Joan Irvine Lecture: For the Love of Children and the World

Joan Irvine Lecture Faculty of Education University of Manitoba December 3, 2015 John R. Wiens

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD I never lose sight of the fact that the questions I address and the formulations I pose might have effects on real people. [EDUCATION] is about how people live their lives and create and recreate meaning anew with each working day. Humility seems the best stance from which to approach questions whose answers may either enhance human meaning or further drain us of our capacity to seek meaning. Jean Bethke-Elshtain (1981) Public man, private woman: Women in social and political thought (xvi)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and most recent fears. This, obviously is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of truths which have become trivial and empty seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing. Hannah Arendt (1958) Men in dark times (5)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD "The decisive difference between the "infinite improbabilities" on which the reality of our earthly life rests and the miraculous character inherent in those events which establish historical reality is that, in the realm of human affairs, we know the author[s] of the 'miracles. It is [we] who perform them because [we] have received the twofold gift of freedom and action [and as a result] can establish a reality of their own." Between past and future (169) Hannah Arendt (1968)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD What saves the affairs of [humankind] from their inherent futility is nothing but this incessant talk about them, which in its turn remains futile unless certain concepts, certain guidepostsfor future remembrance, and even for sheer reference, arise out of it. Hannah Arendt (1963) The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure in On Revolution (220)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it an by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. Hannah Arendt (1968) Between past and future (193) We are not born virtuous, we become virtuous [the power to be human]. How? Through education: through politeness, morality and love. (Compte-Sponville, 224,268)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. Hannah Arendt (1968) Between past and future (193) We do not love [children] because they are lovable, they are lovable because we love them. (Compte-Sponville, 281)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD LOVE (wanting the goodness of another is goodness itself)* FILIAL* LOVE (Love of Children) [Our obligation as parents and teachers], to learn to love the real child and not the child [we] dreamed of, is a never ending process. (Compte-Sponville, 246) Comte-Sponville, Andre (2001). A small treatise on the great virtues: The uses of philosophy in everyday life. (drawing on *Aristotle and **Jesus Christ)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD LOVE AGAPE** LOVE (unconditional Love of the World) love that gives [expecting nothing in return] not to a friend but to a stranger, an unknown person, an enemy. [citizen friendship]* (Compte-Sponville, 277) Comte-Sponville, Andre (2001). A small treatise on the great virtues: The uses of philosophy in everyday life. (drawing on *Aristotle and **Jesus Christ)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD a thought experiment. Suppose we were raising a very large family of heterogeneous children children with different biological parents, of mixed races, and widely different talents. What kind of education would we want for them? Nel Noddings (1992) The challenge to care in schools: An alternative approach to education (45) What kind of appearance do we want children to make in the world?

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD All adults, when they are in the presence of children and young people, are their teachers. Wiens, ad infinitum

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD all of us, insofar as we live in one world together with our children and young people, must take toward them an attitude radically different from the one we take toward one another Hannah Arendt (1968) Between past and future (191-192)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD TEACHING Anyone who refuses to assume joint responsibility for the world should not have children and must not be allowed to take part in educating them. Hannah Arendt (1968) Between past and future (186)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD I mean rather to be asking an educational question: What needs to be done, what skills acquired, what practices employed so that a public [WORLD] may emerge from the plurality in which we begin and so that it may be sustained for all the years of our lives and of our children s lives [for seven generations hence]. Thomas F. Green (1999). Voices: The educational formation of conscience (149)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and labourer The foundation of self-government was that all [people] were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens. Nelson Mandela (xxx) Long walk to freedom (xx)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD the health of democracy depends on many things a shared sense of community with fellow citizens who do not necessarily share our values or agree with our beliefs. We will never know or even meet most of them but we are prepared to take their ideas and opinions into account and even to make sacrifices on their behalf precisely because they are fellow citizens. one of the crucial roles of public schooling is to foster in the young the sense of community that makes [co]existence possible while also providing them with the knowledge, skills, values and dispositions upon which [democracy] depends. Ken Osborne (2008) Education and Schooling: A Relationship That Can Never Be Taken For Granted, 107th NSSE Yearbook (31)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD The point is to protect areas of life that are functionally dependent on social integration through values, norms and consensus formation, to preserve them from falling prey to the systematic imperatives of economic and administrative subsystems growing with dynamics of their own, and to defend them from becoming converted over, through the steering medium of the law, to a principle of association that is, for them, dysfunctional. J rgen Habermas () The theory of communicative action, Volume Two, Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason (372-373)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD The task of the democratic political imagination is possible if civility is not utterly destroyed, if room remains for playful experimentation from deep seriousness of purpose free from totalistic intrusion and ideological control. freedom preserves the human discourse necessary to work toward the realization of both. One day as our children or their children or their children s children stroll in gardens, debate in public places, or poke through the ashes of a wrecked civilization, they may not rise to call us blessed. But neither will they curse our memory because we permitted, through our silence, democracy to pass away as in a dream. Jean Bethke Elshtain (1993) Democracy on Trial (142)

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD Select References Arendt, Hannah (1968). Between past and future. New York: Penguin. Arendt, Hannah (1958). Men in dark times. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company. Hannah Arendt (1963). On Revolution. New York: Penguin. Benedek, Emily (1999). The wind won t know me: A history of the Navajo-Hopi land dispute. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Bethke-Elshtain, Jean (1981). Public man, private woman: Women in social and political thought. Bethke-Elshtain. (1993). Democracy on Trial. Toronto: Anansi Press. Comte-Sponville, Andre (2001). A small treatise on the great virtues: The uses of philosophy in everyday life. New York: Holt Paperbacks. Green, Thomas F., (1999). Voices: The educational formation of conscience. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Habermas, J rgen (1985). The theory of communicative action, Volume Two, Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason. Boston: Beacon Press. Mandela, Nelson (1995). Long walk to freedom. Boston: Little, Brown and Company Noddings, Nel., (1992). The challenge to care in schools: An alternative approach to education. New York: Teachers College Press. Osborne, Ken., (2008). Education and schooling: A relationship that can never be taken for granted. 107thNSSE Yearbook. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. (22-41).

FOR THE LOVE OF CHILDREN AND THE WORLD THANK YOU I Love You All!