Towards a childist theory of democratic dannelse: An argument for the radical potential of more age-inclusive scholarly imagination

Abstract

This dissertation uses the case of the Danish state school to study the democratic aspect of education – in Danish referred to as ‘demokratisk dannelse’. Drawing on a poststructuralist framework and the concept of childism, the dissertation draws attention to how a historically ingrained deficit-perception of the child underlies democratic dannelse in both theory and practice. This is fundamentally a marginalizing and colonizing starting point in that it involves the claim that the child cannot speak as a political subject before it has learned to speak in the ‘right’ (presumed democratic) way. The dissertation draws together two different types of analysis (one focused on discourse, the other on practices in schools) through multiple conceptual lenses and discusses how the lens of childism can potentially widen the epistemological space through which the democratic aspect of education can be understood. Rather than focusing on ‘preparing’ children and young people for (future) democratic life, childism allows for concepts like ‘voice’, ‘participation’, ‘rights’, ‘politics’ and ‘democracy’ etc. to be reimagined in more age-inclusive ways. From a childist perspective, the democratic task of education becomes that of supporting and responding to the student as the political subject it already is. This, the dissertation argues, has a radical and far more democratic potential.