Locke’s Children? Rousseau and the Beans (Beings?) of the Colonial Learner

Genocide, Diversity, and John Dewey's Progressive Education

“…"A too vivid memory of old histories" (Dewey 1924b, 133)-for instance, of deportations in 1915-1916 and latershould not surface and put at risk the route to progress. 28 Besides, divesting land of people and memory, turning it into new property through cultivation, was a well-and often-trodden path (see Papastephanou and Gregoriou 2014). Imperial expansion and the myth of exploration of new frontiers explain passages in Deweys work that make reference to Americas "period of natural and unconscious expansion geographically, the taking up of land, the discovering of resources," where Europeans seized, not Mexican or Indian lands, but a "wealth of unused territory" (Margonis 2003, 301).…”

“…This constitutes a fracture within the progressive tradition itself, and a regression to pre‐Lockean colonialism. Despite ambivalences concerning the legitimacy of expansion and the fact that “unused‐land” colonial principles make property the original relation of humans to space and nature (see Papastephanou and Gregoriou ), John Locke (, §§ 192 and 196) condemned conquest in 1690. He justified revolutions of conquered peoples against any government to which they had not given their consent.…”

“… For a discussion of it along the lines of colonial terra nullius , see Papastephanou and Gregoriou .…”

The ‘Lifeblood’ of Science and Its Politics: Interrogating Epistemic Curiosity as an Educational Aim

“…Utopianizations of childhood as the site of restless natural inquisitiveness underpinned utopianizations of the curious natural learners, colonial travelers, and settlers. The curious colonial 'children' describe the terra incognita, i.e., give an account of it as well as wipe out or suppress its 'barbarity', and then inscribe on the clean slate of the (purportedly) terra nullius (empty land) the laborious products of their epistemic adventures [31].…”