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Chapter 1 15 1.4 L IMITS OF TRANSLATION The (British or American) denominators for the kind of research presented in this dissertation are often ‘educational research’, ‘educational science’, or ‘philosophy of education’, or an equivalent of one of these. This doesn’t always correspond well with the Dutch (and also German) academic discipline of Pedagogiek , which concerns itself with the guiding role adults play and should play in raising children to adulthood. The word that is used in Dutch for what these adults do is opvoeding (German: Erziehung ), which is less informal than what the word ‘child-rearing’ usually implies, but also not equal to, or primarily about, education or teaching ( onderwijs ). It does not have an obvious, wholly adequate translation in English. One could perhaps say that ‘parenting’ is a better translation, albeit that opvoeden is not limited to parents. 53 Every adult who is in an opvoed -relation – a pedagogical relationship – with a child is, in that role, an opvoeder (German: Erzieher ). And this pedagogical relationship is considered to be a dimension of the parent-child relationship next to other dimensions which together form the complexity of the parent-child relationship. I suppose one could call this opvoeder an educator, but intuitively then something of the richness of the term opvoeder seems lost in translation. Although Pedagogiek will often carry out the kind of research one would expect under the denomination of educational research/science, the difference in approach between Pedagogiek , which tends to study the activity of child-rearing (be it in school, at home, or elsewhere) and educational science that tends to study the activities in the domain of education, sometimes causes small problems. 54 To me, this brings to light the limits of translation, and the (inevitable) limitations of not writing a dissertation in one’s mother tongue. To be clear, this does not mean to imply that I wish I had written this dissertation in Dutch, because I am eager to be able to communicate ‘across borders’ (both literally and figuratively). But, it does show that opvoeding as well as education is culture-bound and language bound, which again underlines how in every way implicit (normative) assumptions are interwoven in discussing education, and it does show that it is sometimes difficult to express oneself in a language one is not raised in. Throughout the chapters I take education to refer to both formal schooling and informal child-rearing, but on some occasions it has proven useful to explain (in the chapter itself) what I mean by ‘pedagogical’. 55 53 The objection to the word ‘parenting’, as if being a parent can be reduced to a series of tasks and skills, sometimes heard in philosophy of education (e.g. Suissa 2006, Ramaekers and Suissa 2012), can therefore be avoided in languages that have a word like opvoeden . 54 And on top of that, ‘pedagogics’/‘pedagogy’ does exist in English, but refers to how teachers teach (in Dutch that would be: didactiek ). This could cause additional misunderstandings. 55 In chapter 4.