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In this piece, we reflect upon a recent article published in Fennia by Ansell and colleagues. We identify and discuss aspects of learning that educational research, policies and institutions can consider, addressing the needs and subjectivities of learners and activating a politics around rights in education. Rights in education foreground the intrinsic value of learning,inviting us to realign the purpose of education with the overall purpose of life on this planet. It pursues a ‘bottom-up’ strategy for rethinking education as community formation to incorporate complex sources of knowledge and modes of knowing and becoming for children. In order to think about rights in education, we uphold an analytical distinction between schooling and education. The distinction enables us to raise some questions, reflect on them and suggest preliminary ideas for decolonial, childist strategies to envisage education, highlighting how education and the ‘future’ areintimately woven and exploring what they mean for each other and for childhood. We do so particularly by critiquing ‘western schooling’ as a mode of learning which is a conspirator of capitalism deeply rooted in philosophical racism and contributing to a global epistemological loss. Finally, we outline four strategies of moving forward with a decolonial,childist lens of reimagining education as community formation and welcome further discussions on rights in education.

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Urban tree cover provides benefits to human health and well-being, but previous studies suggest that tree cover is often inequitably distributed. Here, we use National Agriculture Imagery Program digital ortho photographs to survey the tree cover inequality for Census blocks in US large urbanized areas, home to 167 million people across 5,723 municipalities and other Census-designated places. We compared tree cover to summer land surface temperature, as measured using Landsat imagery. In 92% of the urbanized areas surveyed, low-income blocks have less tree cover than high-income blocks. On average, low-income blocks have 15.2% less tree cover and are 1.5⁰C hotter than high-income blocks. The greatest difference between low- and high-income blocks was found in urbanized areas in the Northeast of the United States, where low-income blocks in some urbanized areas have 30% less tree cover and are 4.0⁰C hotter. Even after controlling for population density and built-up intensity, the positive association between income and tree cover is significant, as is the positive association between proportion non-Hispanic white and tree cover. We estimate, after controlling for population density, that low-income blocks have 62 million fewer trees than high-income blocks, equal to a compensatory value of $56 billion ($1,349/person). An investment in tree planting and natural regeneration of $17.6 billion would be needed to close the tree cover disparity, benefitting 42 million people in low-income blocks.

Customarily, reflections on the need to educate sensory and bodily enactments with the world, take for granted that it is the child who must be educated. However, the educational passage of becoming 'rational' and 'grown up' often leaves the adult divorced from her own embodied self. As part of my engagement with childism (conf. Wall in Ethics in light of childhood, Georgetown University Press, Washington, 2010; The child as natural phenomenologist. Primal and primary experience in Merleau-Ponty’s psychology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2013; Child Geogr, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1668912) in this article, I ask: Who needs sensory education? In response, I propose that it is adults who need sensory education more than their temporal others (Beauvais, in: Spyrou S, Rosen R, Cook DT (eds) Reimagining childhood studies, Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp 57–74 2018) i.e. children. As Merleau-Ponty has shown, the richness of embodied perception that children experience, is relatively distant for adults (Bahler in Child Philos 11:203–221, 2015; Welsh in The child as natural phenomenologist. Primal and primary experience in Merleau-Ponty’s psychology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2013). The particular lived-experience I reflect on is the sense of temporality. Accompanied by two distinct, yet interconnected examples of encounters with Baby Ole and Captain Duke, I suggest that being-with-children can enable philosophical clearings for adults to re-cognise plural temporalities, as opposed to a singular clock-time perception of Time. (The preposition with is used in the sense of the Norwegian hos or German bei, whereby an adult intentionally positions herself as a guest in a child's world.)

In this article, the author begins by grasping the present crisis through the social anthropological description of overheating. She then locates “Generation Z (Gen Z)” as a generation born into an overheated era and distinguishes their socio-political struggle for intergenerational climate justice from preceding generations. Following that, the author presents an analysis of the oppressive adultist dimensions of the challenges confronted by Gen Z activists like Greta Thunberg. She does so by engaging with examples from the German context. The objective of the discussion on adultism faced by Gen Z activists consequently establishes that young activists demonstrate relentless courage and hence their contribution deserves a legitimate place in rethinking socio-political “education.” Her reading reveals that young activists are simultaneously resisting adult opposition and contributing to educating older generations about the intergenerational dimensions of the climate crisis. Therefrom, the author proposes that one may re-think the matter at hand from a childist standpoint which implies a re-cognition of pupils' agency within education i.e., intergenerational relating, as something that adults can also learn from. She suggests that an integral dimension of reflexivity in further developing childist educational theory and praxis, entails a conscious commitment to letting children and youth teach adult educators too.

Das Tagungsthema wurde wie viele andere Veranstaltungen und Publikationen in den letzten Jahren unter dem Eindruck zunehmender globaler Verflechtungen gewählt. Und aus einer der vielen kontingenten Perspektiven ist dies auch durchaus plausibel. Tritt man jedoch einen Schritt zurück und reflektiert die eigenen, scheinbar selbstverständlichen Hinsichten auf Welt, werden gleich mehrere blinde Flecken deutlich, von denen zwei genannt werden sollen.Da ist zunächst die Konzeption von Transformation selbst. Ein Kontext globaler Transformationen suggeriert, dass es auch einen Kontext, ein soziales Gebilde ohne Transformationen geben könnte. Als sei die Transformation die Abweichung, die es zu erklären gilt, anstatt die Norm. Es zeigt sich hier eine typische Fokussierung auf das Gleichwicht, die Kontinuität und Konsistenz. Aber schon Darwin hat nicht ohne Grund darauf hingewiesen, dass es strenggenommen evolutionsbiologisch noch nicht einmal Sinn macht, überhaupt von Arten zu sprechen. Umso mehr gilt für das Soziale, dass es keinen Stillstand gibt, und wenn doch, dass auch Konservation der (oft immensen) Arbeit bedarf. Dies ist eine zutiefst im nordamerikanisch-europäischen Denken verankerte Vorstellung ,des Dinges an sich', wie der Philosoph Hans Vaihinger in seiner Philosophie des Als Ob 1922 deutlich macht: "Wir bringen das Allgemeine unter die beliebte Substanzkategorie, fassen es als Ding mit Eigenschaften und Kräften. Der unkritische Sprachgebrauch hat aus dem alles personifizierenden Kindeszeitalter der Menschheit diese Redeweise mit herübergenommen: wie der Astronom noch vom Auf-und Untergang der Sonne spricht, so wenden auch wir jene bequemen Hilfsausdrücke, die Allgemeinbegriffe an, als ob das Allgemeine wirklich etwas Existierendes wäre." (Vaihinger 1922, S. 212/214) Man solle jedoch nicht Ernst aus diesem zugegebenermaßen sehr brauchbaren Spiel machen "und das Als ob nicht in ein starres Daß verwandeln" (ebd.). Es mag auch Teil des Problems derzeitiger politischer scheinbarer Rückbesinnungsrhetoriken oder Konservierungsphantasmen sein, dass Teile der Gesellschaft eine real betrachtet extrem kurze historische Spanne von gerade einmal ca. 70 Jahren Nachkriegszeit als unumstößliches und unverändertes Nationalkonstrukt und ‚Gesellschaftsding an sich' nimmt, statt von Transformation als selbstverständlichem Zustand aller sozialen Konstellationen auszugehen. Insofern gilt es umso mehr danach zu fragen, was die derzeitig ablaufenden Transformationen spezifisch auszeichnet.

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