Abstract
This chapter explores the differences between the epistemologies of adults and those of children, as is evident through the tension between the institution of the school and the figure of the child. Epistemological practices are inherently political, that is, there are political conditions that determine the way persons think, including the very idea of something being rational, or, in accordance with supposedly objective, universal and scientific principles. The school, I argue, is a place where this rationalism is reproduced in subjects. While the school is a token of what Max Weber termed the disenchantment of modernity, this chapter rejects a fatalistic lamentation of a meaningless world, instead turning to psychoanalytic theory that suggests subjects must undergo a process of becoming disenchanted, forcing themselves to suppress their playful daydreaming, and do so as they move throughout the school, being transformed into adult citizens who think in accordance with what Brian Massumi terms State-philosophy in his reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as they become a part of the larger machinery of the capitalist nation-state. This chapter seeks to explore alternatives and envision scenarios where children’s epistemologies are not invalid, but in fact, their ability to think in ways adults cannot think (for they have been taught not to think in those specific ways) allows them to gain insight into the true nature of the horror their communities face in Stephen King’s novel It, and the Duffer Brothers Netflix series Stranger Things .
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Notes
- 1.
As such, Weber is not concerned only with the so-called “hard sciences” that come to mind when one hears the term science; the so-called “social sciences” concern him as well.
- 2.
In Freud’s argument, the suppression of sexual instincts is hereditary rather than a byproduct of education. That Freud does not critique educational practices is important for later discussions of the school in this chapter.
- 3.
For such a reading, see Michael Hardt (2011), who maps the development of critical theory as a tradition beginning with Kant’s essay and culminating in the contemporary era with the work of Michel Foucault.
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Foster, A. (2019). Heretic Gnosis: Education, Children, and the Problem of Knowing Otherwise. In: Kupferman, D., Gibbons, A. (eds) Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_10
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