An exploration of the ‘pushy parent’ label in educational discourse

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor and Francis via http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2015.1064098This article explores the ideological function of the derogatory and polemical label of ‘pushy parent’, which, since the 1980s, has been used considerably in journalistic, popular, but also political and academic discourses in the UK and the USA. ‘Pushy parent’ is not a descriptive term, but a conceptually vague and culturally-specific label implying the existence of antagonistic agents intent on optimising their children’s educational attainment. The function of this label is to mask structural inequalities in educational opportunities and outcomes by making those inequalities imputable to individual practices. As such, the ‘pushy parent’ can be interpreted as what Roland Barthes calls an ‘inoculation’: a concept which allows for temporary discharges of indignation at a phenomenon evidencing social inequality, but which avoids a more systemic critique. The article first explores the distinction ‘pushy parenting’ sets up between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ intelligence, and ‘deserved’ and ‘undeserved’ educational achievement. However, as detailed in the second part of the essay, it is very difficult to draw clear conceptual boundaries between the behaviours and practices covered by ‘pushy parenting’, and those covered by the ‘ideal’ parenting practices of neoliberal educational policy. To conclude, the function of the ‘pushy parent’ label as inoculation is explored, as well as its implications for the cultural politics of education

Is There a Text in this Child? Childness and the child-authored text

This article looks at child-authored texts, both real and fictional, and the adult discourse surrounding or commenting on such texts, focusing on the example of young Marcel’s writing in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and on the critical commentary on the juvenilia of child authors of the 19th and early 20th century. I argue, using Peter Hollindale’s concept of childness, that adult texts written about and around child-authored texts have a tendency to perform themselves the kind of childly characteristics that they hope to see in the children’s texts. The childness of child-authored texts is an all but illusory characteristic if it is envisaged as an intrinsic or essential feature of the texts; however, the adult awareness of the existence of a child-authored text shapes and deforms adult discourse around it in ways that are attributable, at least in part, to the characteristics of childness expected of young writers in a given place and time. Thus, I conclude, the adult text ends up more childly than the child’s; and, by conditioning the reader’s approach to the child’s text as childly, it is the adult’s text, paradoxically, that contaminates it with childness

A is for Aesthetics : The Multisensory Beauty of Baby Books

This introduction presents the special issue on baby books, and summarises the various articles

‘We Actually Created a Good Mood!’ : Metalinguistic and literary engagement through collaborative translation in the secondary classroom

This paper presents findings from observations of literary translation workshops with secondary school MFL pupils, revolving around a literary translation from L2 to L1 which does not require pre-existing language skills in the L2. Our research questions were: what skills do pupils mobilise when they work in groups on a literary translation? What can we say of the pupils’ engagement and motivation? The data shows that pupils mobilise three categories of skills: metalinguistic, linguistic, and literary. Our first contention is that metalinguistic reflection feeds into both linguistic and literary aspects of the exercise and contributes to binding them together. The pupils displayed engagement most intensely when finding a translational ‘solution’ with expressive potential (that ‘sounds good’). Their motivation was maintained through oral performance: pupils engage in vast amounts of vocalisation. We suggest that the spontaneous performative aspects of literary translation workshops help pupils process text, negotiate the linguistic territory across source and target language, and evaluate the aesthetic potential of their writing. Our second contention, therefore, is that translation in schools should maximise possibilities for moments of performance, opting for literary texts with strong expressive quality and potential for vocalisation

Teacher, Tester, Soldier, Spy: Psychologists Talk about Teachers in the Intelligence-Testing Movement, 1910s-1930s

This article focuses on teachers in the discourses of early twentieth-century proponents of intelligence testing in America. Teachers were often a targeted enemy in the academic literature on intelligence testing-their methods belittled, their unreliability emphasized. Yet, in part because teachers were essential for intelligence tests to be given in schools, they were also often talked about in more ambiguous ways. In particular, this paper argues that psychologists’ ways of talking to, at, and about teachers presented a relationship characterized by an originary indebtedness of teachers toward psychology. Intelligence tests, it was implied, were a gift for teachers, and psychologists’ help a favor that teachers should repay by using the tests and showing rigor, obedience, and gratefulness in doing so. Arguably, the debt was framed in such ways as to render impossible its repayment and to make illegible the potential contributions and initiatives of teachers in the intelligence-testing movement

Simone de Beauvoir and the Ambiguity of Childhood

This article explores Simone de Beauvoir's conceptualization of childhood and its importance for her existentialist thought. Beauvoir's theorization of childhood, I argue, offers a sophisticated portrayal of the child and of the adult–child relationship: the child is not a normal ‘other’ for the adult, but what I call a temporal other, perceived by adults as an ambiguous being; in turn, childhood is conceptualized as the origin of the ambiguity of adulthood. This foregrounding of childhood has important implications for Beauvoir's existentialism, in particular regarding her ethics. Through the adult–child relationship, her vision of an ethical relation to otherness emerges — one which foregrounds both the violence and the mutual liberation involved in encounters with the other

Innocence, experience and other childly songs in Max Porter's works

This chapter is interested in the child characters of Max Porter’s writing, as well as, more widely, in the childly quality of his texts – their childness (to use the adjective and noun coined by Peter Hollindale). Childness in Porter’s texts is not just tagged to children. It is a fluid quality, transmissible across characters and to the reader; a quality that the novels continually strive to recover, notably through the means of imagery, rhythmicality and visual layout familiar to scholars of children’s poetry. There is great ambiguity in Porter’s poetic apprehension of childness. On one level, it is archetypal, ancient, intensely romantic in its deep connections to nature, magic, and a kind of prelapsarian innocence; and it is also steeped in folklore and fairy tales. But it also borrows from late twentieth-century discourses on the “death of childhood” or “toxic childhood”. Whatever happens, Porter’s writing about children is never cynical; and the mother, a central figure in his works, remains forever unsullied, the child-mother bond the pivot of his childly view of the word

Child Giftedness as Class Weaponry: The Case of Roald Dahl’s Matilda

Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988) is one of the most entrancing accounts in children’s literature of the changes that passionate educators, good literature, and an intrepid disposition can bring to the life of a child whose home environment is not conducive to learning. However, the novel rests on a denunciation and caricature of a specific socioeconomic category and its practices: the petty bourgeoisie. This class-based antipathy, this article argues, goes mostly unnoticed because it is filtered through an alluring portrayal of Matilda’s giftedness that justifies condescension toward the Wormwoods and what they stand for

Ages and ages: the multiplication of children’s ‘ages’ in early twentieth-century child psychology

This paper explores the trend, between 1905 and the late 1920s in UK and US child psychology, of ‘discovering’, labelling and calculating different ‘ages’ in children. Those new ‘ages’ – from mental to emotional, social, anatomical ages, and more – were understood as either replacing, or meaningfully related to, chronological age. The most famous, mental age, ‘invented’ by Alfred Binet in the first decade of the century, was instrumental in early intelligence testing. Anatomical age triggered great interest until the 1930s, with many psychologists suggesting that physical development provided a more reliable inkling of which grade children should be in than chronological age. Those ages were calculated with great precision, and educational recommendations began to be made on the basis of these. This article maps this psychological and educational trend, and suggests that it cultivated a vision of children as developmentally erratic, worthy of intense scientific attention, and enticingly puzzling for researchers