Conference Agenda

In recent years, the concept of childhood has become an object of critical academic inquiry (Edelman 2004; Young-Bruehl 2013) as well as of political and social struggles (Assan 2024; Pickard 2022). While children are commonly perceived as “unfinished” human beings (Arendt 1961, 185) whose capacities have not yet matured and whose experience is insufficient for making meaningful decisions on their own (Schapiro 1999), contemporary research argues not only that childhood as we know it is a modern historical construct, but also that it is bound up with political oppression and exclusion (Viterbo 2023). The high media profile of young activists such as Greta Thunberg and Ahed Tamimi, who demand a right to speak and act despite – and precisely because of – their young age, blurs the boundary meant to separate the world of adults from that of the young, who are expected to focus on growing up and studying, and thus also destabilizes the very dichotomy between childhood and adulthood (Devji 2021).

The term childism – analogous to feminism – denotes a theoretical and activist perspective that seeks to challenge adultist assumptions in diverse aspects of academic research and social life, and to develop an age-inclusive social and political imagination (Biswas and Wall 2023; Burman 2023; Kennedy et al. 2023; Wall 2022). It aims to free us from the prejudice that children are inherently inferior to adults and to reopen the most basic questions about social and political life. In contrast to the traditional trajectory of childhood studies and child rights activism (as expressed, for example, in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child), the childist approach is attuned to the ways in which the desire to protect children is also expressed through their exclusion and oppression. It seeks to formulate conceptual frameworks that recognize children as full and equal human beings, without doing away with sensitivity to their mental and physical vulnerability.

This symposium proposes to think about education through a childist perspective and to ask what implications such a perspective has for educational research and practice. Western education, it can be argued, has historically been shaped from an adult point of view which, even when motivated by concern for children’s well-being, in fact presupposed their inferiority. It is the students’ young age, as understood by an adult-centrist society, that justifies forms of control, coercion, and at times even violence that would be unthinkable if applied to adults.

As the symposium participants seek to show, the question of what a childist education might look like cannot be separated from many other questions concerning intergenerational relations (within the family and in society at large), political participation, and human relations with their environment. The childist perspective calls for a rethinking not only of formal schooling, but of the very concept of the human being that underlies and enables the field of education. In this way, the symposium will open up a series of questions of crucial importance for the philosophy of education that have so far scarcely been addressed in the discussions of ECER Network 13. The first presentation seeks to formulate the difficulties and paradoxes of thinking equality radically through a childist exploration of Rancière's Proletarian Nights; the second presentation proposes to explore the idea of chihldhood as a form of Exteriority with Dussel’'s philosophy of liberation; and the third invites us to explore Agemben’s concept of infancy together with Wallace’s story “This is Water” to challenge the sociopolitical relevance of accumulated experience and rethink the hierarchy embedded in intergenerational relation. The symposium’s presentations will end with a prepared response to the three above-mentioned presentations.

Throughout the years, Jacques Rancière has written at length on emancipation and equality. He has shown thinking in people who had traditionally be seen solely as research objects – his paradigmatic example being proletarians from 19th Century workers’ movements in France. Through retelling the story of one of these workers, the teacher Joseph Jacotot, Rancière rewrote his so-called (anti)method of equality. This method promoted self-emancipation and argued for the superfluousness of explanations. This groundbreaking work, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987/2004), has been widely read and used in philosophy of education to advocate for radical equality (for recent uses see for instance McDonnell, 2022; Säfström, 2020; van Djik, 2022). In that sense, it would seem natural to push Rancière’s radical thinking further to think about equality between children and adults, to operate a reconfiguration of the sensible by starting with the presupposition of equality with children as well and thus propose a childist reading of Rancière (as suggested by Snir, 2023). However, I argue that the many figures of children in Rancière’s work have remained understudied but are yet important to examine. In this presentation, I suggest an exploration of children and the idea of childhood in Proletarian Nights (1981/2012) in relation to the emancipatory workers movements – Icarians and Saint-Simonians. I argue that the construction of childhood and children crystallizes the tensions and paradoxes of thinking equality and emancipation in the present-tense. First, I present how proletarians constructed their dreams of another world through remembrance of their childhood, longing for familial love and care, and in opposition to traditional hierarchical family structures and children’s exploitation. Second, I explore the paradoxes that appear in the Saint-Simonian and Icarian movements in their promotion of education in their experiments in creating a harmonious utopian society. Third, I examine the emphasis on reading and writing as a means to emancipation – which could exclude younger children from those who can be emancipated. Through this exploration, I seek to show the value in seeing children as equals – something that is already present in some form in Proletarian Nights – and on the other hand, to formulate the difficulties of thinking equality in a radical manner. How to think equality for children in the present tense when the necessity of education and formation rhymes with a romanticized free time of childhood? How to break from the self-reproducing logic of inequality while arguing for care and protection?

McDonnell, J. (2022). Reading Rancière for education. Palgrave Macmillan. Rancière, J. (1981/2012). La Nuit des Prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier. [Proletarian Nights. Archives of workers’ dream]. Pluriel. Rancière, J. (1987/2004). Le Maître Ignorant : Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle. [The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation] 10/18. Snir, I. (2023). The Children Who Have No Part: A Rancièrian Perspective on Child Politics, Critical Horizons, DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2023.2195802 Säfström, C. A. (2020). A Pedagogy of Equality in a Time of Unrest: Strategies for an Ambiguous Future (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351169400 van Dijk, Daniël Thomas (2022) Thinking with Jacques Rancière about education: an adventure on the borders of possibility. PhD thesis. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/83191/

Modern educational thought is deeply structured by an ontology of the autonomous subject. From its Cartesian foundations onward, education has been conceived as the guided development of an incomplete being toward rational self-sufficiency. Within this framework, asymmetry, authority, and coercion appear not as political problems but as pedagogical necessities. In recent years, childism has emerged as a critical perspective challenging these adultist assumptions by affirming children as full human beings and by foregrounding interdependence as a foundational condition of social and political life. By insisting that vulnerability and dependency do not negate equality, childism opens a powerful critique of educational authority grounded in developmental hierarchy (Wall, 2018, 2019). Yet, when articulated primarily as an ethical or normative stance, childism risks underestimating the extent to which relations of dependence are historically produced, politically organized, and unevenly distributed. This presentation argues that a childist philosophy of education requires a sustained dialogue with relational and trans-modern philosophies that also contest the modern, self-grounding subject. Bringing childism into conversation with Martin Buber’s philosophy of relation (1938), Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity (1990), and Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation (1980, 2013), the presentation shows how interdependence can be rethought beyond moral idealization. While Buber and Levinas displace the autonomous subject by centering relation and responsibility, Dussel radicalizes this critique by situating interdependence within the violent history of modernity/coloniality. More specifically, Dussel provides conceptual tools that deepen childism’s critique of adultism. His notion of “Exteriority” makes intelligible how children, like other subordinated groups, are positioned outside the sphere of legitimacy defined by the modern and colonial adult subject. His analysis of oppression as a denial of the Other’s capacity for self-expression resonates with children's systematic exclusion from political and epistemic authority. Moreover, Dussel’s account of ethical responsibility beginning with the cry of the oppressed reframes children’s dependency not as developmental lack but as a site where domination becomes visible. Finally, by theorizing interdependence through the material asymmetries produced by modernity/coloniality, Dussel corrects universalist tendencies in childism and reveals childhood as a structurally produced form of Exteriority, rather than a natural stage of life. By placing interdependence at the center of a dialogue between childism, relational philosophy, and trans-modern critique, this presentation proposes a shift from pedagogy as a technique of adaptation toward a childist pedagogics of liberation, oriented toward the true recognition of exteriority, listening, and the transformation of educational authority itself.

Buber, M. (1938). Je et tu. Paris : F. Aubier. Dussel, Enrique (1980). La Pedagógica latinoamericana. Bogotá : Editorial Nueva América. Dussel, Enrique (2013). Ethics of Liberation. In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion. Durham: Duke University Press. Lévinas, E. (1990). Totalité et infini : essai sur l’extériorité. Paris : Librairie générale française. Wall, J. (2019). From childhood studies to childism: reconstructing the scholarly and social imaginations. Children's Geographies, 20, 257 - 270. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1668912. Wall, J. (2018). Theorizing children’s global citizenship: Reconstructionism and the politics of deep interdependence. Global Studies of Childhood, 9, 17 - 5. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610618815484.

The American writer David Foster Wallace opened his address to the graduating class of Kenyon College, Ohio, in 2005 – published under the title “This Is Water” (2009) – with the following short story: There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” (pp. 3-4) The older fish is not a wise sage who explains to the younger ones what water is. And yet the intergenerational encounter is an educational situation in which the older fish teaches the younger ones something. As Wallace explains, the older fish’s life experience has taught him how monotonous and repetitive the water surrounding him can be; still, he does not share this experience directly, but rather directs the young to think for themselves about the water and give it meaning. An inspiring story indeed. And yet one may wonder whether Wallace’s text does not itself reproduce the very pattern that generates the repetitiveness it seeks to confront: one in which older individuals transmit their experience to the next generation, to young people who (still) don’t know the ways of the world. Are adults with experience really better than the young at drawing attention to the taken-for-granted and questioning it? In this talk I propose to rethink this question from a childist perspective, with the help of Giorgio Agamben’s (1995, 2007) concept of infancy. Infancy is not the name of early childhood or of a developmental stage that is left behind; rather, it is an essential dimension of every human being, regardless of age (Faulkner 2010; Jasinski 2018; Lewis and Jasinski 2022; Ramaekers and Vlieghe 2014). It constitutes a pre-linguistic experience of the very capacity for language, from which the human emerges each time language is put to use and words are transformed into speech. Agamben likens infancy to a vast sea in which the human swims like a dolphin and from which one must leap out each time one speaks. I will seek to retell Wallace’s story with dolphins as its protagonists, and to examine the intergenerational and educational relations in waters where experience is no longer accumulated but rather won anew each time.

Agamben, Giorgio. 1995. “The Idea of Infancy.” In Idea of Prose, Albany: SUNY Press, 95–98. ———. 2007. Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. London: Verso. Faulkner, Joanne. 2010. “Innocence, Evil, and Human Frailty: Potentiality and the Child in the Writings of Giorgio Agamben.” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 15(2): 203–19. Jasinski, Igor. 2018. Giorgio Agamben: Education Without Ends. Cham: Springer. Lewis, Tyson E., and Igor Jasinski. 2022. Rethinking Philosophy for Children: Agamben and Education as Pure Means. London: Bloomsbury. Ramaekers, Stefan, and Joris Vlieghe. 2014. “Infants, Childhood and Language in Agamben and Cavell: Education as Transformation.” Ethics and Education 9(3): 292–304. Wallace, David Foster. 2009. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Little, Brown and Company.