Again on educational processes

There are some good reasons to disentagle children from the all spanning gaze of the educator adult and let them organize and regulate themselves as far as possible. This way, children have a favorable environment and a suitable tempo to be children for a while and to follow learning processes in a meaningful way for them. Nevertheless, this restraint on behalf of the adult that preserves and creates a childfriendly, even a childlike space, suffers from some sort of abstract nostalgia or simplistic reduction of what is held as the adult world. It can be envisaged, for example, an educational context where children can move in between two poles, one of which would be, off course, the free run evolutions of children in fellowship and learning, but in which the other pole was the making public, the exposition, of some kind of contents arranged and created by them. I'm not thinking about the typical performance or display of their skills before the family. It's more of an entering in a public place that is not at all restricted to a public of adults, but a kind of formalization of the utterances or activities before an attentive audience that will be able to discuss and comment on the performance. What most holds us back from what would look like a stress for the little ones is understandably our fear that it subjects children to demands of competing and applause. Actually, applause and its variants is something that should be banished from our relationship with children. Everybody knows that we have lost every sense and judgement for the simplest valuation, we have no consistent set of values that we could try to make valid without experiencing a feeling of being fraudulent, even dishonest. But even for that very reason it is not sufficient to shelter children from any such valuation, there should be the practice and skill of skipping it by being able to discuss and problematize. By entering a more formal platform of communication, reception and criticism, children get a built in medium where they can control themselves while overcoming the non-plus-ultra reception of the educator adult. This medium of expression, unbounded from its fanciful refuge in creativity, advances towards a problematization of what one does and, so, why not, of childhood. What would childhood say if it were let speak?