reconsidering school in painful times

an ending-beginning conversation

Abstract

This article consists of an epistolary conversation between two experienced scholars in the field of philosophy of childhood around different dimensions of schooling. Starting from a shared diagnosis of the actual state of the world where greed, mendacity, corruption, cynicism, and cruelty and violence in politics and public speech prevail, a common search for a (new) beginning of another world—a novum--is carried out. The concept of childhood plays a core role in this conversation, one inspired by the utopian thinking of various prophetic intellectuals: Deleuze and Guattari and “becoming child”; Spinoza’s “joy”; Marcuse’s “new sensibility”; the Romantic “renovation of perception” or William Blake’s “cleansing” of the “doors of perception”; Paulo Freire’s relationship to the concept of “beginning,” and Nego Bispo’s circle of “beginning-middle-beginning.” The content and form of a general letter of intent to those adults participating in the formation of a hypothetical utopian school is discussed, imagining the relationship of such a school to lived space and time, body, animals, plants love, friendship, equality, hope, errantry, joy, questioning, listening, creating and dreaming. In that same context Jane Elliot’s well-known blue-eyes/brown eyes anti-racist experiment in the sixties is presented in order to problematize the power of school as an adult-child intentional community that might self-organize to function as a potential ground of personal and social transformation, both for students and teachers. The conversation ends, paradoxically, with the affirmation of beginning as a childlike force in schooling.