Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1998

Journal / Book Title

Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children

Abstract

Awakening to the voice of the child means that the latter is understood as the bearer of new information for adult self-understanding. As distanced other, the child's status is analogous to what feminist standpoint theorists describe as "valuable 'strangers' to the social order. Like women, persons of color, or others marginalized by Eurocentric and patriarchal personal, interpersonal and social constructs, the child's location in the social and natural world affords her an "epistemic privilege." Since she lives before, or at the margins of the adult instinctual economy, her relationship to that economy is inherently transgressive. What this does for the adult who listens for the voice of the child is that, through his relationship with the child, he rediscovers his own childhood by becoming conscious of the boundaries of instinct and repression which were a result of his own childhood formation. Through becoming aware of his own "child," he recovers himself on a higher level-through incorporating unconscious contents into consciousnes.

Book Publisher

Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children

Journal ISSN / Book ISBN

0190-3330

Published Citation

Kennedy, David (1998) Reconstructing Childhood. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 14(1): 29-37.

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