Quynh Anh Do

Within the tradition of the Continental educational philosophy, the pedagogical relationship is commonly understood as an intergenerational relationship, aptly captured in Schleiermacher’s question What does the older generation intend to do with the new one? (Thoomes 1989). An educator is understood to take up pedagogical responsibility when, in brief, they are initiating the new generation to the existing world, while, importantly, also allowing them to give meaning to it themselves (Arendt 2006; Vlieghe and Zamojski 2019). In this paper we shift the focus to the child, the one being raised and educated, and highlight an aspect of this intergenerational relationship which we think is inherent to this relationship, but which is mostly overlooked: that also the child can emerge as a pedagogical figure in this relationship. We try to make sense of this through a reflection on a series of letters written by one of the authors to her parents. Drawing on Stanley Cavell we theorize the child’s letters in terms of multiple turnings of the self. The transformations these entail express at once a grappling with the “forms of life held in language and gathered around the objects and persons of [her] world” (Cavell 1979, p. 178) and the struggle to (re)present and make comprehensible to her educators (parents) her way(s) of life. Paraphrasing Cavell, how the child pictures herself within her culture, set against how that culture pictures her (Cf. Cavell 1979, p. 125) brings out the child as a pedagogical figure.