1

David Kennedy

Another world is possible:

Schooling, Multitude and Philosophy for Children

Published in In Eva Marsal, Takara Dobashi and Barbara Weber, Eds., Children
Philosophize Worldwide: Theoretical and Practical Concepts, 47-61. Frankfurt
am Main: Peter-Lang-Verlag, 2008.

Since 911, world events have taken a dramatic, accelerating turn, implicit in which
is the possibility, not just of a general global state of war – including nuclear and
chemical war – for the foreseeable future, but an increasing loss of hard-won civil
liberties for citizens around the world, including Western nation-states; the increasing
displacement and marginalization of millions of refugees; the degradation and gradual
disappearance of political democracy and just distribution of economic and social benefits
in the hands of states dedicated to exploitation and control in the service of global
corporate elites, leading to an increasing disparity between the rich and the poor; and
failure of will in the face of the consequences of environmental degradation and global
warming.
Faced with a situation of near-apocalyptical planetary human violence and
degradation, and mindful that any crisis represents opportunity as well as danger, many
are struggling to reconstruct their thinking in search of alternative paradigms that might
contribute to the emergence of a truly democratic global society, and that will afford us
with strategies – however local and provisional – for countering the forces of economic
exploitation, universal surveillance, and dystopic social control. In US education in
particular, the issue is deepened and accentuated by the appropriation of the curriculum –
and, by implication, pedagogy – of the public school system by the goals of the global
corporate economy and its corresponding politics of both neoconservativism and
neoliberalism in the name of “standards” and “accountability.” The take-over of the
national educational system is announced and propogated in the name of social and
economic equality, but its net effect is to produce a form of social subjectivity so
hampered by instrumentalism, knowledge conformism, and the discouragement of
personal and collective inquiry, that it is in fact doubly vulnerable to the hegemonic
practices of the control society.
This situation is of particular concern to those working in the field of teacher
preparation, for many of whom it represents, not just a challenge to professional integrity,
but an undermining of whatever it is in universal education that offers the promise of the
emergence of actual, authentic democracy, both at the social and the political levels. This
particular arrest and imprisonment of the progressive vision – which has labored since the
rise of dialogical, student-centered education in the early 19th century to disengage the
practice of education from the purposes of the state and the elites that control it and to
2

place it in the interests of individual and collective self-actualization, creativity and

democratic forms of life – obliges us to think again the connection between education and
state and economy, issues of diversity and multiple forms of literacy, of rational and
humanistic educational standards, and of the broad reconstruction of universal
compulsory education such that it can resist colonization by state and market. How might
education, rather than acting as an agent of reproduction, assume the role envisioned for it
by the premier US philosopher of education of the 20th century John Dewey, who held it
up as the institution in a democracy particularly suited to the ongoing reconstruction of
social, political and economic life?
The opportunities signaled by the crisis I have just sketched are multiple and
ambiguous. For the purposes of this paper, I want to frame them in three intersecting
contexts: a philosophy of childhood, a philosophy of schooling, and the practice of
philosophical inquiry with children. My basic assumption is that the latter – as a praxis –
opens the adult imagination to another philosophy of childhood, which leads to another
philosophy of schooling, which in turn offers possibilities for understanding children as
key players in emancipatory practice in the current global crisis.
The attempt to imagine the school as one significant site for social transformation
is – at least in the context of the history of the public schooling in the modern state –
painfully counterintuitive. On the other hand, it is arguable that the liberatory potential of
the school has been a part of mainstream educational theory from at least the advent of
progressive education in the early 1900’s. It can be traced at least to the post-Renaissance
educational prophet Comenius (1592-1670) with his notion of “pansophism”, and was an
element in the founding social and cultural moment of Enlightenment in the late eighteen
century – represented for us now most vividly by Rousseau’s Emile – and the Romantic
movement of the first half of the nineteenth in the founder of the Kindergarten Friedrich
Froebel (1782 – 1852) and William Godwin (1756-1836). Godwin was the first we know
of to clearly articulate – in 1797, on the eve of the century in which state-controlled,
universal compulsory schooling was installed and regularized as the “official” form of
schooling throughout the West – a critique of mass schooling that is still completely
relevant today. And a century later, Jose Ferrer, martyred by the Spanish government in
1909, developed the counterposition, from an Anarchist perspective, to education in the
service of control1.

1. Adult-Child Dialogue

The element of adult-child dialogue – latent in Romantic, Anarchist and Progressive

visions – was first suggested to mainstream theory in the educational theory and practice
of Dewey in The Child and the Curriculum and My Pedagogic Creed2 then articulated
clearly in the work of Paulo Freire3. The very possibility of adult-child dialogue implies
another philosophy of childhood – a philosophy which emerged as a social habitus in
1
Blechman, 1975.
2
Dworkin, 1959.
3
Freire 1993.
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what deMause called the “empathic mode” of the adult child relation4. Dewey and Freire
were, of course only the ones fortunate enough to have their ideas widely publicized.
Many Progressives were operating according to the educational principle of dialogue with
children both in theory and in practice, including Maria Montessori, Caroline Pratt Patty
Smith Hill and A.S. Neil.
Philosophy for children, or community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) with
children – understood in the context of Matthew Lipman’s implicit philosophy of
childhood5 in combination with Dewey’s6 ideas about the relation between the
epistemology of childhood and the epistemology of the school disciplines and Freire’s7
epistemology of dialogue – provides us with the theoretical materials with which to
reconceive schooling as a liberatory practice, not just on the political, but on the
ontological and the epistemological levels. In fact the latter is necessary for the
emergence of the former. As a form of cultural production, liberatory practice both
anticipates and produces an emergent form of subjectivity, and thus has ontological status.
The epochal moment in which we find ourselves as a global society is in fact
characterized by the universal subjection – in the Foucaultian double-sense of the term,
implying the formation of a modal subjectivity which is normalized on the grid of the
purposes of the capitalist state and economy – of citizens and workers on a planetary
basis.1 This process of subjection is embodied and intensified, in the U.S. anyway, by the
centralized imposition of an educational system, initiated by the neoconservative
hegemony, that exemplifies the basic elements of what Foucault8 called “discipline” – that
is normalization, hierarchization, and the primacy of the examination. Liberatory practice
as a dialectical response to the current situation implies, in the domain of education, a
praxis that acts to deconstruct this form of control, and thereby allow for the emergence of
another form of subjectivity. In fact, as is characteristic of the dialectic, that form of
control is already threatened with deconstruction through the very mechanism that
establishes its hegemony. In order to understand this dialectical possibility in its current
form, we must have at least a brief account of the contemporary phenomenon of what
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have characterized as “multitude”.

2. Multitude

In their sequel to the widely read treatise on the emergent form of the “new world order”
called Empire (2000) Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Multitude: War and
Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004) argues that the conditions of collective existence
in our post-modern global society no longer justify our being characterized as “the
people”, but rather as “multitude”. In Hobbe’s original drawing of the distinction between
the two terms, “multitude” represented the aggressive anarchic element of the collective

4
see Kennedy 2006.
5
see Kennedy 1993.
6
see Dewey 1902/1959.
7
see Freire 1993.
8
see Foucault 1983.
4

that must give its constituent power over to the absolute power of a sovereign – a
Leviathan – in order to become a “people”, and thereby avoid the war of the all against
all. Hardt and Negri argue that Hobbes’ is a patriarchal misrepresentation of human
possibility, and that multitude in fact represents freedom, individuality, social creativity
and self-rule, “a whole of singularities”, the collective before it submits itself to the
legalized violence of the state. Following Spinoza rather than Hobbes, Negri claims that

“the multitudo indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action,
in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a
centripetal form of motion. Multitude is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as
being many: a permanent form, not an episodic or interstitial form. For Spinoza, the multitudo is the
architrave of civil liberties.”9

Empire – which Hardt and Negri characterize as

“the new form of global sovereignty … [that] includes as its primary elements, or nodes, the
dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and other
powers"10,

is a form of “late capitalist society” on a planetary scale that is “dedicated to the

exploitation of everyone.” As a form of power, it implies total sovereignty – what
Foucault first referred to as “biopower,” which Hardt and Negri describe as

“a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but producing and reproducing all
forms of social life"11 –

accomplished through war, trade, control of information through the media, the
neutralization of authentic democracy through the corruption that is essential to empire,
and through the permanent invocation of a “state of exception”12.
The dialectical element referred to above is represented in the fact that empire
becomes vulnerable to resistance and refusal through the very means – the increasing
perfection of communications technology – by which it asserts its ever more inclusive
control. Multitude as a form of collective subjectivity is possible now according to Hardt
and Negri, because the characteristic form of labor in late capitalism has changed from
“industrial” to “immaterial” – that is, increasingly centered on knowledge, information,
affective relations, cooperation and communication. They characterize it as

“’biopolitical labor’, or labor that creates not only material goods but also relationships and ultimately
social life itself. The term biopolitical thus indicates that the traditional distinctions between the
economic, the political, the social, and the cultural become increasingly blurred”13

9
Negri 2002, p. 21.
10
Hardt / Negri 2004, xii.
11
Ebd., p. 13.
12
Agamben 2005.
13
Hardt / Negri 2004, p. 109.
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The emergent socius that is suggested by this new form of labor in which the distinction
between the economic and the political tends to disappear, makes possible forms of
collaboration, and multiple forms of resistance to the hegemony of biopower. Empire is
inimical to the form of power of multitude, which is biopolitical production, understood
as “immanent to society and [which] creates social relationships through collaborative
forms of labor”14 Multitude is

"an internally different, multiple social subject whose constitution and action is based not on
identity or unity (or, much less, indifference) but on what it has in common. [...] The multitude is the only
social subject capable of realizing democracy, that is, the rule of everyone by everyone"15.

The latter is referred to, after Spinoza, as “absolute democracy”, a form of

democracy based, not on the people’s abdication of their rights to a sovereign in order to
protect themselves from a feared anarchy, but on the recognition of singularity and
difference, through which a “common” is created through “encounter”, “communication”,
“concatenation”, “hybridization”, and “miscegenation” – that is, through constant process
of meeting and affiliating and mixing and grouping across traditional boundaries. This
“queer” form of democracy resists war and totalitarianism in any form, and is in a
continual process of the reinvention of the political forms of democracy.
The multitude constantly creates new social being, and thus a new human nature –
new forms of subjectivity. Hardt and Negri understand the common as an emerging
ontological condition, the social “body” that the social “flesh” of the multitude is forever
producing. And although the multitude is still held in thrall and exploitation by the
purposes of Empire and global corporate capitalism, the very technological, economic and
social development that this exploitation stimulates and demands makes possible the
dialectical emergence of what they call “revolutionary agency”. But it is, they emphasize,
an agency of “exodus” – of refusal, of the constant emergence of small singularities, not
the massive revolution in which one state is replaced by another, but a piecemeal
“withering” of the state in the emergence of a global citizenship, the possibility of
affiliations across boundaries, of subversive action that, vastly outnumbered as it is by the
ever increasing forces of repression, captures the planetary imagination through the
increasing savagery of the repressive apparatus used against it, and as such presents the
possibility of another world. So for example the Other Russia march of April 13, 2007 in
Moscow, made up of fewer than 2000 peaceful protestors, was met by 9000 riot police,
who harassed and truncheoned marchers for no reason, and the complete moral drama, in
all its lineaments, was immediately available to the planet, through the very media that the
states and the corporations use in order to maintain hegemony. And international
institutions like the World Bank morph gradually toward independence from the states
that uphold and dominate them – witness the recent revolt of World Bank employees
against their U.S. appointed chief. Even the insurgency in Iraq, as vicious and perverse as
it is as a sectarian fight, demonstrates the power of decentered, transnational, rhizomatic
forms of organization in the obstinate refusal of biopower. Yet it is as fundamentally

14
Ebd., p. 94.
15
Ebd., p. 100.
6

misguided as the occupation by the current global hegemon it resists, for in the age of
nuclear weapons and global capitalism, dialectical warfare is no longer a valid option.
Instead, the multitude must wage a war against war, or a battle that takes place more in
the form an exodus (a refusal to partake in capitalism).

“The project of the multitude, then, becomes not one of forming instrumental class based
oppositional blocs, but awaking the revolutionary agency that is dormant in all of us”16

The emergence of multitude – of the power of the singular, the plural, the communicative,
the affiliated rather than the “unified” – was announced over a century ago, not just by the
philosophical anarchism that was one flower of the powerful socialist impulse of 19th
century Europe – but in as mainstream a political thinker as Dewey, in a series of lectures
given in Japan at the end of the First World War, and published as Reconstruction in
Philosophy, There he asked

“whether the national state, once it is firmly established and no longer struggling against strong
foes, is not just an instrumentality for promoting and protecting other and more voluntary forms of
association, rather than a supreme end in itself”.17

Dewey uses the word “state” to represent

“the conspicuous culmination of the great movement of social integration and consolidation
taking place in the last few centuries, tremendously accelerated by the concentrating and combining forces
of steam and electricity”18

[to which we may now add “oil” and fibreoptics]. It is not difficult to apply “state” so
defined to Hardt and Negri’s definition of “empire” as a “ruling structure of production
and communication” that is marked by

“a whole series of new characteristics, such as the unbounded terrain of its activities, the
singularization and symbolic localization of all its actions, and the connection of repressive action to all
the aspects of the biopolitical structure of society”.19

Dewey’s point – a dialectical insight – is that the triumph of empire becomes, in

turn,

“an instrumentality for promoting and protecting other and more voluntary forms of association”20

in spite of its best efforts to repress them. Dewey’s naïve political positivism in his use of
the word “protecting” can be attributed to his historical location before the triumph of late

16
Hardt / Negri 2004, p. 347.
17
Dewey 1920, pp. 202-203.
18
Dewey 1920, p. 202.
19
Hardt / Negri 2000, p. 35.
20
Dewey 1920, p. 202.
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capitalism, but his point applies whether empire has the intention to “protect” or not, and
he puts it more succinctly when he says:

“Along with the development of the larger, more inclusive and more unified organization of the
state has gone the emancipation of individuals from restrictions and servitudes previously imposed by
custom and class status. But the individuals freed from the external and coercive bonds have not remained
isolated. Social molecules have at once recombined in new associations and organizations.”21

This, arguably, describes the transition from “people” “united under the sovereign
will” to “multitude” – individuals who come together to produce new forms of life.

3. Multitude and Schooling

Is there any necessary relation between “multitude” and schooling? Can childhood be said
to inhabit a psychosocial space before ritualization under the binding word of the Father,
which is the sign of “the people” and the “sovereign”? Do schools – understood more
generically as adult-child collectives, or spaces where childhood and adulthood meet and
speak with each other – have the potential for becoming socially transformative spaces,
spaces that encourage the form of subjectivity we call multitude? If we take history as our
guide, the answer is a clear negative:

“The public school is, in the modern Western state anyway, the fortress of traditional, hegemonic
epistemology, the social factory of subjection and the production of the docile body, prepared for the uses
of Empire, notoriously conservative and even reactionary. The school of the nation state was founded for
the specific purpose of forming ‘the people’ subjected under the sovereign, and functioning as an agency
of social control”.22

Looked at from the point of view of a possible future – most specifically the refusal of
war and the collective resolve to take action to reverse the global disaster promised by
climate change – the school could represent one of those institutions that Dewey referred
to as in some way repositioned in a way that is beyond the control of, or at least struggles
to place itself beyond the control of, the state.23 To take up his argument in
Reconstruction in Philosophy again, what he noticed and encouraged in his view of the
emergence of social democracy were two tendencies. First, as he put it,

“a movement toward multiplying all kinds and varieties of associations: Political parties,
industrial corporations, scientific and artistic organizations, trade unions, churches, schools, clubs and
societies without number, for the cultivation of every conceivable interest that men have in common. As
they develop in number and importance, the state tends to become more and more a regulator and adjuster
among them; defining the limits of their actions, preventing and settling conflicts.”24

21
Ebd., p. 203.
22
Nasaw 1979.
23
Dewey 1920.
24
Dewey 1920, p. 203.
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Second, Dewey noticed at the end of World War I a tendency towards what is now known
as “globalism”, expressed in the slow resolution of the

“opposition between the claim of independent sovereignty in behalf of the territorial national state
and the growth of international and what have well been called trans-national interests.”25

This tendency connects with the first, in that the voluntary associations which form the
heart of a social democracy “do not coincide with political boundaries,” and therefore

“internationalism is not an aspiration but a fact, not a sentimental ideal but a force. Yet these
interests are cut across and thrown out of gear by the traditional doctrine of exclusive national
sovereignty. It is the vogue of this doctrine, or dogma, that presents the strongest barrier to the effective
formation of an international mind which alone agrees with the moving forces of present-day labor,
commerce, science, art and religion.”26

It could be argued that what Dewey was describing in optimistic terms at the end of
World War I is in fact what later either evolved into or was coopted by empire; that in fact
those “moving forces” he mentions were in the process of configuring the present system
of corporate global capitalism and empire. It could also be argued that he is referring to
the moving forces of multitude – that is, the growing insistence on the recognition of the
ontological desire for both independence and collaboration, for social and personal
creativity, for the recognition of difference, and for the refusal of war and exploitation.
If we assume the latter, then Dewey’s evocation of the school as “embryonic
society” takes on more than a merely sociological significance. In this vision, the school
becomes one locus for social transformation, and necessarily – because it is an adult-child
collective – transformation in the context of the interaction between children and adults.
This lends a new dignity to the possibilities of childhood. It recognizes that childlike ways
of knowing and acting are not simply to be replaced with adult ones through education,
but are expected to inform them as well. That childhood in fact is a marker for the
possibility of the species is emphasized throughout Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct,
and expressed in the concept of neoteny – the persistence in the species of the “childlike”
characteristics of the species as a whole, and the capacity to reproduce before attaining
maturity. The physical marks of neoteny in the human species, among which are a
relatively hairless body, a flattened face, short jaw, and bulbous forehead compared to
other adult primates, are referred to as paedomorphism. Leaving aside the implications for
biological evolution, it has been argued that one cultural enabler of “psychological
neoteny”27 is formal education, in that

“So long as a person is in formal education, or is open to the possibility of returning for more
formal education, their minds are in a significant sense ‘unfinished’.”28

25
Dewey 1920, p 204.
26
Ebd., p. 205.
27
Charlton, 2006.
28
Ebd.
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The school understood as a paedomorphic rather than an adultomorphic institution is, on

this account, the matrix for cultural adaptation, novelty, and those characteristic that
Hardt and Negri associate with multitude – “concatenation”, “encounter”,
“communication”, and “hybridization”.
Multitude is not just an ontological category, but necessarily an epistemological
one – a way of knowing – and school is the chief epistemological site of any culture.
School is the space of interchange where not just knowledge but how knowledge is
acquired is communicated to the next generation, and it is the psychological space where
the modal relationship between work and play in a given culture is constructed, the latter
being a fundamental attitude toward the relationship between creativity and necessity,
reason and desire. Finally, school is the place where a general attitude towards authority is
formed, and by implication, towards power and responsibility. It is where I learn what I
am authorized or encouraged to do or say vis a vis the collective, and what I am not; what
my sphere of political action is, i.e. my possible role in the governance of my own group
life, the life of my classroom and of my school; who is “in charge” of what and whom,
and what or who legitimates that status. It is where the relationship between the individual
and the collective is defined for me – where habits and dispositions of social/collective
action are formed, and where attitudes of political hope or fatalism are reproduced. The
classroom is after all a proto-political entity – a community of individuals capable of
deliberation, judgment, decision and action. In traditional classroom experience, that
capacity is ignored, discouraged or suppressed, and the assumptions underlying that
ignorance or suppression typically fall into deficit arguments: that children are “innocent”
and should not participate in politics, that children are incapable of understanding all but
the most adult-controlled and vitiated forms of democratic process, or that children are
dangerous when accorded freedom and self-regulation, and that all children’s self-
regulated activity ends inevitably in the mythical sociopolitical world of Lord of the Flies.
The traditional classroom is an exemplary instance of biopower: childhood understood as
“our most precious natural resource”, raw material for the production of future adults.
Given that the school is the epistemological control center of the culture – the site
where epistemology is enacted in a characteristic form and style of curriculum, pedagogy
and assessment –the task of constructing multitude there, although it is arduous, lengthy
and fraught with political difficulties, is at its base simple. Multitude is a form of
knowledge as much as a form of being, or of action and reaction: a way of applying
categories to the world, an implicit way of determining what is relevant and what is not,
an attitude to “truth” and therefore also an attitude to “right and wrong”. The source of
empire’s power over its subjects lies in its ability to impose, through both force and
seduction, a unified way of knowing the world. Empire is a source of stable meanings as
well as a set of taboos (“step outside of this knowledge-circle, and there is danger”) – a
set of “truths” about the world, and an implicit set of ethical constructs that follow from
them. The ethical constructs are about what we are responsible for and what we are not –
in particular, which responsibilities are to be delegated to “those in authority”, and which
are the task of our little collective. As such, it determines the possibility of collective
action – or action in the interest of the collective – on the most practical level.
10

The epistemology of empire is reproduced in school in two particular spheres: first, in

what is studied and how it is taught; and second, in how the adult-child collective is
governed. Everything else flows from that – including the “hidden curriculum”, which is
in fact a reification of a way of knowing the world. We feel obliged to train children to
form lines when walking down the hallway, for example, because we “know” that the
Hobbesian multitude – that “state of nature” which shuns authority and seeks only its own
selfish goals, which falls so easily into a chaos of impulse and antagonisms, that “human
nature” so clearly exemplified by the behavior of children – will never be anything but a
threat to civilization without the imposition of order.
The reconstructive task of the school is “simple”, then, because what is needed on
its most basic level is to alter the learning paradigm, which is a concrete, practical, day-to-
day affair. It has to do first off with what is studied – the curriculum – and how that study
is approached, which necessarily results in a shift in the way adults involve themselves in
that study – which is the pedagogical paradigm – which eventually results in a shift in the
epistemological framework. The order of causation between these three dimensions of
experience is in fact not sequential but circular, for it is a particular epistemological
framework that determines what is studied and how.
The educational shift in question is, broadly speaking, from transmission to
inquiry. An inquiry-based learning paradigm is different from the transmissional in
several key aspects. For one, implicit in the notion of inquiry as a psychological
phenomenon is that it is intrinsically initiated. In the context of the school, this implies
dialogue and an emergent curriculum, for it requires that adults take into consideration the
interests of children in determining what is to be studied. An emergent curriculum is the
ever-ongoing outcome of a dialogue between the child’s natural inquiry into the world
and the world as understood through the disciplines or content areas. Dewey formulated
this insight partially in The Child and the Curriculum, published in 1901.
Curriculum as an outcome of dialogue between what Dewey alternately called the
“impulse” or the “instincts” of the child and the “habits” of the particular content area in
fact touches on the second key sphere mentioned above – governance, or the construction
of power in the classroom. The dialogue between the two shifts the balance of power such
that curriculum is not imposed by adults, but negotiated. This power shift in the
determination of what is studied and how – whether through collaborative projects,
independent research, individually programmed learning, and even transmission as one
form of pedagogy among many – is crucial to the organization and expression of power in
the school as a whole, to issues of collective order, discipline for infractions of that order,
and on an even broader level, to the organization of time and space, and by extension, to
issues of authority and governance among adults.
Inquiry in any discipline is a whole educational experience as opposed to a partial
one – a three-dimensional as opposed to a two. Authentic inquiry is about the personal
construction of subject and world through the interaction between the two. This is its third
dimension. In this sense, inquiry is always oriented toward the deep structure of its object
– which is how one knows the object, and is therefore necessarily a reflective activity in
the sense of always asking, “How do I know what I know?” The question “how do I
know?” immediately evokes issues of certainty, which in turn place us in the realm of
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belief. The deep structure of the academic disciplines is in fact located in a set of beliefs
that on their deepest level are philosophical – that is, beliefs about truth, certainty,
causation, nature and culture, identity, logic (i.e. what can be included or excluded in any
account) and so on. These concepts are preeminently philosophical in that, as Splitter and
Sharp have pointed out, they are “common” to all members of the species, “central” in
their importance, and “contestable”, that is, ultimately structures of belief. As such, they
are in a continual process of reconstruction; in fact they are reconstructed through
experience itself, but it is philosophical inquiry in particular that focuses that
reconstruction – that makes it conscious and reflective. This is because philosophical
inquiry has a deconstructive dimension; it takes concepts apart, tests them through
thought experiments and application to contexts in which they are not usually found. It
doubts, but for the purposes of reconstruction, of understanding the concept more deeply,
of holding one’s beliefs more intelligently.
To reaffirm the old designation of philosophy as queen of the sciences may not be
appropriate for the sciences, for which philosophy is so often perceived as, if not a
residual organ, then a handmaiden – clarifying concepts, definitions and assumptions. But
in education, and especially childhood education, philosophy represents the original
meaning of philosophy as a universal, primal impulse toward investigation – not in the
interests of some finite empirical solution, but to consider how the world works, to
formulate its meaning whole. Philosophy promises a form of cognitive mastery removed
from any specific practical interest – as Aristotle says, a form of contemplation, of
“beholding” (theorein, “to see or behold”, from which we have the word “theory” 2 the
world, a way both of engaging and remaining open toward the world. And we can
appropriately identify communal philosophical conversation with children, facilitated by a
philosophically sensitive and dialogically skilled adult, as the “queen” and the
“handmaiden” of the curriculum. As a regular practice in school, it offers a group
discourse-setting, democratic in nature, that encourages inquirers, as a community, to
question, in the context of their own lives and experiences, the common, central and
contestable concepts that form the epistemological understructure of the curriculum. For
example, as a preparation for historical inquiry, we question what we mean when we call
something a “fact”. How is a historical fact different from a scientific fact? Can two
contradictory facts exist? Is any given fact the same for any two or more people? From
here it is an easy step to the issue of what are the agreed-upon criteria for a historical fact,
at which point one has entered the discipline of history proper.
Thus defined and practiced, community of philosophical inquiry represents the
most fundamental and generic activity of the curriculum – the ground floor of any
discipline, the discursive location where the transition between common sense and
“scientific” or reconstructed concepts is negotiated. What distinguishes CPI is that this
transition is made collaboratively, through dialogue, in everyday language, and through
thought experiments within everyone’s range, in a cognitive context of distributive
thinking, and thus within a spontaneous, peer-mediated zone of proximal development.
And equally important, it creates a discursive space for the practices, skills and
dispositions of social democracy and a new collective subjectivity through constructing
and maintaining a deliberative form that facilitates ethical inquiry and practical decision-
12

making within and outside the school. And it is in this space in schools – the space of free
deliberation leading to the possibility of collective action, which is to say in a space of
collaborative agency, or power – that the role of the school in the emergence of multitude
is clarified. For in fact it places children in the active realm of biopolitical production, or
what Hardt and Negri call the “constant creation of a new social being”.
To imagine the role of childhood – and more specifically, schooling – in this
process of biopolitical production means to reimagine childhood, which is in fact the task
of a philosophy of childhood. Philosophy of childhood is dedicated to thinking childhood
in multiple, changing ways: as a historically and culturally marked form of subjectivity,
socially constructed and maintained; as an alternative epistemology to the adult’s; as a set
of capacities and a unique form of potentiality, as a form of temporality (Kohan), and a
particular relation between habit and impulse that – in dialogue with the adult’s relation
between habit and impulse – has the capacity to transform habit. As Dewey (1922/1988)
describes it,

“it must be through utilizing released impulse as an agent of steady reorganization of custom and
institutions”29 that institutions, which are “embodied habits”30, change, and that “habits be formed which
are more intelligent, more sensitively percipient, more informed with foresight, more aware of what they
are about, more direct and sincere, more flexibly responsive than those now current”.31.

Of course “child” is a nonsensical term apart from the term “adult.” Children are, like
anyone else, co-producers of social being, whether at home or at school. Any philosophy
of childhood, then, implies a philosophy of adulthood as well, or a philosophy of the
subject. And as coproducers of new forms of social being in schools, children and adults
share a distinctive project.

4. Childhood and Multitude

The distinctive project now, today, in this emergent critical moment in planetary history,
is in fact the production of the form of subjectivity of multitude, specifically a form of
subjectivity that is able to resist the subjection of empire. Multitude is on one crucial level
about refusal, about saying no to the everyday abuses of power, to the pervasive
psychological manipulation by corporations and politicians, to the dramatic forms of
economic exploitation sanctioned and upheld by the state, to the contempt for the voice of
the people in matters of state, to the automatism of communication, to the repression of
difference, the crass manipulation by the corporate media, to the pervasiveness of denial
and double-speak. Multitude recognizes that, in the grip of empire – a soft, even
comfortable grip if one is privileged, an increasingly harsh grip if one is marginalized or
excluded -we are, as Giorgio Agamben (1995) argues, all refugees, the exploited, whether
privileged or not. Multitude is then necessarily oriented to the sublation of nationalistic
identities in the emergence of a sense of global citizenship, a planetary identity that is
29
Dewey 1922/1988, p. 72.
30
Ebd., p. 77.
31
Ebd., p. 90.
 13

based on both cultural and personal singularity as well as an insistence on human rights
and shared democratic ideals, and which seeks a “common” based neither on totalization
nor exclusion.
If it is no longer a question of taking up a gun, because the guns are too many and
too large, and too much in the hands of empire or its polarized foes – who, if they “win,”
will simply create a worse empire. When it becomes useless to even consider taking up
guns, then adults and children are equalized as cultural producers. As Negri (2002) says
of multitude,

“it is not a question of ’seizing power’, of constructing a new State or a new monopoly of political
decision making; rather, it has to do with defending plural experiences, forms of non-representative
democracy, of non-governmental usages and customs. […] the contemporary multitude is fundamentally
based upon the presumption of a One which is more, not less, universal than the State: public intellect,
language, ‘common places’.”32

If the “revolution” consists in the production of social subjectivity rather than just another
form of subjection, then a child’s work and an adult’s work in biopolitical production are
related. More specifically, children’s capacity to understand the three major issues that
confront the planet today – the general global state of war or “ontological warfare”, the
global environmental crisis, the radical impoverishment of one half of the world’s
population and the radical homelessness through geographical displacement of millions
more – is equal or in ways superior to that of adults. The extremity of these three
situations – universal war, radical impoverishment and displacement and environmental
crisis – places them in an ethical category in which the only realistic response is what in a
situation of lesser gravity might be called an “idealistic” one.
Children, if allowed and encouraged to do so through a community that encourages
it, are arguably more capable of collaborative communicative action based on ideals than
adults, if only because they have not yet – in most cases anyway – fully recognized the
power and ubiquity of evil. Thus, children as a group have the possibility of becoming
political actors on the current world stage, and the locus for that political action is, both
logically and psychologically, the school, which is the adult-child collective in which
social and cultural ideas are both reproduced and – in a system of truly democratic
schooling – reconstructed.
To argue for the encouragement of children’s voices in the realm of biopolitics
implies that those voices can travel – as is still possible (although threatened by increasing
state interference) in the new world order – across national and cultural boundaries, and
that, because it represents a form of subjectivity not so deeply inscribed by nationalism
and ethnocentrism, childhood as a political force is almost by definition a global and
international one. This philosophical turn in our understanding of the political agency of
childhood has implications for how one understands the school under the conditions of
absolute democracy, and for how it constructs its policies and practices.
The specific relation between childhood and multitude remains to be thought. But no
specific attributes or privileged ontological character – as if childhood were “essential” or
“potential”, or “original” multitude – as if childhood represented the socius before the
32
Negri 2002.
14

capitulation of rights to the sovereign, before disciplinary subjection has marked and
shackled some original “multitude-nature” – need be claimed. All that is necessary (and
this may in fact be an argument for what I have just disclaimed) is to recognize that the
child is what Merleau-Ponty called a “polymorph”. The child is the master of all (and no)
forms of species-being. Just as young infants are able to discriminate almost all phonetic
contrasts, whereas older infants discriminate better between phonemes that occur in the
language that they normally hear, rather than foreign-language phonemes,33 so what
Dewey calls the “plasticity” or “original modifiability” of childhood allows the child to
recognize multiple forms of social being, and because of that ontological polymorphism,
to practice and develop privileged forms even further than adults, as is the case with the
documented ability of members of the “Net Generation” to familiarize themselves with
and problem-solve within computer environments more quickly than many adults. In such
a cultural-historical world, the situation of adult-child dialogue is deepened: the child has
new information, is intuitively aware of a future that the adult is not. In a situation such as
ours of dramatic biopolitical transformation and global shift of information environment,
neoteny is advantaged, and children – if not suppressed –enter the realm of biopolitical
production – as actors and shapers, capable of embodying forms of subjectivity that adults
only know as ideals and principles. This was exactly Dewey’s meaning when he criticized
traditional education for its unwillingness to allow the impulse-habit relation of childhood
to find its own way, to reconstruct the school as a laboratory for the opportunity of
reconstructing the impulse-habit relation in general.
Having suggested that childhood can “learn” multitude more quickly, more easily
than adults, there is the problem that adults don’t “know” multitude themselves. It is a
form of social being that we already, through no agency of our own, “are” – distilled by
new conditions of existence but strangely so, as if something that has been forced upon
us. But this is exactly the point. An emergent form of subjectivity has no paradigmatic
masters. Or rather, its masters can be found everywhere –there is no privileged age or
culture or social niche for mastery. In fact because of the “original modifiability” of the
young, because of the socio-productive aspects of neoteny, children are the privileged
learners of whatever is emergent – especially in times of great change, or “future shock.”
As a result, the school, that adult-child collective where social being is – potentially –
produced through open dialogue between old and young, is one of its (potential) “green
zones”, or laboratories for biopolitical production.
The traditional school is hardly a green zone. Rather it is a colony, a reproductive
and not a transformative institution, an authoritarian structure, a closed and not an open
system. And because the school is about producing knowledge, the epistemology of the
school is a chief determiner of its systemic characteristics – whether it is an open or
closed system, a democratic or authoritarian structure, a colony of the state or a zone of
emergence of new social being. Therefore, what is first necessary for fostering the
emergence of multitude in schools is a shift in epistemological emphasis. A shift from a
transmissional to an inquiry-based, dialogical epistemology of schooling promises to tip
the balance of subjective energy towards the emergence of multitude – toward singularity,
differentiation, redistribution of power, the many, concatenation, communication,
33
Kuhl, Williams, & Lacerda 1992.
 15

hybridity, emergence, dialogue, freedom, desire, wonder, social creativity and self-rule
(or “the rule of everyone by everyone”), “a whole of singularities”, and a refusal of
subjection by hegemonic state, corporate and media knowledge/power structures. And
communal philosophical inquiry with children or Philosophy with Children is the
epistemological workshop of inquiry – its normative space, the space in which it
understands itself. Most importantly, it is the space – because it is dialogical and
democratic – which reconstructs power. It is a space of action, where the rule of everyone
by everyone can emerge in action, and the multitude shows its possibilities for
transformation, its capacity to produce new being.

5. Conclusion

I have argued that: 1) the school, because it is the site of adult-child, intergenerational
dialogue, the interlocutive space where childhood can be heard and is allowed to have its
effect on adult habits, is a privileged place for the production of the emergent form of
subjectivity called multitude.
2) that multitude – a unity that replaces the unity of the state imposed through
violence and the imposition of the same – multitude which “does not clash with the One;
rather, it redefines it”, which is “the base which authorizes differentiation or which allows
for the political-social existence of the many seen as being many”34 – that multitude is all
that will save the great majority of humans from growing dystopia, the cancerous growth
of totalitarianism, global warfare, endemic violence, pervasive economic exploitation and
ecocide, leading to human psychosocial degradation on a planetary scale. Not “only a god
can save us,” but “only a new form of subjectivity can save us” (which may be what
Heidegger meant); 3) that the school that privileges an epistemology of inquiry and
dialogue is the vehicle for the emergence of multitude, since it operates through the same
principles as multitude; 4) that community of philosophy inquiry with children is the
epistemological keystone to an inquiry-based curriculum, and therefore a primary agent of
the emergence of multitude in educational settings; and finally, that 5) community of
philosophical as an adult-child praxis promises to lead to the emergence of children and
childhood voices as forms of agency and political power in multitude’s refusal of war,
exploitation and ecocide.

NOTES

1. In fact this form of subjection is available only those who have a chance to participate in it, which does
not include the increasing numbers of radically poor and marginalized, who are in fact its victims.
2. And also connected originally to the word thea, goddess, which gives it a spiritual turn, the idea that to
“see” or “behold” the world is to see its spiritual nature.
3. In Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey argues:

34
Negri 2002.
16

“An impatient, premature mechanization of impulsive activity after the fixed pattern of adult
habits of thought and affection has been desired. The combined effect of love of power, timidity in the
face of the novel and a self-admiring complacency has been too strong to permit immature impulse to
exercise its reorganizing potentialities. The younger generation has hardly even knocked frankly at the
door of adult customs, much less been invited in to rectify through better education the brutalities and
inequities established in adult habits. Each new generation has crept blindly and furtively through such
chance gaps as have happened to be left open. Otherwise it has been modeled after the old”.35

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35
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