Breaking silence: educating citizens for love, care and solidarity

Abstract

An indifference to the affective domain and an allegiance to the education of the rational autonomous subject and public citizen are at the heart of formal education. The impact of Cartesian rationalism is intensifying with the glorification of performativity measured by league tables and rankings. The citizen carer and the care recipient citizen are only recognised in the educational arena when professionals are being trained to manage those in need of care. Education for informal care labour, solidarity work and love labour is generally not part of the formal educational trajectory. Because the scholarly understanding of work has been equated with economic self preservation and self‐actualisation through interaction with nature, education is seen as preparation for this type of work. Education is indifferent to other‐centred work arising from our interdependencies and dependencies as affective, relational beings. In particular it has ignored the centrality of nurturing for the preservation and self‐actualisation of the human species. In this article the authors argue that sociologists need to engage with the extensive feminist scholarship on care if they are to challenge the deeply care‐less view of the citizen that is implicitly accepted in new and older forms of liberal thinking. The rational economic actor model of the citizen is contrasted with the care‐full view of the citizen and the implications of both for education are explored.

Notes

1. For a more detailed discussion of the differences between love, care and solidarity see Lynch, 2007 and Lynch et al., forthcoming 2008.

2. We recognise that there are important distinctions that can be drawn between the work of ‘homo faber’ (humans as makers of things), the labour of ‘animal laborans’ (the work humans must do of necessity to maintain life itself) and the work of humans as ‘animal rationale’ (intellectual labourers) (see Arendt, 1958). The distinctions made by Arendt in The human condition do not focus however on care labouring in and of itself, although she does recognise that the work that women did in the private sphere was hidden away because of the type of work involved: ‘Women and slaves belonged to the same category and were hidden away, not only because they were somebody else’s property but because their life was “laborious”, devoted to bodily functions’ (ibid., p. 72).

3. Gouldner defined domain assumptions as the personal values and assumptions that underpin research thinking arising from personal experiences and statuses people may or may not reflect upon. They arise from our personal identities as women or men, ethnic majority or minority members, lesbian, gay or heterosexual and so on.

4. I think therefore I am.

5. Yet an analysis of the etymological roots of the word ‘education’ shows that it originated in the Latin verb educare (which means to nurture and to develop through care), rather than from the verb educere (which means to lead out).

6. To recognise the patriarchal control of sociological research in education is not to deny that some leading male scholars did recognise the role of patriarchy in educational thought and made a space for feminist scholars to write and publish when it was far from politically fashionable (Walker & Barton, 1983). Pro‐feminist male writers, including Connell (1995, 2002), Lingard and Douglas (1999) and Mac an Ghaill (1994), have been especially important in reconstituting the relevant gender questions for education. By examining the discourses and practices that constitute the masculine, Connell in particular has problematised the conception of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, and in so doing has created a space for feminist educators to move beyond examining their otherness, their problematic status in a male‐female binary. Bourdieu (2001), while ignoring gender in most of his work, also recognised latterly the key role of patriarchy in subordinating women.

7. For examples, see Folbre (1994, 2004) (economics); Noddings (1984, 2001, 2005, 2006) (education); Fineman (2004) (law); Harrington Meyer (2000) and Hochschild (1989, 2001) (sociology); Held (1995); Kittay (1999) and Tronto (1993) (philosophy); Ungerson (1995, 1997) and Williams (2004) (social policy); Sevenhuijsen (1998) and Hobson (2000) (politics) and Gilligan (1982, 1995) (psychology).

8. It is important to distinguish between emotional capital and the related but separate phenomenon of nurturing capital. While emotional capital (and the associated emotional work involved in love labouring and caring that produces it) is integral to nurturing capital, not all nurturing involves emotional work (and neither does all emotional work involve nurturing, as Hochschild showed in her work, The managed heart). Nurturing can involve the enactment of practical tasks with limited emotional engagement at a given moment. Thedoing of nurturing tasks is generally motivated by feelings of concern for others; however, the undertaking of the task itself may well be routinised at a given time and require low emotional engagement.

9. See the European Commission’s Implementation of Education and Training 2010 Work Programme, Key competences for lifelong learning: a European reference framework, agreed by the European parliament in 2006—available online at: ec.europa.eu/education/policies/2010/doc/basicframe.pdf