Nancy Vansieleghem

Cinema Education as an Exercise in ‘Thinking Through Not-Thinking’

Abstract In this article we explore the educational potential of cinema. To do this we first analyse how the American critical thinker Henry Giroux tries to give body to an educational theory in relation to cinema. His ‘film pedagogy’ is described as developing a critical response of the learner in relation to the public sphere of film. Giroux’s approach, however, seems to forget rather than explore the potential that is specific to the medium. Secondly, the article analyses Walter Benjamin’s (1936, Illuminations, London, Pimlico) essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, because here we find not a different educational response to cinema, but one of the first studies on cinema that describes its ontological nature and the potential of moving images for thought. Finally, the article discusses the cinema philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, who, in contrast to Giroux, does not construct a Cartesian framework around cinema. Rather, he recognizes and explores cinema’s potential for thoughts like Benjamin did. In this way, Deleuze reverses Giroux’s question of how education should respond to cinema. A pedagogical discussion hereby comes to the fore that does not ask the question of what methodology should be used in education to think critically about cinema, but what the implications are of the nature of cinema for thought and for education.

What is Philosophy for Children? From an educational experiment to experimental education

Abstract Philosophy seems to have gained solid ground in the hearts and minds of educational researchers and practitioners. We critique Philosophy for Children as an experimental programme aimed at improving children’s thinking capacity, by questioning the concept of critique itself. What does it mean when an institutional framework like the school claims to question its own framework, and what is the consequence of such a claim for thinking, in education, philosophy and the child? Implications for the concept of critical thinking follow.

Repairing the body, restoring the soul: the Sea Hospital of the City of Paris in Berck‐sur‐Mer and the French war on tuberculosis

In the second half of the nineteenth century, France suffered of one of the highest rates of tuberculosis in Europe. This illness increased gradually until its peak in the late 1880s and early 1890s, whereupon it started decreasing. The high infant mortality rate, caused by different forms of tuberculosis, was especially considered a huge problem. Infant mortality claimed as many lives as major epidemic diseases and thus had a considerable effect on long‐term demographic development. The concern over tuberculosis and infant mortality led to the development of several initiatives and the establishment of numerous kinds of institutions. An example of this was the rise of sea hospitals on different European coasts, which were believed to enhance children’s welfare by putting them in a healthy environment. This paper deals with the history of the Sea Hospital of the City of Paris, which will be analysed as part of a larger project of social, medical and educational engineering, i.e. processes of institutionalisation in France in the nineteenth century. In the discussion regarding the rise and the growth of sea hospitals for tuberculous children two topics are explored. First, there is the development of a professional network of medical services aimed towards children at risk during the second half of the nineteenth century. In the history of the sea hospital in Berck‐sur‐Mer the development of this medical discourse can be illustrated by the transition from a hospice maritime (focusing on the sea, the sun and the sand as natural healing agents) towards an hôpital maritime (where medical treatments required the more and more professional medical doctors). The second topic deals with those mechanisms that lay behind the growing medicalisation of childhood. In line with, for example, the research of Bakker and De Beer on the educational meaning of the medical inspection in Dutch schools, the article will consider how the (medical) practices aimed at the children living in the sea hospital were embedded within their social and cultural context. The central idea is that these practices were functioning as normalising techniques. The leitmotiv of Cazin, the doctor in charge at the sea hospital between 1879 and 1891, “Il ne s’agit pas de guérir, mais de refaire et créer” (It is not about healing, but about reconstructing and creating), illustrates this idea very well. The medical practices that took place in the sea hospital clearly served a double goal. Of course, the medical doctors were striving for an improvement in the children’s medical status. However, the focus was much more on moulding the children’s hearts and souls. By removing the children from their family and by putting them in a natural setting, far away from all dangers of their life in the city, the hope existed to create newborn citizens.

The ‘Educationalisation‘ of the Language of Progressivism Exploring the Nature of a True Alternative

Si j’avais a organiser aujourd’hui cette ecole du people, je m’appuierais sur ce principe que ce qui conditionne la vie des hommes, ce qui suscite et oriente leurs pensees, ce qui justifie leur comportement individuel et social, c’est le travail. Dans tout ce qu’il a aujourd’hui de complexe et de socialement organise, le travail est moteur essentiel, element de progres et de dignite, symbole de paix et de fraternite.1