue from Herbert Marcuse’s prophetic invocation of a “new sensibility,” which is characterized by an increase in instinctual revulsion towards violence, domination and exploitation (whether personal or structural) and, correspondingly, a greater sensitivity to all forms of life. As the embodiment of a form of philosophical “post-animism” or hylozoism, it represents the evolutionary shift that, it could be argued, our species requires for survival at this historical moment. I suggest that the evolutionary phenomenon of neoteny—the long formative period of human childhood and the paedomorphic character of humans across the life cycle—makes of the adult-collective of school a primary site for the reconstruction of belief. After exploring child–adult dialogue more broadly as a form of dialectical interaction between what John Dewey called “impulse” and “habit,” I argue for a form, or archetype of schooling first articulated in ancient Greece called skholé, a space that functions, according to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, as a “meeting place,” a “form of gathering and action” dedicated to inquiry, and not to the production of calculated, preordained outcomes—a space removed from the world of production, and characterized by a form of temporality associated with childhood: aion, or “timeless time,” as opposed to kronos, or linear time. Skholé is dedicated to emergence and cultural reconstruction, which follows from an educative relationship between adults and children based on understanding the latter as bearers of the “novel,” and on a faith in the “reorganizing potentialities” of childhood impulse, or interest—that is, on natality as a fundamental principle of cultural evolution. Is it too late for the species to self-enculturate in a new relationship between prefrontal cortex and limbic system—a new organization of desire—and as such, a new relationship with nature—that is, an emergent normative form of culturally mediated subjectivity that acts to “recover the continuum between our ‘first nature’ and our ‘second nature’, our natural world and our social world, our biological being and our rationality?

Some Text-Related Concepts / Questions. Please add your own!

1. What do we mean when we say “human nature”
2. Is the human species evolving? If so, how does that work?
3. Is there evolutionary significance in the phenomena of neoteny and paedomorphism?
4. What do we mean by “natality”?
5. Are children members of an oppressed class? If so, what would emancipation mean?
6. What do adults have to learn from children?
7. What do we mean when we say “school”?
8. What would it mean for a school to transform from a “natural community” to a “community of interpretation”? (13)
9. What would it mean to “empower” children?
10. Is there such a thing as a democratic psychoclass?
11. What does Ricoeur mean by “an enlarged self”? (10)
12. Is the new sensibility already present among us?
13. What drives epistemological reconstruction?
14. What is the role of communal philosophical dialogue in the reconstruction of belief?

** David Kennedy will not be reading his paper aloud or “talking” it, but he rather expects that those in attendance will have read or at least skimmed it, so that altogether be able to proceed by generating questions, picking one to start with, and engaging in communal dialogue