Leena Kakkori
What are little children?
A philosophical study of the essence of the little child.
A paper presented in the European Conference on Educational Research,
Lisbon September 11 - 14 2002
Network 13, Philosophy of Education
Session 1A, Wednesday 17.00-18.30, Faculty of Law Room 12.09
Chair: Volker Kraft
Abstract
In this presentation, important concepts are privation, recognition, childhood, love and care. These concepts refer to Axel Honneth's and Martin Heidegger's theories, which I will use as a starting point of my argument about the essential features of early childhood. Philosophically, I think that we can no longer fully understand what it is to be a little child, because of our privation of childhood. This makes the question even more interesting. I argue that while my point of view is only one aspect to the essence of early childhood, it nevertheless broadens our customary thinking about a little child.
I Three aspects as to why I ask this question
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The first aspect is a critical attitude to science. Here I want to stress that we have to understand the criticism as something positive. I am thus not trying to say that some sciences are wrong; my purpose is rather to see things from a fresh standpoint. Various branches of science adopt a suitable idea of man as given, without really reflecting on it. This questioning is of course a task of philosophy. But I claim that not even philosophy can provide very thorough consideration of the child and even less thorough one of the little child. One explanation of this is historical. The history of philosophy, as that of many other sciences before the 20th century, is the history of male philosophers. Women have been taking care of children, young children in particular. The concept of childhood is a very young concept in the male dominated science. In spite of this, many great figures of western philosophy have had something to say about education and childhood. But when we take a look at their considerations and at their thoughts about big issues, such as the idea of man, the ways how we are in the world, what is good life, etc., we can find only marginal comments about childhood. Aristotle, for example, says that a child must be educated and drilled to become virtuous in order to have good life later on. Plato thought the same way. But we do not find in Aristotle a description of a happy childhood or a philosophy of happiness of the child. Rousseau and other so-called child-centered thinkers (Schiller-Pestalozzi-Fröbel) form the important exception.
The science of education needs the question of the child. Even more so because the subject of research has been taken as self-evident due to the triumph of the natural sciences and their methods over scientific research, part of which is the science of education. The natural sciences have been represented as proper sciences, research methods of which have created the idea of the experiment. A real researcher has a white coat and a laboratory with shiny glass vessels. And in case he has invented something very important, he must be a man with a beard. The other extreme, characteristic of less important sciences, is the researcher of literature - a woman with eyeglasses and a bun. The means of gaining prestige in social and humanistic sciences and the arts has been the use of statistics, for we tend to think of it as of a way of obtaining exact facts. This way one can, for instance, claim that 23 percent of children learn to read before they start to go to school. The number 23 is quite exact, but actually it does not tell much. Reducing human behaviour to brain physiology has gained huge attention and prestige, as well. Continuously new scientific findings, such as how neurotransmitter between synapses causes and explains human anxiety, are presented. And then there is genetic engineering, which has its own idea of man. What I am trying to say is that while science builds some kind of unreflective idea of man, it does not really consider the nature of man, and especially the nature of the child.
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The second aspect in this paper is that of educational research being concentrated on a certain age and learning. The early years of childhood are usually left out of the research by definition, and most of the researches are concerned with school-aged children. This aspect relates to my background as a kindergarten teacher. I have completed the seminar for kindergarten teachers, where education was understood as comprehensive action of taking care of and educating the child. It was emphasized throughout the training that a kindergarten teacher is not a school teacher, but first of all an educator who brings up the children. My training comprised partly of studies taken at the faculty of education at the University of Jyväskylä. I found it rather amusing that all my studies at the university were about school education, theories of learning and teaching, and some central theories of human development. At the same time, the kindergarten teacher seminar was delivering an idea of education not only as of teaching but rather as of comprehensive doing with the essence of the child.
The third and very important aspect here is the situation of our modern, or better yet, postmodern society (See Moisio 2002). We can say that in Finland the standard of the education of kindergarten and school teachers is very high. Our society has been devoted largely to education and training of these groups, and our day care and school systems have a long tradition and are at a level which characterises the Nordic welfare state. In spite of this, it seems that indisposition of the little children and the youth has been increasing. During the last year, we have witnessed extreme neglect and violence towards little children, and so have we seen violent acts of youth, some of which have even lead to death. I think that there must be several reasons for this kind of development. One reason are the values of the society, which I think have become harder due to the need for effectiveness and aggressiveness. In Finland, they say that the industry is going to need new workers with the latest knowhow in the near future, and that we need the present young generations to enter working life as early as possible, so that they can pay our pensions, etc. To achieve all this, they are however ready to throw the children and childhood to the altar of science, and quoting Rousseau, without letting them mature in peace and in their own time. To argue against this kind of development, we must think over what it is to be a child, and not only think about how she is going to be an adult or a Kantian mature and autonomic subject.
II The question "What is a child?"
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The question "What is a child?" can be turned into the question "What is it to be a child?" The answer seems to be easy. A child is a human being, but not yet adult. In this answer "not yet" refers to the fact that something is missing right now. Martin Heidegger would call this lack of something "privation". For Heidegger, privation is not negation, but the way of existence which determines the human being in her entire life. It is an ontological question, in other words privation refers to a possibility of being and not merely to a propositional negation. (Heidegger 1992, 75, 286 and Heidegger 2001, 46-47, 55.)
A child is a human being who has a privation of adulthood. A privation is not default, but rather a relation. This can be seen if we turn things the other way around. We can say that adulthood is a privation of childhood. A privation is not something which we have to get away from. The privation ends when our life is full, and that is at the moment of death. In other words, privation is something essential to our life. We all have been children and now we are adults. When and how do childhood and adulthood meet, as a privation of adulthood turns into a privation of childhood? My suggestion to this question refers to the concept of recognition.
III Martin Heidegger and man
Martin Heidegger's definition of the human being is: "Being-open to what is present is the fundamental characteristic of being human" (Heidegger 2001, 73). As any of you with any knowledge of Heidegger know, Heidegger's Opus magnum is Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), in which he presents his question of being and the analytic of Dasein. And Heidegger stresses that Dasein is not be interpreted directly as the human being and that his study is not an anthropological investigation of the human being. Heidegger suggests that anthropology, psychology, and biology all fail to give an unequivocal and ontologically adequate answer to the question about the kind of Being which belongs to those entities which we ourselves are. In spite of this, Heidegger did not want to deny positive contribution of those disciplines. (Heidegger 1992, 75)
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We can illustrate Heidegger's concept of man (Dasein). Think about a door. Only our being makes the door open, because the door is present to us and the meaning of the door to us is to be closed or open. By itself, the door is not closed or open. The shoes, which are at the door, are not shoes to the door and they are not present to each other. "The door and the shoes are only there at different place in space" (Heidegger 2001, 73). The door and the shoes do not have world, or they are worldless. Being-open is possible only for a human being because of the clearing (Lichtung). The clearing is one of the most essential concepts of Heidegger. The clearing is the place and the happening at the same time, in which the truth as being uncovers. This clearing belongs to the Dasein, or to the being of human who is always in-the-world. This being-in-the-world is essential to the human being, and to the Dasein it is an existentiale, an essential state. This does not mean, as Heidegger describes it in his famous example, that the human being is in the same way in the world as the water is in the glass. (Heidegger 1992, 79-80.) The human being is not only at a different place in space, but is able to touch and to be near somebody or something. Heidegger writes: "Being-in is not a 'property' which Dasein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, and without which it could be just as well as it could with it. It is not a case that man 'is' and then has, by way of extra, a relationship-of-Being towards the 'world' - a world with which he provides himself occasionally." (Heidegger 1992, 84.)
Dasein, the human being, is always in-the-world, and "its being toward the world is essentially concern" (Heidegger 1992, 84). This concern is care of things and others in the world, it is being-with (Mitsein). One of Heidegger's main arguments is that we always are already in the world, and he even derives from it the idea about the absurdness of the question of the outside world. I think that this can be broadened to the question of the being of others. Why ask something so obvious as the being of the world, the being of others, because we always are in the world when we ask it, and we can ask it only because there is somebody else to whom we direct that question. Heidegger says that Dasein is in "particular relationship to the world, to the Da-sein-with (Mitdasein) other humans, and to itself" (Heidegger 2001, 139). This relationship is constituted by understanding and thrownness, which belong together. Dasein is always in the world, thrown into the world with others, and it always understands the world into which it has been thrown trough the concern and care of things and others. Heidegger does neither ask how and when the human being has come into the world, nor how the human being learns to ask about being. In other words, can a newborn ask the question of being and be Dasein, and how is birth related to being in the world? Of course we must admit that Heidegger was a philosopher of one question, the question of being and a man of his own age.
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In Heidegger's philosophy, the end of life has a very important role. Human and Dasein are beings which are being-towards-death, trough which they have the possibility of being-a-whole. Death reveals nothingness, which is needed in understanding of being. Heidegger himself notices the problem of birth in the latter part of Being and Time, in chapter 72, and tries to rescue what is possible. He writes: "The other 'end', however, is the 'beginning', the birth. Only that entity [!] which is 'between' birth and death presents the whole which we have been seeking. Accordingly the orientation of our analytic has so far remained 'one-sided'." (Heidegger 1992, 425.) And later on he continues: "Not only has Being-towards-the-beginning remained unnoticed; but so too, and above all, has the way in which Dasein stretches along between birth and death." (Heidegger 1992, 425.) "As long as Dasein factically exists, both the 'ends' and their 'between' are, and they are in the only way which is possible on the basis on Dasein's Being as care" (Heidegger 1992, 426). Heidegger leaves out the problem, which is a consequence of his neglect of birth, namely the little child who cannot yet speak. In other contexts Heidegger claims that animals do not have the world, and that this is why they do not have language and so they can never be-in-clearing. ABecause plants and animals are lodged in their respective enviroments but are never placed freely into the clearing of being which alone is world', they lack language. (Heidegger 1999,248). A little child does not have language, but she will have it, and definitely she is in the world. We can say that the child has a privation of language as a privation of adulthood. This privation we now have to understand in Heideggerian terms as something positive and not as non-being of something.