Fashioning a Mind of One’s Own in the Good Company of Others

ABSTRACT

While much theoretical work on value takes point of departure in what adults presumably value, this chapter addresses the valuing work children do. Articulating ideals of ‘being social’ and ‘being oneself’ as good forms of personhood, Danish teachers oblige children to enact a good form of ‘being together as a class’, a sociability considered vital to democratic society. Drawing on discussions of value exemplarity, I suggest that Danish school classes may be viewed from an adult perspective as exemplars representing, and to some extent realising, a high-sung value of egalitarian community. For children tasked with living out an idealised social form, the class is a limited social field, one they ‘value’ through myriad small valuing acts lodged in the sociable give and take of everyday class activity. The verb form is crucial here for exploring, not how children take on adult values, but rather what comes to matter to children as they, inescapably themselves, navigate the ‘class’ as an imposed social field and highly valued form of sociability.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedagogy
• children
• sociability
• autonomy
• value

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the editors for their kind consideration of my work situation, and for their encouraging, constructive and direct feedback on article drafts. I thank the anonymous reviewers for both generous and challenging readings.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The discussion draws on three decades of extended fieldwork in a range of Danish public and private, urban and rural schools, as well as voluntary associations for children.

2 The Danish term fællesskab is difficult to gloss in English, as it connotes different forms of membership, senses of belonging and proper ways of being together. Fællesskab may refer to the commonality and togetherness experienced by a group of commuters on a morning train. It may also refer to stronger feelings of fellowship among people whose lives intertwine through living or working together. It also refers to organized collectivities across scales – cooperative housing, trade unions, a village church, a nation-state or the European Union (Anderson 2008; Olwig 2010; Bruun 2011).

3 Larsen witnessed mentors working with young refugees in rural villages, endeavouring to teach them to ride bicycles, use smart phones and swim, and thus to ‘individualize’ them by drawing them ‘out into the society’ of local youth. These mentors interpreted resistance to their work as expressions of parental control and not knowing one’s own needs rather than expression of personal autonomy (Larsen 2018, 262–263).

4 Friedman suggests that this social form ‘locks autonomous individuals into a field of mutual dependence’, one in which they are deeply dependent on each other for recognition as equals (2018, 340).

5 The worst class is very often offered to field-working anthropologists.