Christian Bobin, écrivain français, parle de tout dans ses livres. Mais il accorde une attention particulière à l’amour et à l’enfance. Cet article présente quelques extraits portant sur l’enfance. Il nous a fallu faire des choix, tant le sujet est traité amplement dans presque tous ses livres.

Thinking is to reason with sensibility. We feel the feelings with the heart (In Spanish: co-razón: co-reason), through the impulses of our rational intuitions. Whenever we think with sensibility, we do it from a place in which the feelings give rise to affections, in other words, to this world of assimilation of the perceptible reality’s sensations that make us more subject than objects of ideas. Reasoning with feelings is different than reasoning rationally. It is to think with the imagination and the fantasy, illusion and metaphors, with the trans-physical reality of the sensitive ideas. The emotion is the first step to think sensitively Emotion is the first cause of sensitive thought; his origin and fertility, it impregnates it with histories and destinies its origin and fertility impregnates thought with histories and destinies. It is to live another worldliness, where the felt and re-felt world turns into a freedom that make us become and create in a much more free and autonomous way, without restrictions or cognitive frontiers. To think with tenderness is an expectation opened to reality in its aesthetic and dramatic dimension, where the passion that Life is, has the pleasure to feel the affections of feeling.

The present work intends to focus the child in the context of what is understood of childhood today, a concept which is overlapped in the net of relations of a world geared to an exacerbated production, to the banality of knowledge and reflexive activities, to a promptness and to human relations not much solid and based on values marked by the fragility of which is acquired by idioms and by mass standards. Looking for an alternative to interrupt the strength of mechanisms of an education inspired on the “paradigm standard of the pedagogic normal practice” (1995, p. 30), Lipman proposes an “educative model ruled in reflexive practice”, maintained in his revised edition of Thinking in Education (2003, p. 18-19), in which philosophy distinguishes itself with an unique and necessary participation of the child from the moment they enter school. It is obvious that this suggestion is based on a different conception of childhood. The philosopher is disturbed by that prescriptive perspective that indicates, for the youngest, restrictions in order to be surprised by the things and by the situations that has been shown to them, lessening in that way, the taste for questioning and the search for meaning in their experiences.

In his last texts, Lyotard refers to the figure of childhood through a criticism of the humanist doctrine of education, which results in an opposition between child and man. Lyotard affirms that all institutions and cultures, if they are necessary, must abstain from repressing childhood and maintaining loyalty to it’s inarticulate and almost inaudible voice. After reviewing, through the analysis of Kant’s pedagogical theories, the relevance of this criticism, we point out its consequences on the life of institutions, the value of tradition and of great works, memory and symbolization. The disquiet of Lyotard invites us to consider that loyalty to childhood also promises an ironic loyalty to institutions, leaving them opened to all the dialectics of education.

The present work intends to describe the personality of a teacher from the beginning of the XIX Century who transgressed the traditional forms of being with the other in the “School of First Letters” in South America. The article is structured in three parts. The first part analyzes the concept of the foreigner and its possible relation with the first letters school of the XIX Century. The second part attempts to describe the form with which Simón Rodríguez offered hospitality to the foreigner in the school of Chuquisaca. Finally, we try to think of the possible relation between the concept of childhood, as described by Walter Kohan in his book Childhood, politics and thought, and the concepts of foreigner and hospitality in the thought of Simón Rodríguez.

The term “infancy” is usually associated with `childhood` and it seems to indicate more clearly a psycho-biologic reality in regard to an individual. In this study we wish to question this identification: to investigate childhood, not in it’s capturable constitution in the institutional context of the family, the school, place of work or even in her conditions of existence referring to ethnicity, gender or cognitive availabilities, but in what it approaches as a devenir. Our way of thinking about the word devenir is made possible because of its semantic strength to emphasize forms of return and of becoming; in other words, the processes of alteration in an existential state, more than a stage of life.

Considering dialogue as a fundamental philosophical experience, this paper aims to understand the possibility of a radical and emphatic dialogic practice in the formation of the educator-philosopher. “Educator-philosopher” is the term used to detach the importance of a dialogic specialization in philosophy so that the teacher’s teaching practice becomes a philosophical activity, and he finds himself as a philosopher in the ways of philosophy. The transdisciplinary perspective announced is configured as an epistemologic field of a dialogue methodology practiced at all ages of basic education. It has to do with an understanding of philosophy as an apprenticeship of appropriative thinking, which requires of the educator-philosopher a radical transformation, because only the one who learned to be a philosopher – the one who learned to investigate the "what" of things, investigating thoughts themselves – can favor the event of a dialogic practice whose focus is the apprenticeship of the articulator thought: to learn to learn with the seriousness of a child.

A marker of quality in a cultural experience is its enduring resonance as it engages its audience intellectually, imaginatively or emotionally. This is certainly the case with theatre that is made for adults and we should have the same ambition in theatre made for children. It is worth acknowledging, however, that children might need to be actively invited to take their engagement with a theatre performance further and provided with the time, skills and structures through which to do so. This paper presents the findings of a piece of research commissioned to explore the potential of using Philosophy Enquiry for Children (P4C) as the structure through which to deepen and enhance children’s engagement with theatre. In doing so it explores what happens when theatre is used as the stimulus material for a philosophical enquiry, providing insights into both the nature of the theatrical experience and the nature of P4C.

This article is an evaluative synthesis of my masters dissertation entitled “Body: possibilities of thinking and teaching philosophy: Philo-drama as an experience of formation”. This text proposes to think of the body in a specific relationship with philosophy, studying an aesthetic proposal – philodrama – which proposes dramatic games and textual transpositions to understand philosophical concepts. In what ways can philosophy in school contribute to the direction of a “hearing of one’s own body” making new forms of subjectivity possible so that these new ways of “hearing”counterbalance the instrumentalization of the body or the idea of the body as an object of consumption?

The paper deals with the analysis of the buffer or transitional nature of humanistic-oriented school subjects like “Philosophy for children” first introduced in the USA by Dr. M. Lipman and Dr. Ann Sharp. A new ecopsychological and ecofacilitative vision is suggested. The ecofacilitative approach is assumed to be better fit a) into the framework of the ongoing educational ecocrisis and b) as a resolution of the emergent eurointegration and globalization issues.