(1986) Young Children's Thinking: An Interpretation from Phenomenology

Authors

David K. Kennedy, Montclair State UniversityFollow

Document Type

Dissertation

Publication Date

1986

Abstract

This study is an inquiry into the nature and significance of the lived experience of the young child, and into the relevance of the results of that inquiry to adult epistemology. As such, it may be described as an onto-epistemological grounding of a philosophy of childhood. The study argues, first, that current notions of the young child and its development are culturally and historically conditioned. In a brief analysis of the historical origins of these notions, it singles out one image—that of "holy childhood"—as an enduring one in Western thought, and shows how it was given its particularly modern form in classical Romanticism. The study then undertakes a phenomenological analysis of the perceptual and noetic modes of the young child, and concludes that they do, indeed, point to an epistemological style which not only differs qualitatively from the adult's, but whose closest parallel in adult experience is the aesthetic and the religious. The study argues that, not only is this ontological substrate present as a "nucleus of childhood" in the adult, but that, in the West anyway, it is present as a developmental ideal in adults, a spiritual goal: i.e., the recovery, or re-appropriation on a higher level, of the form of early childhood experience. Finally, the study draws some conclusions and suggests some implications for education, where pedagogical theory and strategy are invariably the practical outworking of a philosophy of childhood.

Comments

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education at the University of Kentucky, by David K. Kennedy

MSU Digital Commons Citation

Kennedy, David K., "(1986) Young Children's Thinking: An Interpretation from Phenomenology" (1986). Collected Papers of David Kennedy. 24.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/dkennedy/24

Published Citation

Kennedy, David K. (1986) Young Children's Thinking: An Interpretation from Phenomenology. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education at the University of Kentucky.