Abstract
The working thesis of my latest research is that cinema can offer a viewer something of a ‘re-education in education’. In the case of policymakers and researchers in the field of education, this means looking again at the reality of the conceptual phenomena with which we occupy ourselves in writing to see whether the two groups are aligned. This article will first look at how the figure of the child is commonly constructed as an object of knowledge within policy and philosophical discourse, suggesting that this approach affirms frameworks in which it is possible to know what a child is, but may fail to do justice to the child of our ordinary experience. I then turn to a discussion of some of Iran’s so-called ‘children’s films’, exploring how their presentation of a world, and the representation of children within that world, allow for a re-education in the lived reality of children. It is suggested that this aesthetic turn in observing the child's behaviour may encourage a more faithful representation of that reality within educational policy and research also.
When it appears in our speech or writing, the child of educational policy and research has always already become a figure of language, a concept, and no longer the ‘real thing’. This is only to be expected; it is simply not possible to do justice to the individual subjectivities of the many millions of people we might be tempted to describe as children every time we speak of them. The word ‘child’, therefore, affords the speaker or writer an expedient term when making decisions and recommendations on behalf of a given group of people. The very expediency of the term, however, also allows for it to fall into a frame of familiarity, in which the associations made with the term are repeated to the extent that they become unquestioned (Jacques Derrida calls this a word’s ‘iterability’). This article explores how the frames of familiarity just described are understood as epistemological frameworks, the ways in which we come to know the child in order to speak and write of it. I then want to consider how aesthetic modes of defamiliarisation might be just as important in inviting policymakers and researchers to continually reappraise their understanding of the child, such that their knowledge is always informed by ‘real’ children, rather than children as the product of abstract knowledge. The figure of the child in New Iranian Cinema is then explored as a potential source for the educationalist’s re-education in childhood.
The child of knowledge
Most speaking of and writing on the child proceed from some understanding or definition of the child that permits such action in the first place. In short, there is an assumption that we must know what the child is in order to speak of it with any authority. The child, in this sense, is a child of knowledge. I want to give two examples of how the child of knowledge comes to be figured in our language, and how it can appear weird as a result. One of these examples comes from policy, the other from philosophy.
For evidence that a knowledge of the child is necessary in order for us to make decisions on its behalf, we need look no further than Britain's Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). The introduction to the government's statutory framework for the EYFS states that: Children develop quickly in the early years and a child’s experiences between birth and age five have a major impact on their future life chances. A secure, safe and happy childhood is important in its own right. (Department for Education, 2014: 5)
The point is less to make the case that the EYFS statement is not true, but rather that its truth depends simply on its saying so. It is tautologous. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, a tautology is not just a stylistic error of repetition, but an expression in which ‘the conditions of agreement with the world – the embodying relations – cancel one another, so that it does not express reality’. The two phrases ‘Children develop quickly in the early years’ and ‘a child’s experiences between birth and age five have a major impact on their future life chances’ are mutually affirming here, in such a way that the document is able to assert the importance of early years education via its definition of what constitutes the early years. We could, of course, imagine the phrasing otherwise (‘children develop relatively quickly’, ‘children between birth and age five and three quarters’), but this would not fit within the EYFS strategy of promoting teaching and learning to ensure children’s ‘school readiness’ and giving children the broad range of knowledge and skills that provide the right foundation for good future progress through school and life. For the policymaker, then, knowledge of the child of early years education is necessary before specific learning strategies can be recommended for it. Furthermore, knowledge means standardising the picture of childhood we are intended to share.
A knowledge-based approach to educating the child that is itself based on a knowledge of the child is certainly a mutually affirmative approach to ensuring ease of application, but its Kafkaesque tautologies end up denying something more fundamental about educational relations, that is, that I do not actually need to know what a child is in order to teach it. Most nursery teachers do not enter a classroom in the morning reminding themselves that ‘children develop quickly in the early years’ before they can carry out their activities, just as they do not need to know that children are not chimpanzees, or swallows or daisies – they simply go about teaching them. To accept this does not mean having to swing towards an intuitive naturalism in our approach to teaching; it is rather to draw attention to the fact that it is strange to make the relation between knowledge and the world a one-way street. It is strange precisely because our everyday experience tells us that children are not semantically replaceable with other objects. We behave differently towards children than we do towards chimpanzees, swallows or daisies, for example, so perhaps our policy frameworks should reflect this also. Arguably, then, the relation ought to be the inverse: our knowledge of the world should always be keeping pace with how the world both appears to us and also with how we respond to it. In this relation, there is a suspension of the conceptual superiority associated with being the expert, the researcher, the philosopher or the policymaker. Instead, we become attendant upon the ‘worldhood of the world’ (Heidegger’s phrasing) to reveal itself before anything can be truthfully said of it.
The problem with pictures
The EYFS offers a picture of childhood according to which policy recommendations can be made as long as that picture remains static. Pictures of childhood, then, might leave us wondering whether a child might not end up trapped inside that picture as well. Wittgenstein also expresses this concern in discussions of St Augustine’s ‘picture theory’ of language, whereby all phenomena are essentially things waiting to have specific words attached to them. In setting up this attitude to language, we cultivate the expectation that words have an immutable relation to the objects they describe, rather than a relation that discovers itself in the use of language at a specific time in a specific place. Wittgenstein even says that Augustine has left us with an entire picture of a psychology of language that continues to hold us captive: ‘And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably’ (Wittgenstein, 1978: §115). With this repetition, the risk is that the picture as a representation becomes further and further removed from the thing in reality, to the point that it becomes either unrecognisable, or purely performative.
The reproduction of conceptual ‘pictures’ is not an issue limited to the performativity of policy writing. Philosophical research on the subject of the child can be just as problematic, not least because it often presents the child as a problem of knowledge in the first place. In a 1999 paper entitled ‘What is a Child?’, Tamar Schapiro tried to make the philosophical argument for treating someone ‘like a child’. The essentially Kantian thrust of the article was to show that it is morally wrong to treat someone as a child ‘unless, of course, that person really is a child’ (Schapiro, 1999: 715). 1 Schapiro then set out to ask ‘what features of a person's condition can in principle justify us in treating a person this way?’ (Schapiro, 1999: 715), by presenting childhood as ‘a predicament’ whereby the adult's intuition is that children are people whose moral authority does not have the same sway as that of adults. This lack of moral agency is a correlate of their physical dependency upon adults: however much we respect our children, Schapiro argues, we have to accept that they must be ‘protected, nurtured, disciplined and educated’ in ways that we, and not they, see fit – and, therefore, in ways that privilege our moral view of the world over theirs. The construction of this argument is analogous to that of the EYFS, and similar in its tautology: a child is someone whom we must treat as a child because they have not got the same moral agency of those who decide what constitutes moral agency. The only way a child could, therefore, have the same moral agency would be if it became an adult. The child, thus, becomes hermeneutically trapped in a picture of moral agency (or lack of it) from which there is no escape (as a child).
Schapiro's ontological analysis of what a child is, then, is actually determined by what a child is not yet: the rational adult. In just a few general opening observations, there is a wealth of dismissiveness towards the figure that the article attempts to address or, rather, resolve. When Schapiro asks what might ‘justify us in treating a person this way’, the search for a justification seems to have no mandate, and the question of ‘Why do you want to justify treating a person this way?’ is never addressed. Again, the operation of replaceability allows us to probe the ethics of Schapiro’s initial argument further. We can adjust the formula of Schapiro’s question such that it also addresses alternative justifications: ‘What features of an animal’s condition might justify us in treating it cruelly?’, for example, or ‘What features of a person’s condition might justify us in treating him/her as less than human?’ The flaw in the design of the moral argument here is that it is presupposed by a knowledge of what something is, which can only mean that knowledge and normative morality end up affirming one another, irrespective of the claims made upon us by our ordinary attitudes towards the things of our experience (the fact that most people do not normally seek for legitimate excuses to treat animals, children, or other humans harmfully). Equally, when Schapiro writes that ‘in general, we do not feel bound by childrens' expressions of their wills in the same way that we feel bound by adults’ expression of theirs’, we might frustratedly cry out at the self-proclaimed ‘uncontroversial’ claims being made on our behalf. Why do we not feel bound by children's expressions of their wills in the same way? Shouldn't we?
The child of sight
This article is not just an exercise in righteous indignation, but rather one that attempts to address a particular concern over the representation of the child in educational research and policymaking, its given nature. It is a concern that the child spoken of in these contexts is actually being spoken over, because its presence is already prefigured by a knowledge of something, a picture of that object, such that the writing about it only confirms not just the knowledge we already have of it, but the method of knowing.
If we are to declare an interest in education, and an interest in educating children, then it makes sense also to suggest that those with that interest should be engaged in their own re-education. By re-education, I do not mean upskilling, or the acquisition of new knowledge, but simply returning to the conceptual tools of our trade to see how well our use of them in the language of policy and research accurately reflects their appearance in everyday existence. The tools to which I refer might include terms like ‘schooling’, ‘teacher’, ‘knowledge’, ‘development’, ‘curriculum’, etc. Given that our understanding and perception of these phenomena has changed significantly from age to age, it is worth revisiting them every so often to test whether they have become conceptually fixed in our intellectual imaginary, or whether they still bear some resemblance to the phenomena of our ordinary experience.
Both the EYFS and Schapiro have in common the idea that it is necessary to find a definition for the child before we can behave towards it accordingly. However, this approach defies an important aspect to language acquisition, the fact that, in the words of Stanley Cavell, ‘we learn language and we learn the world together’ (Cavell, 2002: 19). Cavell illustrates this point by using the example of coming across an unfamiliar word whilst reading a book: You reach for your dictionary and look it up. Now what did you do? Find out what ‘umiak' means, or find out what an umiak is? But how could we have discovered something about the world by hunting in the dictionary? (Cavell, 2002: 19)
Whether it is a dictionary, a statutory framework or Kantian epistemology, there are ways to speak of things in words that overlook their worldliness and there is the possibility that our actual experience of them might demand of our words a revaluation in expression. The ‘theoretical’ child of these frameworks serves its purpose well in each instance because it never has to justify itself with reference to the ‘real’ child, only with reference to the framework of knowledge itself. What this means is that policy and research can too often end up writing children out of the areas that are meant to invest in their interests. Furthermore, their hands are seemingly tied in this respect by the fact that children are unable to represent themselves. So, how can the ‘real’ child play more of a role in educational policy and research, such that it does not figure purely as performative or tautological arabesque? My concern here is less with what this representation might look like, and more with how the policymaker and researcher might revaluate their perception of the child, such that we speak and write of children and not over them. It is, therefore, by no means necessary to try and directly include the voice of the child within these activities, because that voice will still be claimed by the teleology of the medium. Equally, the subjectivity of the child is not really representable within these contexts, because it is not yet turned towards self-reflexivity in such a way that enables the child to defend or advance their interests within them.
However, this conundrum does not mean that the ‘real' child cannot figure in or inform educational discourse. It just means that that participation is likely to be indirect, rather than direct. Or, perhaps better said, it is informed by our experience of learning the word and the world together. It comes, in part, from personal experience, in that all policymakers and researchers were once children, and some will also have children or work with them. However, if we want to do justice to the voice of the child in educational policy and practice, it may be that we have to move beyond the frames of our personal experience and interest to look at representations of childhood that are surprising for their unfamiliarity – albeit no less ‘real' or ordinary in the contexts of their representation.
My view is that the child can come to participate indirectly in educational policy and research via our experience of the child’s representation in cinema. We can re-educate ourselves in the character of childhood, and its many manifestations, such that we do not fall into the trap of performative and replaceable pictures of childhood in our language. We might then see children as people who remind us that, as educational professionals, we are very much bound to listening to the expression of their wills for the integrity of our own work. In films that are attendant upon the theme of childhood as an educational concern, the child appears as someone who compels our interest, such that our attitudes towards the child might be revisited and revaluated. This aesthetic view reverses the epistemological notion that our attitudes towards children should be determined by what we know of them, and says instead that we only really know children via our attitudes towards them.
The Hollywood picture of childhood
The first thing to say with regard to cinema as a source for re-education in childhood, is that certainly not all films are well placed to help in this. Indeed, the child of traditional Hollywood narratives is more closely aligned with the child of knowledge than it might initially appear. The curious thing about the way that children are represented in many Hollywood films is that they can behave very unlike the children of our ordinary experience and, yet, still be understood as the very epitome of childhood. Mary Pickford, Shirley Temple, Hayley Mills, Lindsay Lohan and Macaulay Culkin all came to embody at different stages of the 20th century a picture of childhood that suited the narratives of family, aspiration, morality and mobility that their films depicted. 2 Moreover, much like the static nature of the Google image of childhood, the problems often witnessed in the later lives of child stars might be understood as a similar kind of straightjacketing: the role is not itself open to interpretation, because the child has not got sufficient experience to interpret it. So, the child submits to the picture of childhood it is asked to portray, its gaze bends to the will of the adult, it becomes directed. These representations ought, then, to appear strange: we see children who only ever speak on cue, and always look in the direction they are supposed to. How is it that these children do not seem weird?
Again, it is a bit like the umiak: despite not having seen one, for some reason we can feel reassured that we know what it is just by looking it up in a dictionary. Equally, the pictures of children we get in Harry Potter films or Home Alone can drift very far from the real behaviour of children, whilst still allowing us to feel satisfied that they meet with a certain picture of childhood we already have, without asking us to question that picture in any way. The child can, therefore, be spoken of without ever really appearing as it often does in our reality: unfixed, distracted, temperamental, etc. In the traditional Hollywood narrative there is no space for the child to, in Stanley Cavell's words, ‘lend his being to the role and see what fits’ (Cavell, 1979: 28), because there is not enough experience to inform that being. As an audience, we come to see the child star not as a person in his/her own right, but the embodiment of whatever we take childhood to be at the time.
Seeing the ‘real’ child
To see cinema as a source for the re-education of educationalists, then, becomes a matter of looking at films that provide a cinematic space in which it is possible for children to transform the perception of the audience, not just affirm it. So, to paraphrase Schapiro, what features of Iranian cinema can justify us in calling it a form of education, one through which those with an interest in education might re-educate themselves in the objects of their interest? Why might we pay attention to these films as texts that can reveal something new about children or, at least, something that has gone unnoticed? One reason is historical, and another is stylistic. Of the first, it might be said that Iranian cinema has a peculiar, and special, relation to the representation of children on screen because of an educational initiative entitled the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. Known as Kanoon, it was first developed by the former Empress of Iran, Farah Diba, in the 1960s. The Institute began as a translation enterprise, bringing European stories and fairytales to an Iranian audience. It then began to generate its own cultural output, first in literature, and then turning to film, as a way of contributing to the cultural development of young people. Significantly, the Institute survived the Iranian revolution and was able to continue its activities under the Islamic Republic. The fact that the Institute, with filmmaking as its core activity, became a locus for artists to not only communicate culturally with children, but to conduct artistic experiments and meditate broader philosophical themes at the same time, makes Kanoon an unusual site of educational industry. It operated at an intersection of art and observation, rather than knowledge.
The other principal way in which films of the New Iranian Cinema (a term used to denote a lot of the output from the original Kanoon directors and their apprentices) differ from the traditional Hollywood films about children is the style in which they are shot. Taking some inspiration from the Italian neorealist directors of the post-Second World War period, such as Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, the filmmakers opted for blurred boundaries between documentary and fiction, using amateur actors, outdoor locations and improvised dialogue. The choices lend themselves to a sense that the film sits closer to reality, with little artistic interference from the director. Whereas neorealist films such as Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero and Paisà concentrated on the ways in which children might struggle to discover new identities within the bombed-out cities (and destruction of values therewith) of Berlin and Naples, the Iranian films are characterised by small-scale odysseys, in which children undertake complex journeys (even within the confines of their own homes) under the noses of inattentive parents.
The ‘children’s films’
Children are ubiquitous protagonists in Iranian cinema. These ‘children’s films’ frequently depict heroic quests conducted in miniature, whereby a seemingly trivial task is portrayed as a voyage of Homeric proportions. In Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987), for instance, a boy accidentally takes a classmate’s notebook home with him, and defies his mother to go to the next village to try and return it. In Forouzesh’s Kelid (1987), a boy is accidentally locked in the house by his mother and spends the whole morning having to carry out household chores with no supervision. In Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror (1997), a girl’s mother does not pick her up from school, so she is forced to make the journey alone. In Mohammed-Ali Talebi’s Willow and Wind (2000), a boy breaks a pane of glass at school and must go and find a replacement for it, battling the elements to return with this fragile object in his hands. In Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple, two sisters are released from 11 years in home captivity to take their first steps into the world outside. In Hana Makhmalbaf’s Buddha Collapsed out of Shame (2007), a young girl in remote Afghanistan tries to go to school for the first time, but encounters boys playing at being the Taliban along the way.
The lack of narrative structure, a paucity of dialogue and use of amateur actors in the ‘children’s films’ have led to some describing the New Iranian Cinema as one of ‘poetic realism’. Essential to this poetry is the relationship to space: characters undertake their quests through streets and across cities, or over fields and wilder landscapes. I think Chaudhuri and Finn (2003) are right to observe that these adventures make ‘even the most concrete places fleetingly uncanny – both for the character and for the viewer’. Whether it is traffic in the cities, or the wind in the countryside, the environment poses its own perils and has its own potentialities. What is so important in these odysseys, however, is that the principal character, the child, does not know what it seeks, or what it anticipates will lie at the end of the quest. Its gaze wanders – and wonders – without direction, in a world whose rules it is not yet familiar with. The child’s gaze is undirected, in contrast with the ‘directed’ gaze of the Hollywood child (see Rancière, 2006). The Hollywood gaze is one in which every shot fixes the child’s line of sight in whichever direction it is intended; in doing so, the child’s consciousness achieves a kind of transparency in the eyes of the viewer. What is strange is that this transparency should not have an alienating effect on a viewer who is unused to knowing what goes on in the mind of the child. The fact that their psychology is inscribed into this unwavering line of sight ought to be uncanny but, instead, serves to fix the character of the child exactly as an adult intends it: innocent, mischievous, angelic, obedient.
The child actors of Iran’s ‘children’s films’ refuse the direction of an adult gaze. Not only are they new to being directed, but the narratives in which they are involved entail a ‘not knowing’ of what comes next: in Where is the Friend’s Home?’ Ahmed must find a classmate’s house he has never been to; Bakhtay in Buddha Collapsed out of Shame must find a school she has never attended; and the boy in Willow and Wind must track down a pane of glass not knowing where to begin finding one. This wandering gaze, then, mirrors that of a viewer who finds little structural and formal stability in the cinematic images within which to ground his/her own reception of them. The curiosity, fear, wonder and desperation in the eyes of these amateur actors have all the appearance of being entirely unrehearsed (untimely), and seem designed less to inspire empathy or pity, than to invite the viewer to inhabit this state of seeking also. The curiosity, miscomprehension and wonder that lie within the wandering gaze of the child, then, might be called educational if we associate them with the will to learn, that is, to discover and understand more about the unknown world (albeit a world in which the opportunities to carry out those discoveries are limited).
Within this searching gaze lies part of the (re-)educational character of the children's films. The search is a reminder that this is an as yet unformed, or unfinished person, someone who is still in search of the knowledge, the information, or simply the people that will bring him/her closer to a sense of destination. Unlike their Hollywood counterparts, these are individuals whose fate and future has not yet been decided for them, whose cognition is not burdened by the cogito, and who are learning – often under quite brutal circumstances, through harsh lessons – that humanity is no kind and forgiving narrator of their tale either. These filmmakers do not condescend to romanticise childhood for the sake of narrative, or to make life easier for their audience by providing them with the picture of childhood they already hold; rather, children carry the burden of existence through stories that do not always see their hardships redeemed, and the viewer has to endure that privation also. We are like the parents of the films, who do not see what children are really up to right under our noses.
Countering narratives of closure
In conventional Hollywood narratives of childhood, the child is often restored to a harmonious family environment and, therefore, the stability of its position within that institution is upheld. Most of the Shirley Temple films, and Annie, Oliver!, Mary Poppins, Home Alone and The Parent Trap all provide examples of Hollywood’s desire to reaffirm the importance and stability of family through its representation of the child. The films of the New Iranian Cinema, however, refuse to satisfy a viewer’s desire for closure, completion and, therefore, ontology also. In cinematographic terms, Chaudhuri and Finn have described the style that emerges in Iranian cinema as one characterised by images of tension between the viewpoint of the protagonist and that of the director, something that the authors call ‘open images’: Open images are not necessarily extraordinary images, they often belong to the order of the everyday. While watching a film one may meet them with some resistance – yet they have the property of producing virtual after-images in the mind. (Chaudhuri and Finn, 2003: 38)
The open image, in being neither assimilable to the gaze of the director or that of the protagonist, defies any claim to omniscience on the part of the viewer: ‘we would prefer to stress not an imagined source of subjective or subjectless viewpoint, but rather the otherness of the images as objects, as intrusions of the real’ (Chaudhuri and Finn, 2003: 40). The real as associated with the camera is something of a limited and limiting consciousness in its own right, and its gaze is one that lingers perhaps longer than it should on objects to which we would not otherwise attach significance, perhaps long after the characters have departed from the shot. The ‘resistance’ to which Chaudhuri and Finn refer, then, is that of having one’s attention drawn back to the act of looking, the uncanny feeling that perhaps one was looking for meaning in the wrong place all along. This effect of the ambiguous open image becomes particularly significant with regard to the representation of children on film, as they do seem to resist the idealised archetypes that traditional hermeneutics might otherwise wish to invest in them ‘in terms other than those of sentimental humanism’ (Chaudhuri and Finn, 2003: 46) so commonly seen in Hollywood cinema. This implies an aesthetics and an ethics of childhood that do not take the nature of the child for granted.
Conclusion: An education in the inexplicable
Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has written of Kiarostami’s work in particular that it marks a confrontation with Western cinema, in that it exposes a complacency, or stultification, of cinema in our eyes. He ventriloquises Kiarostami in addressing the West’s cinematic industry: Film sits planted in your culture – I mean in your ways of living – like the tame olive tree no longer known in the wild or the other trees I like to film or behold. No longer are you making its discovery and marvelling like children in front of a magic lantern. (Nancy, 2001:14)
Rather than providing comforting conceptions of childhood on screen, much of the project of Iranian filmmaking seems to involve drawing attention back to the look that assumes it already knows how to look: at place, at space, at cinema. Nancy describes this as ‘a way of looking through which we have to look but that is not to be seen itself, that is not of this order’ (2001: 18). We cannot help but watch what cannot be fully seen: in this case, we cannot fully see the child in the children’s films because it is someone who, through its own journey of sight and motion, is still becoming that person. Nancy goes on to observe that tropes such as open doors, but also broken windows, barred and bolted doors, and homes with neither windows nor doors, all draw architectural attention to possibilities of leaving, escaping, captivity – the ‘leading out’, if you like, that sits at the heart of the word ‘re-ducation’. In many ways, it is hard to find adequate words to describe images when talking about cinema of this kind: they are both insufficient and in excess. However, Nancy encourages us relish the challenge of this inadequacy in the face of an image that resists explication: ‘I want to remain this foreign spectator who I am, and whom the film, without explicating this image to me, lets me be’. Iranian cinema’s re-education in childhood is one that, in letting children be on screen, invites us as viewers and educators to rethink the degree to which we do, and should, direct who they become in life. Perhaps those with an interest in education can also learn themselves from those whose interests they hope to represent.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.