The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold.

Young teenage girl Susie Salmon is murdered and her body cut in bits and only her elbow found. The readership know who did it because the girl's spirit/ghost remains closely and tells us so. We know that the same man has killed many other girls and occasionally women. Susie speaks to some of them in heaven. The police make no progress even though the girls father points the finger at the right chap. The girl's sister is more proactive and she becomes a new target. The police investigator is having sex with Susie's mother and allows the murderer to escape. He kills again, and is never caught - he dies in a freak accident trying it with another girl. Susie has appeared to her friend Ruth (and to her brother) and briefly changes places with Ruth so she can have sex with her former boyfriend Ray (now Ruth's boyfriend). They all live happily ever after (Ruth and Ray anyway, Susie finds a more distant heaven). Good grief.  What ambition.

http://fiction4children.blogspot.com/2010/03/those-lovely-bones-alice-sebold.html

Children's stories as helpful sedition

Bigger, Stephen and Webb, Jean (2010) Developing Environmental Agency and Engagement Through Young People’s Fiction. Environmental Education Research . ISSN 1469-5871 (electronic) 1350-4622 (paper) http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/788

Bigger, Stephen (2010) Literature For Learning: Can Stories Enhance Children’s Education? Almas , Vol. 11 . ISSN 1818-9296 http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/793

The first paper explores how 20th century children's stories encourage social (and environmental) action, active participation in changing and protecting the world rather than passive acceptance of adult policies. They are therefore (in a positive way) seditious, encouraging children thinking for themselves and taking action. We argue that this can be a role model for children growing up, for whom real life is anything but this.

The second paper is for a Pakistani journal, promoting informal education through story.

In children's stories, adults often lack the wisdom that children have, leaving the child characters to battle through in opposition to achieve good over evil. This is the opposite to real life in which children have to accept adult decisions as final and are taught to be dependent by the education system.

Encouraging reasoned and values driven independence of thought and action should be a priority of upbringing. This means encouraging children to be social critics, media critics and literary critics. If this sounds negative, criticism should promote appropriate counter-action - so encouraging children to be social activists, responsible media producers, and thought-provoking writers for the next generation.

The Infant Brain

Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time today is on The Infact Brain - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r2cn4 (time limited, copy below).

My take on it: The current position is a combination of Piaget's constructivism, Chomski's hard wired, and brain neuro-science. Children even at 1 or 2 years old are logical, but have insufficient knowledge to tackle problems as an adult would. The solution is that we need to give them more knowledge/information quicker so that they can work things out. The worst thing we can do is to give them misinformation which will delay their rationality because falsehoods are presented to them as truth. Adult talk to children is always about fairies, father christmas and other irrational beings which will get in the way of developing rationality. Children need accurate knowledge and information from the beginning if they are to develop rationally. They do not need childish language or ideas, and lies (however good the cause) are a form of abuse. So goodbye Santa Claus.

Programme blurb (copyright BBC):

Melvyn Bragg and guests Usha Goswami, Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Denis Mareschal discuss what new research reveals about the infant brain.

For obvious reasons, what happens in the minds of very young, pre-verbal children is elusive. But over the last century, the psychology of early childhood has become a major subject of study.

Some scientists and researchers have argued that children develop skills only gradually, others that many of our mental attributes are innate.

Sigmund Freud concluded that infants didn't differentiate themselves from their environment.

The pioneering Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget thought babies' perception of the world began as a 'blooming, buzzing confusion' of colour, light and sound, before they developed a more sophisticated worldview, first through the senses and later through symbol.

More recent scholars such as the leading American theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky have argued that the fundamentals of language are there from birth. Chomsky has famously argued that all humans have an innate, universally applicable grammar.

Over the last ten to twenty years, new research has shed fresh light on important aspects of the infant brain which have long been shrouded in mystery or mired in dispute, from the way we start to learn to speak to the earliest understanding that other people have their own minds.

With:

Usha Goswami, Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and Director of its Centre for Neuroscience in Education

Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at the Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck College, University of London

Denis Mareschal, Professor of Psychology at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck College, University of London.

FURTHER READING

Gliga, T., Mareschal, D. & Johnson, M. H., ‘Ten-month-olds' selective use of visual dimensions in category learning’, in ‘Infant Behavior and Development’, 31, 287-293, (2008)

Goswami, U., ‘The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development: 2nd Edition’, ‘Blackwell Handbooks of Developmental Psychology’ (Oxford: Blackwell, August 2010)

Goswami, U., ‘Cognitive Development: The Learning Brain’ in ‘Psychology Press’ (Taylor & Francis, 2008)

Goswami, U.,‘Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development’ (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002 & 2004)

Johnson, Mark H., ‘Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience’ (Oxford, Uk: Blackwells Publishers, 2004)

Karmiloff, K. & Karmiloff-Smith, A., ‘Pathways to language: From foetus to adolescent’ in ‘Developing Child Series’ (Harvard University Press, 2001)

Karmiloff-Smith, A., ‘Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science’ (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1992, reprinted 1995).

Karmiloff, K. & Karmiloff-Smith, A., ‘Everything your baby would ask if only he/she could talk’ (London: Cassell/Ward Lock, 1998)

Mareschal, Denis, Quinn, Paul C. and Lea, Stephen E. G., ‘The Making of Human Concepts’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2010)

Mareschal, D. Johnson, M. H., Sirois, S., Spratling, M., Thomas, M. & Westermann, G., ‘Neuroconstuctivism Vol. 1: How the brain constructs cognition’ (Oxford UK: OUP, 2007)

Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, by Alison Scott-Baumann, Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy, 2009. x + 327 pages, price: £65.00.

The works of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) have become more accessible recently thanks to reasonably priced reprints by the University of Chicago Press. His Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination (1995, Fortress Press) brings his work firmly into the orbit of this journal. Living through the 20th century creates “an existential sadness” and yet “the supposedly empty space between the opposites we create is in fact teeming with our desires, fears, illusions and fantasies and our enormous potential to do good” (p.170). He opposed French imperial actions in Algeria, and opposed the rigid secularism in France that forbade hijab dress code for Muslim girls in schools and denied young people an education. The masters of suspicion were Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, declaring scepticism about economics, psychoanalysis and genealogy. Ricoeur wished to learn from this, but in a balanced way, since out of control scepticism is self defeating, as nothing thereafter can be meaningful. These three cannot make meaning for us: “we have to do it ourselves” (p.176). For Ricoeur, suspicion has to balance negative with positive. He used the term ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ for a while, but then hermeneutics and suspicion separately as ambiguities began to emerge. Suspicion is important because it is iconoclastic, it holds no hostages.

Scott-Baumann starts by way of introduction with Cartesian doubt. Then, in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics I, covers the archaeology of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, the “masters of suspicion”, ending with the use and abuse of the phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion”. Its abuse by other writers led Ricoeur to stop using the phrase as it had become ambiguous, whilst still focusing on the twin ideas of hermeneutics and suspicion. In Ricoeur’s hermeneutics II, Scott-Baumann covers the theory of interpretation, linguistic analysis, methodological dialectics and philosophical anthropology. Finally Ricoeur’s hermeneutics III deals with recovery, interesting not least for linking Ricoeur’s positivity with the journalism of Robert Fisk, seeking a balance between justice and forgiveness to prevent the paralysis of negativity.

This is an important book by a writer in full control of her material and with a clear and readable writing style, on a topic that is significant for both education and religious studies. It goes to the heart of Ricoeur’s thinking, the need for suspicion so that our understanding and knowledge is not subject to other people’s honest or dishonest persuasiveness. However, if that suspicion is total, its negativity will be paralysing and we are left only with despair and absence of meaning. Ricoeur sees this as a symptom of post-modernity, and argues that the only route out of this is by giving a fair place to love and justice. That he allows religion, and Christianity in particular as it is his tradition, to be part of this mix does not make him a Christian apologist. Here too, the principle of suspicion gives him a critical edge, and his theology is far from naive. In a sense he lines up with the humanistic Frankfurt School of critical studies, but with Husserl’s assistance leaves Marxism well behind, a brick in a complex philosophical edifice but not the edifice itself. Scott-Baumann’s topic in this book is an essential introduction to Ricoeur’s thinking over a long life; but Ricoeur’s work was vast, leaving her much work still needing to be done on his wide ranging and multi-disciplinary philosophy. I look forward to further volumes. Since his philosophical writing is dense, this will help us all. I fully recommend this book. It is priced as for library purchase, and well worth ordering. For further reading, I also recommend the official Ricoeur website in French and English, http://www.fondsricoeur.fr.