Conference Program

This paper will argue that the relational concepts of John Dewey, a pioneer in the development of the concept of ‘democratic education’, can be integrated with Norbert Elias’s argument on long-term processes of civilisation. Although Norbert Elias did not explicitly address educational practice or the role of education in society, he was deeply interested in the development of the social learning processes of young children and adults. One integral aspect of the civilising process is that young children should eventually grow up through their own self-regulation. I introduce Elias’s important relational concept of love and learning to focus on the long-term individual civilising processes that young children undergo as they prepare for education in complex societies. The relation between love and learning is used as a sensitising concept to focus on the way in which young children’s educational development is both a cognitive and affective process, one that enables us to integrate the findings from other disciplines apart from sociology, especially from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology.

But how do processes of learning between adults and children relate to the development of a democratic habitus in learning between adults and children? To address this question, I compare Elias’s framework with Dewey’s account of education for democracy, focusing on the formation of democratic habits that are conducive to processes of thinking together. These habits facilitate intelligent action by predisposing persons toward seeking out and taking account of the perspectives of others. Dewey discusses one such democratic habit, which he names ‘the habit of amicable cooperation’ which he defines this as a habit “to treat those who disagree … with us as those from whom we may learn’. Such habits are formed through direct experiences with a democratic way of life in an educational environment which can facilitate the co-construction of educational encounters between teachers and children.

However, in contemporary societies the potential for these democratic processes of learning to be developed and embedded can be ‘blocked’ by teachers in educational institutions where it is assumed that pedagogy is mainly a rational, conscious and deliberate process. According to Winnicott (1964: 202-3), ‘The child, in learning to be civilised, naturally also feels frustrations acutely, and is helped in becoming civilised not so much by the teacher’s precepts as by the teacher’s own ability to bear the frustrations inherent in teaching’. Within this perspective, schools can be seen as anxious institutions where young children must exercise a more intensive and all-embracing control over their emotions. By refocusing on the unconscious processes of risk and uncertainty in the classroom, I will offer some suggestions for the ‘good enough’ school - a way beyond the dead-end approach of accepting or rejecting prescriptive advice on how to teach better or how to deal with ‘difficult’ pupils.