Stefan Ramaekers

The matter of simply living together, on both a global and a local scale, is complicated by the cultural, economic, religious, technological, and ecological challenges that we face in today’s world. An educational-philosophical take on these complexities translates into reflections on, and attempts to answer, the questions that these challenges raise. How is the older generation to introduce a new generation into today’s world and to ‘prepare’ it for the world to come? What sense can be given to such introduction and ‘preparation’? Or in the more general terms of Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘What indeed does the older generation intend to do with the younger generation? The contributions in this book – originally presented during the 14th conference of the International Network of Philosophers of Education – address a broad range of philosophical issues related to the question of the educational relationship between generations today. The philosophical analysis offered by the authors in this volume creates openings, not only for other philosophers of education, but also for policy makers and practitioners. They serve as invitations, not only for further thinking but also for reconsidering educational practices; and most importantly, they generate new questions, for both today’s and tomorrow’s generations. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethics and Education.

Shifting landscapes of education

Old and new generations in the 21st century

Naomi Hodgson

This book uses contemporary film to articulate a philosophical account of raising children. It forms part of a revaluation of the parent as a pedagogical figure, which stands in contrast to the instrumental accounts dominant in contemporary ‘parenting’ culture. Hodgson and Ramaekers use film in order to offer an affirmative account of the experience of raising children, as a presentation of those inevitable aspects and experiences that upbringing is: the initiation into language and the world; the representative nature of the parent; and the maintaining of mundane practices that constitute our shared culture and community. The films which are discussed are taken as grammatical investigations and enable the authors to develop an account of the use of film in education and as educational philosophy, and to respond to each film’s invitation to articulate the existential dimensions of raising children. Philosophical Presentations of Raising Children will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including education, sociology, philosophy, critical parenting studies and film studies.

The Grammar of Upbringing

Philosophical Presentations of Raising Children

Judith Suissa

Many sociological, historical and cultural stories can be and have already been told about why it is that parents in post-industrial, western societies face an often overwhelming array of advice on how to bring up their children. At the same time, there have been several philosophical treatments of the legal, moral and political issues surrounding issues of procreation, the rights of children and the duties of parents, as well as some philosophical accounts of the shifts in our underlying conceptualization of childhood and adult-child relationships. While this book partly builds on the insights of this literature, it is significantly different in that it offers a philosophically-informed discussion of the actual practical experience of being a parent, with its deliberations, judgements and dilemmas. In probing the ethical and conceptual questions suggested by the parent-child relationship, this unique volume demonstrates the irreducible philosophical richness of this relationship and thus provides an important counter-balance to the overly empirical and largely psychological focus of a great deal of “parenting” literature. Unlike other analytic work on the parent-child relationship and the educational role of parents, this work draws on first-person accounts of the day-to-day experience of being a parent in order to explore the ethical and epistemological aspects of this experience. In so doing it exposes the limitations of some of the languages within which contemporary “parenting” is conceptualized and discussed, and opens up a space for thinking about childrearing and the parent-child relationship beyond and other than in terms of the languages which dominate the ways in which we generally think about it today.

Stefan Ramaekers

Books

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