Towards the human, after the child of Man: Seeing the child differently in teacher education

Abstract

Sylvia Wynter’s wide-ranging intellectual contributions contain a poetics of being and becoming human that serve to counter the hegemony of developmental psychology and its articulation of the child in teacher education. In this article, I use Wynter’s insights to unsettle the universality of this child figure to reveal the child of Man, a genre-specific formulation of the not-yet-fully-human white modal child. In the first part of the article, I demonstrate how the origins of the developing child are conjoined with purely biocentric nineteenth century views of the human as formulated within the context of asserting the hegemony of the Western bourgeois subject. In the second part, I consider how the genre-specific trope of the child of Man persists in teacher education and the kind of subjectivities it compels for teaching candidates. I explore materials relating to the developmental psychology course (i.e. standards, syllabi and textbook), an important site where teacher candidates confront notions of the child. I argue that the white Western bourgeois child masquerading as universal child is key to reproducing our current hierarchical order by inciting the violence of continual measurement, evaluation and ranking, thereby legitimizing and depoliticizing the “achievement gap”, and condemning Black, brown and poor children. In conclusion, I suggest ways to use Wynter’s poetics of being and becoming human in the constructive sense to inspire other ways of thinking about the child, teaching and learning for a project of re-enchanting humanism.

Keywords:

• Being and becoming human
• childhood
• developmental psychology
• ethno-class Man
• teacher subjectivities
• Wynter

Acknowledgments

I thank Nathan Snaza and Aparna Mishra Tarc for their thoughtful suggestions and the initial provocation that inspired this article. I also thank the journal editors and the two anonymous reviewers for the critical comments that greatly improved the argument. I am grateful to Jason R. Ambroise for the generous feedback that brought this article to light, and for bringing me closer to the brilliance of Sylvia Wynter.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The silence concerning race mirrors the aporias of the broader posthuman critique (Weheliye, 2014). In her centering of Wynter and Césaire, rather than Foucault, in the genealogy of the critique of Man, Jackson (2013) argues that posthumanists have challenged the sovereignty, autonomy and exceptionalism of Man, but have not attended to the core racial, gendered and colonial hierarchies of “reason”.

2 I highlight these three because they are concerned with a more holistic view of human behavior as compared to disciplines like political science, criminology or economics.

3 In addition to the multiple textbooks I browsed, the three that were examined in-depth include: Berk’s (2013) Child Development; Pressley and McCormick’s (2007) Child and Adolescent Development for Educators and Santrock’s (2014) Child Development. Each of these texts appeared at least once in the syllabi.

4 Lightfoot, Cole, and Cole’s (2012) The Development of Children is exceptional in the way it challenges the universality of Western assumptions about childhood, and the rich way it presents cultural diversity around the globe. However, it is not as rigorous in problematizing race and class inequalities within the US.

5 CAEP’s definition of accreditation as voluntary is belied in an animated video linked on their website and tweeted on 20 June 2017, which takes a more ominous “accredit or die” tone: “Would you hesitate to get surgery from a surgeon who trained at an unaccredited school? Would you feel completely confident driving across a bridge built by engineers whose degree came from a program that was not accredited?” (American Society for Public Administration, 2016).

6 The five standards are: clinical partnership and practice; candidate quality, recruitment and selectivity; program impact; provider quality assurance and continuous improvement.

7 In a position paper bemoaning their incomplete reign within teacher education, they outline their vision for TEPs that was nothing less than a complete stranglehold, with recommendations for accreditors, states, the federal government and funding agencies.

8 I employ scare quotes for “achievement gap” to gesture toward the broad criticism of how the phrase obfuscates the way the gap is produced. A more apropos term is “opportunity gap”.

9 Burman (1994/2017, p. 246) notes that the uptake of Piaget’s work is not so much a misinterpretation as it is an “opportunistic” incorporation into technologies of control. Aslanian’s (2018) work shows how Piaget’s large corpus can be anchored more productively to analyze children’s ways of knowing, in her case with posthuman perspectives that highlight the plasticity of children’s knowledge.

10 Conservation is the understanding that changing an object’s appearance does not change its basic properties. See Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010) for a critique of the way psychology has privileged the cognitive operations of Man, or what they call “WEIRD” (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Developed) societies.

11 For research that engages the child as sexual subject beyond moral panics, see Renold, Ringrose, and Egan (2015). For an overview of a recent collection that brings together queer studies and childhood studies, see Gill-Peterson, Sheldon, and Stockton (2016). There are certainly many ways to mine Wynter’s insights about gender and sexuality within childhood and education that are beyond the scope of this essay. See for example Wynter’s discussion of homosexuality as a liminal category within our Western bourgeois order, and how heterosexuality “binds the lower classes to the middle classes” much as does whiteness (2000/2005a, p. 363).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Kromidas

Maria Kromidas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at William Paterson University in the US Her work explores how race, schooling, and the human can be rethought through the critical perspectives of children and childhood. She has published in the journals Anthropological Theory, Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, Critique of Anthropology, and Harvard Educational Review. She is the author of City Kids: Transforming Racial Baggage (Rutgers University Press).