15315-wolbert

Chapter 6 92 A substantive account of education for flourishing increases the chance that this account shows a certain (cultural or class) bias. I believe it is important to find ways to address these ‘obvious’, and therefore perhaps biased, notions. With this dissertation I have tried to make a start with this. 6.3 A D IFFERENT L ANGUAGE OF ( EDUCATION FOR ) F LOURISHING The points that are brought forward in this dissertation are also discursive points. The ‘luck-side’ of flourishing, as I have called it in the introduction, is not completely absent from the paradigm of theory on education for flourishing, but it is the language in which the effort-side is emphasised that is distinctive of current theory on education for flourishing. In this section I discuss two different aspects of this discourse. The first is how a choice of words emphasises a particular normative paradigm of flourishing as an aim of education. As described in chapter 4, a discourse in which ‘risk’ is used to describe things and events that ought to be avoided at all times, is at the same time a discourse that reduces the value of trust, for instance the need for, and importance of, trust in the parent-child relationship. Such a discourse tends to focus on the things ‘we’ (whether these are parents, educators, or human beings in general) can and should do about ‘it’ (whatever problem is at hand), as opposed to a focus on how ‘we’ should react upon the things we cannot control. Also, as seen in chapter 5, it is easy to connect competitiveness, hyperparenting and stress with parents having expectations, both of themselves and of their children. ‘Hope’ on the other hand, is intuitively connected to humility and to an awareness of the uncertainty of achieving that which one hopes for. Arguing for a parental attitude of hope is also arguing for the use of a particular vocabulary . Judith Suissa and Stefan Ramaekers argue that ‘questions about what parents do for their children and how they act need (..) to be reclaimed from psychology and put at the heart of moral thinking about parenting’. 16 They argue that we need a different ‘language’ – one that is not dominated by a (Western) psychological discourse – in which we can discuss matters of child development, parenting, and also the end(s) to which children (ought to) be raised. I think that such a different language should also make it possible to go beyond ‘obvious’ (in the sense of culturally dominant) conceptions of human flourishing. Ramaekers and Suissa give several examples of authors who use a different language to discuss parenting, such as Winnicott, Ruddick, 16 Ibid., p. 107.