Humanistic Perspectives group member, Nick Swarbrick has been writing about education in the new and very altered situation that we find ourselves in, for the blog: Education in the Face of Existential threat. He starts:
“For some time I have been intrigued by the stories not told in books written with children in mind (I’ll use the shorthand “children’s literature” from now on): the author (and sometimes the reader) consider what happens before a story starts, what happens alongside and afterwards. In some books these “beyond the text” narratives are hardly dealt with at all, and characters emerge like Athene from the brow of Zeus, fully formed. It can work well: the child reader particularly perhaps invests in a child they might assume to be like themselves. Often the characters are introduced and then bits and pieces of their lives are dropped in. This too works well (if done sensibly), fleshing out details of the character as needed. Rarely, however, do we see this detail in the minor characters, and we are often left at the end of a book with “that’s all right then:” justice is served, wrongs put to rights and “all manner of thing shall be well.””
Read more here.
Humanistic Perspectives on Education 