Education as Mediation Between Child and World: The Role of Wonder
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Education as Mediation Between Child and World: The Role of Wonder Anders Schinkel1
© The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Education as a deliberate activity and purposive process necessarily involves mediation, in the sense that the educator mediates between the child and the world. This can take different forms: the educator may function as a guide who initiates children into particular practices and domains and their modes of thinking and perceiving; or act as a filter, selecting what of the world the child encounters and how; or meet the child as representative of the adult world. I look at these types of mediation (or aspects of the mediating role of the educator) at the hand of the work of John Dewey, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Richard Peters. The purpose of this paper is to explore the bearing that the mediating role of the educator—as interpreted by these authors—has on the role wonder may play in the educational process. I suggest that initiation highlights the familiarizing function of wonder, and is most readily associated with inquisitive wonder; representation draws attention to the defamiliarizing role of (in particular contemplative) wonder, as well as to its worldaffirming role; and selection (the educator as ‘filter’) foregrounds the distinction between momentary and dispositional wonder. Keywords Wonder · Inquisitive wonder · Contemplative wonder · World · Mediation · Hannah Arendt · Martin Buber · John Dewey · Richard Peters · Alfred North Whitehead
Introduction Education as a deliberate activity and purposive process necessarily involves mediation: the educator mediates between the child and the world. This mediation can take various forms; the educator may act as a filter, selecting which aspects of the world the child encounters and the ways in which it encounters them, or as a guide, initiating the child into particular domains of experience, or as the representative of the world, speaking on its behalf in order to pass it over into new hands—and undoubtedly other forms of mediation are possible. Since the three I mentioned here are not (necessarily) mutually exclusive they may also be seen as different aspects of the mediating role that both in practice and * Anders Schinkel [email protected] 1
Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Van der Boechorststraat 7, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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in theory may receive different degrees of emphasis. Depending on how exactly they are conceptualized or fleshed out in practice, there may or may not exist tension between them. A recent paper by Mario Di Paolantonio on Arendt’s thinking about wonder (Di Paolantonio 2019) highlights the importance of reflecting on the relation between wonder and the world. From an Arendtian perspective the main question is: does wonder (make us) withdraw from, or rather attend to the world? While I recognize the former as a real possibility, my purpose in this paper is to explore the bearing that the mediating role of the educator has on t
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