The Well of Being: Childhood, Subjectivity, and Education

Contents

Contents Preface ix 1. Questioning Childhood 1 Whose Child? 1 Which Adult? 5 The Western Construction of Childhood 8 Theorizing Childhood 13 Adult-Child Dialogue 14 The Child Before Us: Education, Parenting, and the Evolution of Subjectivity 21 2. The Primordial Child 27 The Divine Child 27 The Romantic Child 44 Romanticism, Education, and the New Humanity 56 3. The Invention of Adulthood 63 Adultism and Models of the Self 63 The Evolution ofAdulthood/Childhood 75 The Evolution of the Adult-Child Relationship 85 4. Childhood and the Intersubject 105 Boundary Work 105 The Ego Dethroned 116 The Emergence of the Intersubject 120 Psychogenic Theory of History and the Present Age 132 vii The Dialectics of Reason and Desire 136 The Privileged Stranger 142 5. Reimagining School 151 The Purposes of Schooling 151 The Space of Dialogue 158 The School as Laboratory of the Third Way of Living 165 The Dark and the Light 183 Notes 187 Bibliography 211 Index 229 viii The Well of Being ...