Maureen Lyons

Breaking silence: educating citizens for love, care and solidarity

An indifference to the affective domain and an allegiance to the education of the rational autonomous subject and public citizen are at the heart of formal education. The impact of Cartesian rationalism is intensifying with the glorification of performativity measured by league tables and rankings. The citizen carer and the care recipient citizen are only recognised in the educational arena when professionals are being trained to manage those in need of care. Education for informal care labour, solidarity work and love labour is generally not part of the formal educational trajectory. Because the scholarly understanding of work has been equated with economic self preservation and self‐actualisation through interaction with nature, education is seen as preparation for this type of work. Education is indifferent to other‐centred work arising from our interdependencies and dependencies as affective, relational beings. In particular it has ignored the centrality of nurturing for the preservation and self‐actualisation of the human species. In this article the authors argue that sociologists need to engage with the extensive feminist scholarship on care if they are to challenge the deeply care‐less view of the citizen that is implicitly accepted in new and older forms of liberal thinking. The rational economic actor model of the citizen is contrasted with the care‐full view of the citizen and the implications of both for education are explored.

Love Labouring: Nurturing Rationalities and Relational Identities

This chapter opens with a brief review of traditional scholarly interpretations of work and the reasons for the marginalisation of care work. It then outlines the reasons why care is a form of work. Drawing on a set of 30 in-depth Care Conversations with carers and care recipients (see Introduction and Appendix), it goes on to map carers’ understandings of their primary care relations in terms of the love labouring they do to maintain and develop these. The latter part of the chapter focuses on the issue of commodification, outlining how and why primary carers rejected paid-care alternatives to their own caring. It outlines the ways in which nurturing rationalities override economic rationalities, and how people’s relational identities as carers play a central role in determining their life priorities.

The home–school interface in religious and moral formation: the Irish case

With the student body across Europe becoming more diverse, the issue of religious education in schools has come to receive greater attention. In the context of the specific historical and institutional context of the Irish primary educational system, this paper addresses aspects of the religious and moral formation of primary school children. The methodology employed in this study is qualitative: it is based on in-depth interviews with school principals, teachers and parents, and focus groups with students in five case-study schools. The paper examines the role of both home and school in the development of religious and secular beliefs. It also examines the way children are active agents in their own moral development, specifically how they mediate and interpret three sets of influences, namely formal school-based religious instruction, the broader school climate, and the implicit values and beliefs communicated by school, parents and the wider family.

Time to Care, Care Commanders and Care Footsoldiers

This chapter uses data from our set of 30 in-depth Care Conversations with carers and care recipients (see Introduction and Appendix) to examine the way unpaid care work interfaces with employment in terms of time demands. It also explores the ways in which time for love labouring is squeezed out increasingly through the use of so-called flexible time schedules, the intensification of work and time spent commuting to and from work.

Children’s Agency and Religious Identity in Irish Primary Schools

Chapter 1 has pointed to the neglect of children’s agency when it comes to analysing the issue of religious identity. In this chapter, we draw on case studies conducted in five Irish primary schools in 2010–2011 to contribute to the understanding of children’s perspectives on their own religious formation. Ireland is an interesting case study in this regard since the dominance of faith schools, especially Catholic schools, serves to constrain school choice on the part of families of minority or sec ular beliefs, an issue that is discussed in the second section. Within faith schools, children are required to attend a form of religious edu cation, which emphasizes faith formation, unless their parents ‘opt out of these classes on their child’s behalf. This practice may further serve to limit children’s freedom to exercise their own choices regarding par ticipation in religious activities. In spite of these constraints, analyses presented in the chapter highlight the way in which children negotiate their own religious meanings, developing a personalized set of beliefs in the context of, but not determined by, home and school.

Care-less Citizenship? Public Devaluation and Private Validation

Given the influence of liberal thinking on Western political thinking, it is not surprising that issues of love, care and solidarity are also conspicuous by their absence from major debates about public policy (Baker et al., 2004: 28–29). Caring is defined as a private matter, an inadmissible subject within serious politics. Yet, the state plays a major role in determining the conditions for caring in most Western societies: it regulates paid working hours and thereby the amount of time one has available for care; it regulates housing, transportation and education in a way that either inhibits or enables caring; and it determines the levels of public solidarity that exist through systems for redistributing wealth, and through the levels of social expenditures devoted to care and solidarity services. Regulatory mechanisms within welfare and legislative codes also affect the power and subordination of both carers and care recipients, with respect to each other and to third parties such as social workers and the police.

Gender, Social Class and Lone Caring: The Intersectionality of Inequalities

As carers are not singular in their identity, caring is done under very different conditions depending on the resources, abilities, power and status of both the carers and care recipients. There are deep inequalities among carers themselves that reflect and exacerbate inequalities in other social systems. While the gender inequalities in the doing of care work are well recognised in the research literature (Lewis, 1998), there is a need to explore how other differences in social class and family status intersect with gender and determine the conditions of caring.

Love Labouring: Power and Mutuality

Most research on care is taken from the perspective of the carer (Hughes et al., 2005). Within this work, the carer is represented as the giver, the care recipient the receiver; the care recipient has needs, the carer is less needy; the carer is strong and able bodied, the care recipient is weak and vulnerable. This understanding of care portrays it as a deeply asymmetrical relationship and leads us to expect marked power inequalities within it, with the caregiver exercising power over care recipients.