This chapter explores the critical consensus that children are always figures of the future anchored to cisgendered heterosexual reproduction, as proposed by critics like Rebekah Sheldon, Lee Edelman, Lauren Berlant, and Robin Bernstein. Against this view of the child, this chapter foregrounds the experiences of children in the U.S. educational system and in racially differentiated ways that don’t necessarily spare white children from a high disregard for their welfare. What it finds is that the “sacralization of the Child,” as Edelman put it, is a thin discursive tissue that distracts from pervasive negligence and racial anxiety. It concludes with a meditation on Ezra Pound’s famous imagist poem “In the Station of the Metro,” which the critic Josephine Park has identified as an important figure in Asian American literature because of the ways in which it popularized a highly orientalized idea of Chinese and Japanese culture. What is the view from the crowd the poem conjures, which is racially diverse and getting more so? What kind of claim on childhood does this crowd make?

Chapter Abstract: This chapter explores how to cultivate wisdom through public education. To educate for wisdom, we need to be clear about our target outcome. We suggest a wise student is one who is healthy and well-integrated physically, personally, intellectually and socially—what Rogers called “a fully functioning person.” Educational programs need specific indicators of progress, so we propose six connections to being, feeling, and thinking. These connections are established and strengthened by curricula that include: studying inspirational exemplars; teaching strategies to become like those exemplars (e.g., journaling); teaching concepts related to wisdom (e.g., critical thinking); and building real and virtual educational environments. Although the best teachers already teach for wisdom, many (perhaps most) teachers in public education do not. Making teaching for wisdom more common requires changes to current teacher education, student assessment and educational policy.

Difficult times are when leaders need to rise up. There is no more important or impactful time for you to demonstrate your character and mettle, no time your group needs you more. Leaders cannot shrink from this responsibility, or they should be replaced. It does not take tremendous intelligence to strive in a crisis, but it does require character, fortitude, and courage. This chapter outlines some principles that may be of use in the event of a crisis. It begins with understanding the scope of the problem and how it will affect your group. It goes into how to stay ahead of the curve, predicting the potential outcomes and implications of the crisis before they occur. It talks about the importance of clear, concise, and effective communication to your group. It goes into the importance of aligning your actions with not only your group but the groups above you, such as the hospital and medical school. It covers the concepts of surveying your constituents, learning from them, and adapting your responses based on their needs. We talk about the importance of addressing mental health issues that develop in response to a crisis, not only for your group but also for yourself. It concludes with how to come out on the other side of the crisis as a strong and functional group.

Your vision statement for your group, presented both orally and in writing, is one of your most important and memorable acts as a leader. It should be given a great deal of advance thought and planning ahead of time, and you should be sure to vet it with a number of people who will give you good and frank advice. Although they can be intimidating, vision statements are usually full of positivity and forward thinking, are a great source of inspiration to your group, and serve as the ultimate frame of reference. This chapter describes difference between “mission” and “vision,” and how to develop both types of statements. It discusses the three “pillars” of academic medicine – clinical, research, and education – but also additional pillars worth considering as you develop your mission and vision statements. It goes into how to set goals, metrics, and milestones for your vision statement, as well timelines for achieving them. It then describes how to get your group to fully understand your vision and rally behind it, and concludes with a discussion of how to periodically reassess and recalibrate your vision.

The chapter aims at investigating the way Galen constructs his philosophical theories in dialogue with his predecessors, both by adhering and by opposing to their doctrines. For this purpose, it focuses on a certain part of his epistemology, namely his account of sense perception and, in particular, his theory of vision. I argue that Galen’s perceptual theory starts from material he finds in the Platonic dialogues, but revises it significantly either in order to reply to objections raised by Plato’s opponents or in order to rebut unfortunate, at least to his mind, adaptations of the Platonic inheritance. Indeed, in his attempt to defend Plato’s views on sense perception, Galen does not recoil from borrowing whatever seems to him valuable from rival philosophical schools, and it is this enriched reworking of the Platonic theory that he adopts as his own philosophical stance. To fully reconstruct and comprehend Galen’s method in his general theory of sense perception and in his theory of vision, I draw my evidence from what Galen tells us about these topics in his extant works, and especially in the seventh book of his treatise On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato.

This chapter explores Britten’s investment in composing for young people – the most obvious outworking of his well-known belief that the composer had a ‘duty to society’. It positions this part of his oeuvre within the context of a number of interconnected contemporary critical debates: about national education reform; about the supposed impact of sound reproduction technologies on the public’s listening habits; about the arts’ imagined capacity to nurture ‘responsible citizens’; and about the contested consequences of industrialisation for local culture and community. It then examines two different ways in which Britten responded to cultural critics’ concerns about the socially alienating conditions of modern life: whereas Noye’s Fludde sought to foster community through promoting amateur performance, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra encouraged a different kind of cultural participation premised on ‘active’ listening. More broadly, these compositions reveal how arts education became a vehicle for debating, making sense of, and regulating the social changes that took place in mid-twentieth-century Britain.

This chapter examines the involvement of the Roman empire in administrating education in provincial cities during the High Empire, through regulation of exemption from tutelages. It uses the case of Aelius Aristides, who appealed against his own exemption being revoked. The chapter traces the various interests and forces which shaped provincial education both in the civic arena as well as in the imperial one.

This chapter explores how human children soften the abusive edge of carceral spaces. Prisons, immigration detention centres, and zoos and aquaria are institutions that attract sustained public scrutiny from prisoner rights, migrant rights, anti-racist, and animal rights movements. Among other things, critics contest the messaging that these institutions and their proponents use to assure the public of the need for confinement and the ethical acceptability of the conditions captive animals and humans experience. These discourses, depending on the specific institution, highlight the larger public “law and order” interests of safety and border control, but also “progressive” interests of rehabilitation, conservation, and education. In highlighting these latter “progressive” interests, carceral institutions seek to humanize themselves and their work to bolster their social credibility. This “humane-washing” occurs through long-standing rationales about rehabilitation for offenders in the prison context, and more recent rationales about the conservation of nature and conservation education in the zoo and aquarium context. It also, I will argue, occurs through a specific type of marshaling of the human child. I apply a multispecies lens to consider how the real and imagined human child in the zoo and aquaria context, and narratives about what is in the best interests of human children in the immigration and prison context, figure into characterizing such carceral institutions as legally and socially legitimate spaces.

Angela Watkins argues that although Quicksand is a well-studied novel, more attention should be paid to Nella Larsen’s depiction of education and educational institutions. Analyzing the objectives, rules, and regulations of historically Black colleges during the early twentieth century, the chapter examines Larsen’s critique of the conformity instilled in HBCU students. By drawing upon biographies of Nella Larsen, the chapter reveals how Larsen’s own problematic experiences at Fisk and Tuskegee shaped her fictionalization of Black southern institutions and the broader examination of ideologies of racial uplift.

In economics the labour force comes out of nowhere. Under capitalism children are still produced at home. Under slavery they were reared for profit. Children were reared collectively in kibbutzim and boarding schools. In industrialising Britain child labour paid for itself. Affluent societies rely on communal education. Even private schools are not-for-profit. The slogan of school choice was invented for racial segregation. Its appeal is social separation. For politicians and wealthy backers the charter school/free school/academy model is ideological money-laundering and opportunities for enrichment. Despite three decades of effort school choice has failed. Universities derive their economic support from student fees financed by government loans. This encourages expensive facilities, at the expense of students and staff. Student loans have become a lifelong burden exacerbating inequality. Bringing children to maturity relies on family altruism and public education. Other methods have failed.