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Book Review 
 

Thinking, Childhood and Time: Contemporary Perspectives on the Politics 
of Education. 
 
Edited by Walter Omar Kohan and Barbara Weber  
Lexington Books, 2020  
229 Pages  
Price: Hardback $ 100.00, Kindle $45.00      

 
 
Review by Richard Morehouse  
 
 

 
  
s I sat to read this book and write a review of it, I planned to read the whole text quickly 
and then go back to a thorough and careful reading. After reading the first chapter, I 

changed my approach. I already had my pencil out, and the marginal notes had begun to grow. So, I 
reoriented my approach and read slowly and carefully. With that strategy in hand, I will start the 
review by first providing an overview of each of the two sections of this work. 
 

In their Introduction, Kohn and Weber state that the book is an interdisciplinary and 
interparadigmatic exploration of children and childhood. Many anthologies are interdisciplinary; few 
are interparadigmatic. The authors’ disciplines are many but easy to tick off: educationists, 
philosophers, political scientists, early childhood theorists, educational foundation experts, atelierista, 
and pedagogists. The paradigms within which these authors work include modernism, post-
modernism, humanism, posthumanism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology. This mixture of 
disciplines and paradigms is, in part, what makes this work so engaging, informative, and challenging. 
To grasp this scholarly work’s breadth and depth, the reader needs to be open to expanding their 
knowledge base, viewing information through new conceptual lenses, and rethinking once solidly held 
points of view.  
 

The editors state that exploring the otherness of the child and childhood is their overall topic 
for the book.  Citing Hannah Arendt’s notion that “every child brings a new beginning into the 
world, we asked: how can educators be more responsive to the otherness that children and childhood 
offer?” Two ideas provide the overarching themes of Thinking, Childhood, and Time. First, childhood’s 
otherness is to be affirmed and embraced rather than seen as disrupting adulthood’s normative 

A 



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development. Two, childhood needs to be recognized as a source of human natality.1 In the 
introduction the authors wrote, “…this book focuses on how this paradigm shift in our understanding 
of children and childhood affects educational practices: how can we educate responsibility in the face 
of these core transformations regarding the way we think and relate to childhood?” (3). 

 
Part One: Phenomenological Exploration of Time, Thinking, and Embodiment 
 

Part One, “Phenomenological exploration of time, thinking, and embodiment,” has six 
chapters.  This section of the work, the child’s view of time, is inspired by phenomenology. Each of 
the authors provides new insights that can potentially impact teaching and learning and offer a fresh 
look at the child and time. Part Two: Decolonial and Poststructuralist Perspectives on the Politics of 
Education is even more diverse than Part One. Decolonialism and Poststructuralism are related but 
different areas of study.  The connectivity and disconnection of decolonialism and poststructuralism 
become evident when looking at child and childhood specifics.  
 

Near the beginning of Chapter one, “Childhood and the Genesis of Time,” James Mensch 
references St Paul’s statement regarding our “putting away the things of childhood,” including the 
child’s sense of time as pre-numerical. “Can our earlier sense of time be so easily abandoned? Can this 
sense be ignored or denied in our educational practice? From a phenomenological perspective, this 
hardly seems possible. To do so would be to abandon a still functioning layer of selfhood” (11-12). 
Maintaining a layered sense of time and the layers of development more generally are explored in this 
chapter and in some of the chapters that follow. 
 

The idea of layering of experiences, or our interpretation of experiences, Husserl calls genetic 
phenomenology. Genetic analysis “focuses on how the various elements, such as the apprehension of 
temporality determined perceptual data, their interpretation, and the resulting visual presence comes 
about” (11). It is the temporality of events that is Mensch’s focus. Is there a parallel, Mensch asks, 
between event-time and clock-time? Mensch’s examination of Husserl’s idea of protention 
(anticipation of a future event) and retention (the remembering of a past event) by looking at how the 
child understands the world through reaching out and grasping an object of desire. The articulation 
of the role of anticipation, memory, and time, by exploring the young child’s grasping activities, 
provides new insight for my understanding of ‘genetic phenomenology.’ 
 

James Mensch connects this with our sense of time beginning in our earliest years, that is, that 
time is measure by an event: An event takes place, and then another event follows. “Time is 
determined by the order of events” (Mensch, 2020, 19). This understanding of time changes with the 
advent of school, wherein a clock determines time. But as Mensch states, this “event time” also stays 
with us throughout life; it is one of the layers of our understanding of time. As a current adult 
example, think about what has happened during the pandemic; we have lost the rhythm of our days, 
as we have lost the pattern of events. Thus, the loss of time events has to some degree changed how we 
                                                 
1 Natality refers to belonging to a world characterized by plurality and is a politic in that each revolution is a new 
beginning. 
 
 



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know what time it is or what day it is, so we need to consult a calendar or check our watches more 
frequently. 
 

Our sense of being-in-the-world shapes our selfhood. This being-in-the-world is shaped in part by 
a layered understanding of time. 
   

The different layers of our sense of self and time are not sealed off. Given this, we do not 
have to choose between them or reject one in favor of the other. All are present, in this co-
presence makes possible the empathy that allows us to reach the child at the level he 
occupies (27).  

 
This awareness of the layered nature of time is essential to our understanding of the child and 
childhood. 
 

“A Phenomenological Journey into the Human Condition of Education” is the subtitle of 
Barbara Weber’s chapter, “Child and time.” Weber begins with Immanuel Kant’s observation that 
time cannot seem for the outside and that space is conceptualized from inside of us. Weber divides 
her chapter into two primary sections: 1) the first explores time from Merleau-Ponty’s approach to 
how children explore time. Merleau-Ponty understands time as a “field of presence” and “situational 
understanding.” In this section Weber goes on to challenge the implicitly accepted perspective that 
childhood is something to be “expired.” 
 

Weber, following Merleau-Ponty, understands time as something that one “falls into” rather 
than something to be sensed.  Falling into brings to mind a body, our body. Weber continues the 
discussion of how we (our embodied self) experience the world when she writes, “perception is always 
already turned towards the world, we make sense of things in our environment through the bodily 
relationships that we formed2” (33). Piaget’s examination of a children’s view provides a familiar 
background against which to then look at Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective on time. As 
I understand it, Piaget imposed a metric understanding of time as he observed and experimented with 
children’s understanding of it, rather than examining how the child might understand time as 
experienced. I think it is fair to say that Piaget took his adult experiences of time and then looked to 
see how a child might come, in stages, to match that adult understanding. Merleau-Ponty, on the 
other hand, argues that “Time does not exist for us, but it is consciousness that makes us experience 
our existence in time” (38).  
 

In his critique of “Piaget’s child,” Merleau-Ponty argues that the child is not egocentric but 
rather that the young child and the world are one; therefore, the young child is not egocentric. The 
child lives in a world where the world and the self are one; that notion of the ‘me’ does not yet exist 
(38).  The child’s oneness experiences are illustrated by her experiencing the environment, including 
time, as being a part of her being—thus, time is now. This sense of time should not be discounted or 
undervalued but should be appreciated when seen in the child and re-experienced in us as adults. 

                                                 
2 Mensch in the previous chapter writes about Husserl and makes similar connection between the body’s importance to 
understanding in his discussion of the grasp. 



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Weber’s chapter is rich in practical application and philosophical understanding, wherein we have an 
opportunity to see her as an observer of children and a consummate educator and philosopher. 

 
‘Thinking Like a Girl: Scout as a Philosophic, Androgynous Child in To Kill a Mockingbird”, 

as explored by Peter Costello in chapter three, provides a penetrating view of Scout’s becoming. 
Costello affords a deeper and more nuanced look at this often read and seen story.3 Costello follows 
an earlier scholar. Iris Maron Young’s lead in “Throwing like a girl: a phenomenology of feminine 
body comportment motility and spatiality” by rejecting biological differences between the sexes as the 
sole and insufficient approach to explain differences in children’s bodily experience (51). Instead, with 
Simone de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, Young emphasizes the notion of the situation and works 
from childhood onward “to describe the modalities of feminine bodily existing existence for women 
situated in contemporary advanced, industrial, urban, and commercial society” (51, [Young 1980, 139-
140]). What Costello adds to this understanding of the role of Scout’s movements and thoughts is an 
insight into Scout’s sense of herself as we vicariously see her moving invisibly around Maycomb. 
 

In the novel, Scout’s movements and thoughts are judged by the people around her, including 
the reader of the book, as someone who might become a ‘girl.’ The reader learns along with Scout 
how her experiences are regulated by the gaze of the characters in the novel (54). During the novel’s 
course, Scout enacts her transformation through her vulnerability and uses the limits she discovers in 
Atticus’ formulation as formulations of her experience. As Scout passes between and among the 
people of Macomb, she observes what they say and do.  “… she thus assembles tools to help her 
explore her own experiences. She is even able to discover the limitations of her own family and to 
reflect on how her own emotions propel her beyond them” (58). 
  

How does Costello illustrate Scout’s becoming a girl, becoming a self, become manifest? He does 
this by showing how she interacts with four important women (Calpurnia, Miss Maudie, Miss Rachel, 
and Aunt Alexandra).  Scout becomes who she is in the process of becoming through what she calls 
experiments, or what philosophers call thought experiments.  These Gedankenexperiments enable 
observations that potentially lead to change and growth. Scout used these experiments intentionally, 
but whether used knowingly or not, these thought experiments are vital parts of human development 
for many young people.  

 
In the last paragraph of this chapter, Costello states one reason teachers might wish to read To 

kill a Mockingbird and why this type of analysis might work in other texts.  
 

The successful classroom text will, perhaps like the novel, To kill a mockingbird, so irritate or 
promote identification that those children who read and discuss it will discover something 
new. They will discover themselves always already in process with it, always already taking 
up the next text as a partner, moving towards its quarters, dancing with it, singing with it, 
bringing it home to a new place (72).  
 

                                                 
3 To kill a mockingbird 40th Anniversary Addition has been widely read (1999) and often watched (1972) and a Broadway play 
(2018). 



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“Listening, Phronein, and the First Principles of Happiness” by Pablo Muruzábal Lamberti 
begins by examining the pedagogical meaning of phronein. His essay is built around an understanding 
of the role of attic drama.4 Socrates, among others, praised Greek theatre and the power of the spoken 
word. Lamberti seeks to reclaim the space of the spoken word as he explores the meaning of 
phronein—“to be a particular disposition of the mind”—and how that disposition is essential to 
expanding rational thinking into the area of listening and practical wisdom. Sophocles and Antigone 
have an instructive role in the articulation of the practice of listening.  

 
This examination leads him to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Erasmus. Put in present-day 

wording, what philosophy teaches, is learning from attitudes of mind and experiences of others, with 
the added benefit of running no risk of personal harm. Kreon’s inability to listen becomes a central 
theme of Lamberti’s article.  Antigone and To kill a Mockingbird play different and symbiotic roles in the 
“good life. Lamberti uses Antigone as an excellent vehicle for philosophically engaging with specfic 
issues, learning to listen to others as a part of this learning process, which may prevent one from 
thinking too quickly about complex situations and avoiding thinking dogmatically or thinking 
without listening (89). Like Scout’s experiments in To kill a Mockingbird, Antigone provides a 
philosophical voyage of self-discovery.   

 
In “Thinking and the Play of Being” by Michael Bonnett (Chapter 5), Paulo Freire’s concept of 

“conscientization” is given recognition.  Adding to that perspective, Bonnett makes a case for a 
metaphysical standpoint in addition to an epistemological one. Metaphysics, as Bonnett sees it, is a 
type of deeply embedded culture.  It frames our outlook and way of relating to all around us and 
conditions us to the extent that this metaphysical structure profoundly affects our ability to think 
differently, to question cultural structures in any radical way (93).  

 
Bonnett’s argument is organized around three points. First, the anthropocene names the world’s 

current status; human activity is responsible for the world’ geological and climate level. Second, it is 
highly questionable whether our current ways of thinking, which led us into the situation, can lead us 
out of our condition. Third, we need to find a replacement way of thinking, which instills within us a 
different relationship with the cosmos and the natural world (94). 

 
The “play of being” is Bonnett’s replacement for our current way of thinking. To oversimplify, 

the “play of being” is to attend sufficiently to the world around us, particularly the natural world, to 
be in the moment, to become a part of the unfolding of this moment.  

 
Bonnett’s last heading of his chapter is entitled poetic thinking. Eric Fromm in To have or To Be 

captures this move from our current thinking to the “play of being” in this poem by Goethe. 
I walked in the wood 
All by myself, 
To see nothing 
That was in my mind. 

                                                 
4 Attic drama, the phrase, if not the concept, is new to me – though based on an article published in 1898, not to the rest 
of the world (Haigh, 1898). 



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I saw in the shade 
A little flower stand, 
Bright like a star, 
Like beautiful eyes. 
 
I wanted to pluck it, 
But it said sweetly,  
Is it to wilt, 
That I must be broken? 
 
I took it out  
With all its roots 
Carried it to the garden 
At the pretty house. 
 
And planted it again, 
In a quiet place, 
Now it sprouts. 
And blossoms forth. 

(Goethe cited in Fromm 1976). 
 

Annalisa Caputo’s chapter, “Philosophia Ludens for Children: A Proposal to Play and 
Think,” ends Part One. Caputo argues that there are two images of childhood. 1) childhood is 
something to be outgrown, something to be left behind, or 2) childhood is lost innocence, lost 
creative spirit that we might wish to, but cannot, reclaim. This dichotomy leads to different answers to 
the question of children’s philosophy. The first view leads to the idea that P4C is impossible, while 
the second leads to the belief that only children can do philosophy. The resolution to the either-or 
dilemma is found in Walter Kohn’s statement, “Cuándo se empieza a pensar con otrzs,” which I 
roughly translate as “Begin to think with the other” (106). I have clumsily stated my version of this 
idea as “to think with other people’s ideas.”   

 
The idea of thinking with the other as it relates to this chapter has two applications: 1) when 

working with children, their otherness is to be ‘thought with’ not ‘thought to,’ and 2) children can relate 
to people in books as well as to other children or adults. Philosophers, living or dead, in-person or in 
books, are included. Caputo writes that thinking with otherness is part of an Italian educational 
tradition that values the teaching of philosophy as an academic subject.   
 

The overall goal and approach to this teaching and learning style are to use the methods of 
engaging children in ideas that originated within the history of philosophy and examining them with 
hermeneutics’ tools. “Because philosophy is also a search for answers. Together. In dialogue. Where 
inevitably the first dialogue is with the thinkers who came before us, and therefore, with the history of 
philosophy” (110). To underscore that premise, Caputo states that any philosophical discussion with 
children or young people starts with the statement of a philosopher’s ideas or what she or he was 
working to understand.  In making this point, she emphasizes the value of books in her discussion of 



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the “magic box.” The magic box’ is a teaching tool for philosophical discussions. It contains many 
things, including palettes, colors, masks, sheets of paper, etc.).  But before taking any other tools out 
of the box … we always pull books out of the box. Yes, books” (110). 

  
With that background, which is only partially developed in this review, Caputo goes beyond the 

rigid Lipmanian root to articulate some new experiments and research. At one point, Caputo 
describes some critical element of the training of philosophers or graduate philosophy students in a 
teaching philosophy with children.   
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

In our first workshop, our mentors were Gadamer (and his ontological game theory) and 
Aristotle (and his idea of metaphysics as work with questions: which starts from what is the 
closest, and reach the highest and most complex issues). In the second workshop, we were 
guided by the philosophers of difference: particularly Levinas and Derrida. In the third 
workshop, on the theme of the untimely, our guide was undoubtedly Nietzsche, but also 
the romantic cities of Plato, Campanella, and Thomas Moore (111). 
 

This paragraph is perhaps an exemplar of the challenges and the possibilities of engaging children 
with philosophical ideas in a new application of Lipman’s work.  
 

Caputo’s essay ends Part One. Like all the other chapters of this section, her chapter is jammed 
with new ideas and perspectives that will engage readers. I hope this summary will pull the reader 
deeper into this chapter and this section of Thinking, Children, and Time. Seven chapters await the 
reader as we embark on Part Two: Decolonial and Poststructuralist Perspectives on the Politics of 
Education. 

 
Part Two: Decolonial and Poststructuralist Perspectives on the Politics of Education 
 

David Kennedy’s chapter introduces Part Two of Thinking, Childhood, and Time. It is entitled 
“Becoming Child: Wild Being and the Post-Human.” Kennedy’s opening sentence continues the 
book’s overarching theme, ‘What do children teach adults” (119). The below quote is an example of 
how children teach adults; if we attend to children’s experiences, we learn what we fail to see in 
ourselves. 
 

In what follows, I want to explore the lived temporal experience of embodiment of infantia 
in the interest of locating the transitional zone between the virtual and the actual that is 
the space of becoming other, and which paradoxically, is also the space of self-actualization, 
or singularity (119).    
 

Kennedy develops his examination of three understandings of time to create a space for a 
hermeneutic exploration of becoming. The analysis of identity and singularity appears to be at the 
intersection of time and infinity. To set up this intersection, Kennedy looks closely at three meanings 
of time: Aion, Chronos, and Kairos. Aion is Einstein’s “Now” and is associated with Heraclitus’ view 
of childhood and play (120-121). To play is to experience now.  

 



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Chronos is the Greek word for time, but Kennedy argues that chronos is not just linear, clock 
time. Chronos is also the unfolding of the cycles of birth and death, the seasons (cause and effect, 
planting and harvesting, etc.). “It is chronos itself that equips us, that builds the structure of awareness 
whereby we escape it” (22). 

 
Kairos is an interruption of clock time, whereas chronos is usually translated as an opportunity 

or fulfillment of time. It is a moment that appears out of nothing, almost a rebirth in that it is as that 
time that one is entirely in the moment5. The concept of becoming child intensifies the evolutionary 
implications, which recognizes childhood as a form of life wherein the child is an interlocutor, 
corresponding to changing cultural institutions and education institutions (125). Childhood is time at 
the juncture of all beginnings (127). We hold conflicting themes of symmetry and a mathematical 
perfection of time while simultaneously hoping, fearing, a desire to become the other (127-128). But 
the seeking of space between self and the other, time and eternity, is our hope for becoming. 

 
In his chapter, “Paulo Freire and the Childhood of a Philosophical and Educational life,” 

Walter Omar Kohan begins by exploring philosophy and friendship. Citing Giuseppe Ferraro, Kohan 
first points to the idea that philosophy can be interpreted as a love of wisdom, or friendship of 
wisdom, and as the wisdom of friendship (131). As philosophy and friendship are connected, so too 
are philosophy and education. Philosophy and education are based on a shared concern about the 
world. When a friend and her interlocutor engage the world together, the dialogue is fluent; when 
there is no friendship, no philosophical or educational conversation is possible (132).  

 
Paulo Freire, Kohan argues, is an educational philosopher in a precise sense. It was not his 

philosophical ideas per se that was most significant. Still, his life was a path of philosophical 
questioning that led to the liberation of himself and others. Living a philosophical life is living an 
educational life, and that living is what would liberate others from oppression (133). 

 
Freire’s mission was to give voice to the oppressed and hear their voices and hear them as 

“other” and different and perhaps resonant with his voice. To give “voice” to another is to allow them 
to speak and to be heard. All persons need to be given voice.6 Freire’s voice and the voices that 
resonated with it have been heard throughout the world. Freire’s lived philosophy was so influential 
that it has led the current pollical establishment in Brazil to purge “the ideology of Paulo Freire from 
Brazilian education” (134). 

 
Freire’s vision of childhood was a central tenant of his life path. Freire taught that play and 

curiosity should be experienced all through life, a vision, which according to Kohan, he practiced. 
However, the willingness to be childlike has not found fruitful ground in the current Brazilian 

                                                 
5 While Kennedy does not make this comparison, it appears to me to be similar to the idea of the Sabbath, that is, to life 
as though at the end of time. “The Sabbath symbolizes a state of complete harmony between man and nature, between 
man and man. By networking – it is to say, by not participating in the process of nature and social change – man is free 
from the chains of nature and from the chains of time, although only for one day a week” (Fromm, 1951, 245). 
6 A similar voice can be heard in the writings of Carol Gilligan, especially In a different voice (1982), Joining the resistance 
(2011) and Why does patriarchy persist (Gilligan and Snider, 2018). 



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establishment; it has flowered in other places. Yet, Kohan and Freire encourage us as educators and 
philosophers to continue to be childlike, to live “as if’ a philosophical life path were possible. 

 
“Democratic Child’s Play: Natality, Responsible Education, and Decolonial Praxis” is the title 

of Chapter Nine. Toby Rollo writes from the perspective of a political scientist. Rollo continues the 
theme of characterizing the traditional view of childhood as “the absence of full capacities of reason 
and speech as well as learning through play and creative experiment” (145). Rollo, however, poses a 
different view: childhood is not a phase to be gradually grown out of but is instead a mode of being 
and potential we possess throughout life. Secondly, liberal democratic politics means more than 
reasoned speech. It can also be demeaning and embody ineffective play in creative environments, or 
what Rollo refers to as “inactive agency” (146). With these two points in mind, Rollo set the stage for 
exploring the decolonization of childhood. Decolonization, in Rollo’s view, begins when we recognize 
that play and creative experimentation are embodied experiences and ought to be acknowledged as 
modes of political agency in a democratic society (146).  

 
Play and experimentation are two critical modes that allow forward movement without the 

destruction of earlier being, thinking, and doing. Rollo adopts Jerome Bruner’s (1966) concepts of 
enactive (embodiment), iconic (imagistic,) and symbolic (linguistic) as ways of characterizing change.  
These changes he calls the layers, rather than stages, of development.7 Notably, the enactive mode 
does not disappear but continues to inform the child’s thinking and actions. The enactive mode 
becomes a part of the iconic layer. Eventually, both the enactive and iconic layers become integrated 
with the symbolic layer. All layers can interact with one another, but one layer may also be more 
dominant than other layers. 

 
Rollo goes on to ask: How should a liberal and democratic tradition approach agency? What is 

essential for this discussion is that agency is exercised by saying, representation, and action. Liberalism 
and democracy are not equivalent. Liberalism is most concerned with the rational pursuit of the self-
interest of the individual. Concerning agency in democratic practice, “we exercise in their political 
demand so long as it is a form of persuasion rather than in coercion and is enacted under conditions 
of equality in reciprocity rather than hierarchy in unilateral command” (148-149). 

 
According to Hannah Arendt8, political activity is manifested in speech; therefore, one-third of 

the population, namely children, is excluded from political participation.  This privileging of speech is 
one element that allows for colonialism. As a counterargument to Arendt, Rollo suggests that the 
problem stems from the exclusion of children’s voice.   Rollo indicates that the model of democratic 
parenting might show a way forward to counteract the one-sidedness of excluding children. If children 
can persuade parents, and vice versa, an opening is provided for children’s voices. The democratic 
parenting paradigm may be a model for the decolonization of the many stifled or underdeveloped 
voices. “Education must be rethought to exclude a developmental paradigm that presupposes literacy 
and other forms of competency that are unavailable to some with intellectual disabilities” (157). 

                                                 
7 This approach, while not opposed to Piaget’s developmental theory, is more consistent with Lev Vygotsky and Kieran 
Egan. 
8 It is important to note that Rollo credits much of the thinking in this essay to have originated in the writings of Ardent. 



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Karen Murris’s chapter “Posthuman Child: De(con)structuring Western Notions of Child 
Agency” builds on her book The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation through Philosophy with 
Picturebooks (2016) as well as her other works in this area.  She argues in this essay that the 
“[p]osthuman child is an opportunity to make a quantum leap, rather than trying to catch up with the 
West or leapfrogging development” (163).  

 
The figuration of posthuman child as natureculture phenomenon relocates agency from 
inside the body to relational mutual agency, from thinking contained in a mind (or brain) 
to thinking in movement, from individualized actions to ‘messy’ entanglement in worldly 
relations and invites all to be fully present in the thick ‘now-time’ [Barad 2-17] (163). 

 
 She further argues for rethinking chronological time and the processes that have led to racial 
differentiation that underlies our modern understanding of child, and which are used to justify the 
child as savage and intellectually and emotionally primitive. 
 

De(con)struction involves the radical thinking of intentionality and agency celebrated in 
Western thought. Defection is a form of de(con)structure that includes integrating quantum theory 
with an intra-action of poststructuralism. This methodology provides for a queer reading9 of agency, 
time and the child by which variables of age, gender, and class, are seen as an individual person’s 
properties. Citing Barad (2017), Murris states that posthumanism does not mean “after” or 
“following” human but rather it is a condition, a critical attitude, and an ambivalent and ambiguous 
internal relation to modernity.   In Lyotard’s phrasing, the posthuman is “an inability to put one’s 
faith in a grand narrative.” Within this matrix, a different sense of time operates, a now-time. 

 
The application of de(con)constructionist methods afford an ontological, epistemological, and 

ethical problematizing of agency within a child-centered education (174). The de(con)constructionist 
methodology presented in this chapter helps to create a space for in which “postdevelopmental 
perspectives on child/hood do not separate nature ontologically form culture” (175).  
 

Cristina Delgado Vintimilla writes Chapter Eleven, “Rational Openings for the Otherwise: 
Thinking Community as what is not …” presenting the views of a pedagogista. A pedagogista is a 
concept developed with a Reggio Emilio tradition. It is devoted to thinking about pedagogical 
possibilities, working with teachers to improve their abilities and students’ learning outcomes. What 
does it mean to create a life with others in an educational context? (178). This question is closely 
connected with the issue of how to define an educational community. Uncovering the meanings of 
relations, making common, and pedagogical thought in early childhood education is the task she sets 
for herself (180). Community of/within education is hoped for, a desire for an elusive entity. Part of 
the reason that community is elusive is that “the very act of defining a community is what prevents it from 
becoming” (182).  
 

                                                 
9 Queering is to not give a fixed, stable or referential context but it is the ethical -political practice of radical questioning of 
identities and barriers.   
 



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Something happens when we attempt to bestow substance on community or even when we 
speak about it, in efforts to define or clarify what community (or relations) “really” mean. It 
is as if such efforts would always fail. To the pedagogical imaginaries of communities, this 
failing might induce greater frustration, a sense of failure, disappointment, or even 
paralysis. ….  As soon as community becomes an object of definition, its definition fails.  …  
This is the very impasse at the heart of defining community (182-183). 
 

Vintimilla writes that many of her students don’t see an “impasse to the idea that community is always 
changing.”10 As a counterpoint, she states, “the root of community refers to a nothings-of-substance, 
of its deficit or constitutive absence” (184). 

  
Is community an undefinable dichotomy, that is, singularity (otherness) or commons (likeness)? 

As I have struggled to wrap my mind around this essay, I kept thinking about Albert Camus’s short 
story, Jonas or the Artist at Work (1957). The story ends with a dying artist, Jonas, who completes a final 
canvas after long isolation. It is a mostly blank canvas with one word in the middle. The word can be 
read as solitary or solidary; another translation says the terms are independent or interdependent.  

 
While this reference to the Camus short story may not aid the reader looking for a summary of 

the chapter, Camus’s short story has been running through my head since I read Vintimilla’s chapter. 
I have concluded that the problem of seeing/grasping a concept and defining it are intrinsically 
related, and the oneness and togetherness are linked in similar way that community and individuality 
are connected, that is, community and the individual are not opposites but are united in their 
difference. 

 
Iris Berger and Adrienne Argent wrote the penultimate chapter, “Life as a Pedagogical 

Concept.” The authors experiment as they jointly construct a concept of life in and outside of a 
classroom as the experience/lesson unfolds in two narratives as children work/play with blocks. Their 
narrative explorations bring together ideas from practice, philosophy, anthropology, place, artist, 
friends, children, and materials11 and the kibitz with colleagues and co-researchers. Among their 
colleagues, the authors work with an atelierista12 and a pedagogista.  

 
The reader may need to reorient herself about early childhood education and maybe education 

more generally to fully grasp what Iris Berger and Adrienne Argent have served up to us.  This 
reorientation was also necessary for the reviewer. Suppose you are not familiar with the Reggio Emelia 
school in Italy or the approach as it has been implemented worldwide. It may help in understanding 

                                                 
10 A variety of similar discussion on the nature of a ‘community’ within communities of inquiry has been much discussed 
in NACCI and ICPIC papers and meetings. 
11 In both Chapter Ten and Eleven, the authors draw on methods and approaches adapted from the Regio Amelia 
approach to education.  
12 An atelierista is a studio teacher that welcomes children's ideas and ongoing projects. She or he is a sort of “artist-in-
residence” with a goal of aiding children as they figure out and explore many different ways to do things through art 
expression. 
 



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this chapter to view one or more videos or immerse oneself in some films13, books14, and materials 
from this tradition. 

 
This chapter presents two looks at life as a pedagogical concept. Essential to understanding life 

as a pedagogical concept is understanding the difference between extensive concepts and intensive 
concepts. “Extensive concepts act as labels or as something that has already been legitimated as such; 
whereas intensive concepts emerge as an event, a force – a newness – they require us to do something” 
(196).  

 
Berger and Argent present any conceptual/practical reorientation that affords experimentation 

with the notion of life as a pedagogical concept (198). They present to the reader two vignettes 
entitled “Tracing the life – line of wooden blocks -1” and “Tracing the life – line of wooden blocks – 
2.” The two narratives are the backdrop for four conceptual/practical movements. These movements 
afford a vehicle for a pedagogy in early childhood education that moves (1) from observation to living, 
(2) from intention to attention, (3) from othering to togethering, and (4) from discovering to creating 
(196). 

 
The stated goal of this chapter is “to open a new perspective on what it is to be alive” for young 

children and the adults who are “alive” with them. Not only do Berger and Argent accomplish their 
goal, but also managed to enriched the life of this reviewer. Essential to this enrichment was the 
quality of the two phenomenological vignettes. These vignettes were so well written that when I 
started to write about his chapter, I had to reflect for a moment as to whether I read stories or if I had 
seen a film of them.  

 
Chapter Thirteen, “Nature, Culture, and Education,” is written by Juliana Mercon. While 

some of us may be living in the Anthropocene (the current geological age dominated by human activity 
that conditions climate and environment); Mercon argues that our period might be called the 
Capitalocene. The Capitalocene is a world dominated or closely intertwined with an intersection of 
political, economic, environmental, and cultural entities that create crises (Enrique Leff, 2004). As 
Mercon develops her argument, she follows a Foucauldian genealogical approach, wherein the 
emergence of values and social identities morph into genuine power relationships (210).  

 
She presents her anarcheological exercise for the invention of other times in a four-step 

sequence. Mercon, citing Kelley (2014), defines anarcheology as a “non-history of thought”—this 
reviewer might characterize it as a thought history of what might have been. Step one in this non-
history of thought is to assume universals do not exist. “De not admit the a priori of existing things. … 
Question, for instance, notions of’ ‘nature’ and ‘culture’” (211). 

                                                 
13 I have chosen one short film as a way to provide a minimal information to understand the Reggio Emelia program 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYx_aGs-DjU 
14 This books provides a more comprehensive look at how the Reggio Emilia approach works – Edwards, C.P., Gandini, L. 
and Forman, G.E. eds., 1998. The hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia approach--advanced reflections. Greenwood 
Publishing Group and Wurm, J., 2005. Working in the Reggio way: A beginner's guide for American teachers. Redleaf Press. 
 
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYx_aGs-DjU


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Tampa (1994) argues that when we ask how humans perceive nature, we presume both that 
nature is objective in that humanity is one. Nevertheless, not only are notions of nature 
and humanity highly variable cultural constructs, but they are also inexistent in many 
societies. What power relationships would thus sustain the view according to which there is 
only one nature in one humanity (212). 

 
This move takes us to step two. Mercon asks us to question the dichotomy of nature/culture. He 

also asks the reader to denaturalize and culturize nature. The third step is to naturalize culture, 
reintegrate humans into non-human communities, and times of affinities and potentia. Naturalist 
culture allows a necessity of interconnection and the generation of novel entities (213).   

 
In understanding what allows for interconnectivity, Spinoza’s comparison between the camel 

and the packhorse is instructive. Spinoza argues that what makes the camel and the packhorse related 
is how each is affected and how they are affected; that is, the significant aspect is their relational and 
dynamic nature more so than any supposed interiority or physicality (214). If one takes this 
perspective, one can be led to three possible leaps. First, it is possible to look at the world through our 
feeling and attitude’s, thereby imagining the formation of a society not reduced to human and other 
animals. Second, imaging thinking among and across species, affording a more complex power 
relationship, and a broader expression of politics is possible. Third, creating an ecopolitical experience 
allows us to include different intra- and inter-specific societies whose traditions in norms would enable 
us to think of them as cultures (213).  

 
The fourth and final step is to invent an ecopolitical education that cultivates a body of 

thinking. Mercon’s chapter is a re-thinking nature, culture, and education. As such, it has provided 
this reviewer with an understanding of the journey the editors and authors have taken as they 
explored the many avenues and venues of Thinking, Childhood, and Time. 

 
Chapter Thirteen ends Thinking, Childhood and Time: Contemporary Perspectives on the Politics of 

Education. I found this work complex, compelling, and occasionally frustrating. On the one hand, I 
would have liked to know more about how it was put together because there were many implicit 
thematic connections throughout the book, yet none of the authors cited, referred back, or made 
explicit connections with one another. While there is some value in allowing the reader to draw 
connections (this reader, for example, found it a valuable activity); I suspect it might also be a 
frustrating experience. 

 
A closing chapter by the editors would have also been valuable for this reviewer, and I think for 

many readers. On the other hand, the time spent contemplating, making connections, and seeking 
application to the brilliant ideas presented in Thinking, childhood, and Time was time well spent. 

 
This work will be read and taught for years to come.   

  
Address Correspondences to:  
Richard Morehouse,   
Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Viterbo University (La Crosse, WI). 
Email: remorehouse@viterbo.edu 

mailto:remorehouse@viterbo.edu

