Michael F. Shaughnessy Senior Columnist EdNews.org
Eastern New Mexico University

David Kennedy is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University, and Fellow of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, also at Montclair State.  He engages regularly with children ages 6-14 in local schools in communities of inquiry on philosophical concepts such as friendship, time, ownership, self, conflict, person, intelligence, and the mind-body relation.  He is currently involved in writing a series of philosophical novels for middle school students in the various school disciplines, designed to complement traditional curriculum in those areas

In this interview, he responds to questions about his latest book and other philosophical issues.

1) Your latest book is entitled "The Well of Being". What prompted you to write this book?

The book is actually a sort of intellectual "will and testament" couched in academic terms.So what prompted me to write it was whatever hope I hold both for my own ongoing development as a person, the development of others, and for a just and peaceful world.It was begun in a period of cultural optimism, and ended in a period of cultural abuse, cynicism, injustice and despair, and that in itself changed the way the argument and focus of the book unfolded.

2) When did the proverbial "history of childhood "begin?

Well, I guess there's no such thing as a history until there's some kind of separation.I mean if you don't recognize children (or women, or people of color) as anything but an absence, or deficit, then they don't have a history—they're just an appendage of your own.So I would say that the history of childhood began when children began to be understood apart from the adults who care for them, and would place that moment in the West as coterminous with the protestant revolution and the rise of radical individualism—that is, early modernism.This is more or less in agreement with the French historian Philippe Aries, who started the whole history of childhood thing with his Centuries of Childhood in the mid sixties.

3) In art paintings of the 15th and 16th century, children were seen as "little adults". When did this conception begin to change?

Actually I'm not sure I agree with this notion.Jesus was portrayed as a little adult until the renaissance because he was the word of god, and thus was always perfect manhood, 33 yrs old.So, when you see him represented as a child in medieval religious art, he's not meant to be a child, he's meant to be timeless (33) but just in the form of a child at this moment.

The other claim—that the self-portraits commissioned by the families by the rising middle classes of France and the low countries in the early modern period portray the children as little adults—is wrong I think.The way I read these paintings, they're just dressed up in their Sunday best.

4) How has Piaget contributed to our changing conceptualization of children?

Piaget has had an oddly dual effect.From one side, his early and vigorous constructivism gave us a whole new respect for children's construction of knowledge, and a sensitivity to aspects of their epistemological autonomy that we had not really registered before.From the other side, his directional developmental scheme—egocentrism towards decentration, intuitive towards "formal" relations—sets up a hierarchy that is very political—very much a privileged white male view of genetic epistemology.Of course Piaget was very canny and sophisticated, and when people tried to pin him on this he wriggled away through developing his ideas further, for which I admire him.But the educational establishment has, as usual, oversimplified his ideas and made of them tools for mindless orthodoxies.

5) In Green mythology, children were often "mentored" by an older, wiser, mature adult. What has happened to this concept over the years?

I'm not sure which Greek myths you're referring to.Mentoring has always been an aspect of relations between the old and the young.If you mean why isn't mentoring a part of the public educational system, the short answer is that the state is not a whit interested in the personal growth of its wards.The state (which includes the economic institutions which run it—the corporations) has one interest: worker/consumer/token citizen. Personal growth, or what used to be called "self-actualization" is intuitively understood by the state as detrimental to that interest.

6) We seem to currently see a great many children as "patients" or with deformities. There is an explosion of children with attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, learning disabilities, emotional and behavioral disturbances, developmental disorders etc.

Are we making patients of our children?

I think it has to do with diet, information environment (TV), the long-term effects of the sexual revolution, increasing loss of touch with the natural world, and the punishing mediocrity of traditional education, which participates, along with other ideological state apparatuses of late capitalism, in the medicalization of difference.Probably the best overall framework for explanation can be found in Michel Foucault's famous book Discipline and Punish, which is ostensibly about the rise of the prison in modernism, but which also fits the school. The more the state (in the broad sense stated above) requires a "normalized" population, the more marginalized people you're going to get.

7) What do you see as the purpose of education in the year 2007?

Whose purpose?The neocons or the progressives?If the former weren't still so firmly in control of the agenda, it would be an armed camp.

8) How much philosophy should children be exposed to in the educational system and who should teach it?

Philosophy is the critical basis of the curriculum, in the sense that all the "data" that the school curriculum communicates is based on a set of assumptions about what is true, how you tell what is true, and how certain you can be of anything. Every content area has a philosophical understructure, which is the set of beliefs about the concepts that make up its particular realm of knowledge (history, art, science, etc.).The practice of philosophy is the problematization of these underlying concepts, that is, the critical project of deconstructing and reconstructing them.The purpose is to make them truer and to make them work better, i.e. to reflect reality and human value better. All healthy life is ongoing reconstruction. Therefore, every discipline should have a philosophical component.We should be doing philosophy of math, for example, once a week.Same goes for science, history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, language, art, body (PE).Who should teach it?People who recognize that the discipline they are teaching is based on philosophical concepts that are contestable, that education is fundamentally about continually reconstructing them, and who themselves have a passionate interest in that reconstruction.They may be trained philosophers and they may not.

My prejudice is that philosophers are born (whether from birth or through the fire of experience), not made.

9) How has your book been received so far?

I'm not sure.I know a few people who've read it and say they like it.I've not yet had that telephone call from Charlie Rose Inc., and I'm not holding my breath.

10) Who has influenced you and why?

Norman O. Brown, William Blake, Herbert Marcuse, Bob Dylan, The Incredible String Band, Arthur Rimbaud, Fyodor Dostoyevsky,Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonio Vivaldi, D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Lloyd deMause, Alan Ginsberg, Lev Tolstoy, Sigmund Freud, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, C.G. Jung, W.A. Mozart, Mick Jagger, Mathew Lipman, John Dewey, Tielhard de Chardin, JJ Rousseau, Erich Neumann, my father and mother, Novalis, Bhagavad Gita, Holy Bible, Jean Piaget, Emmy Lou Harris, Lao Tsu, Norbert Elias, Jesus Christ, Dionysius, Diego Velasquez, Ludwig Beethoven, Socrates, Steve Gaskin, Friedrich Schiller, St. Francis of Assisi, Soren Kierkegaard, Maria Montessori, Neil Young, Heinz Werner, A.S. Neil, Martin Buber, Charles Fourier, G.W. Hegel, Dane Rudhyar (a Jungian astrologer), my four children, Iris Murdoch, Paolo Freire, Hans Jonas, Henri Matisse, Paul Cezanne, Joan Miro, Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, Michel Foucault, Wilhelm Reich, Franz Kafka, D.W. Winnicott, King Lear, LSD, peyote, marijuana, alcohol, four elementary, high school and college teachers that I can think of and probably a few that I can't, St. Paul, Melanie Klein, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and many, many more (and who knows, maybe I've left out the most important ones). . . Why?Well, what is "influence," and how does it work in a person's life?

11) The title of your book reminds me of the work of Tillich, Frankl, Rollo May and Kierkegaard, although not necessarily in that order. Who would you cite as your philosophical underpinnings?

I have read all of those authors with great interest, but I think the underpinnings for the book are the English and German Romantics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and Jung.He provides the grand developmental model.And N.O. Brown (Love's Body) and Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man) have affected my thinking profoundly.

12) In the current educational climate of mainstreaming and inclusion, how difficult is it to educate children? And what do you see as the ramifications for education to pursue this educational policy?

I would describe the current educational climate as the most poisonous and stagnant since the Cold War reaction in the 1950's.Mainstreaming and inclusion are problematic only in the context of a system that requires a complete Copernican Revolution (which was outlined with cogency and restraint by John Dewey at the turn of the last century) in order to be anything but what Althusser called an Ideological State Apparatus.The issues are not technical:the system cannot just be "tweaked" in order to become something more than an engine of repression. The last chapter of my book addresses this problem in concrete terms.

13) What question have I neglected to ask?

What is your favorite of William Blake's proverbs from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell?