The articulation between children and nature does something within arts education, particularly when it comes to the apology of the senses, following the premises pointed out by the ‘sensualist philosophers’ of the late seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries (Jütte 2005). The apologists of the senses believed that thinking depended on sense impressions and those were rooted in the body. A comparison used by the end of the eighteenth-century by the French physiologist George Cabanis was that as the stomach digested food, so the brain digested the sense impressions (Jütte 2005, 137).
My argument is that this something that the articulation of children and nature ‘do’ is part of a primitivist way of thinking about the ‘white’ child, essentializing childhood as ‘authentic’ in contrast to the forces of civilization. It means that the appeal of nature and childhood, and the intersection of the senses, creates effects in terms of determining and legitimizing universals about how children learn: from the simple to the complex, from experimentation, through curiosity and imagination, from an engagement with the objects and the world that starts in sensations and perceptions until it reaches reason.
Within the western modern education, the senses, which counted as five, did not have the same privileges, and limits and different values were also imposed among them and in each of them. These limits and values give rise to ways of using the senses that also configure the borders of children’s freedom in relation to their bodies.
In Emile, Rousseau stated that “to train the senses it is not enough merely to use them; we must learn to judge by their means, to learn to feel, so to speak; for we cannot touch, see, or hear, except as we have been taught” (Rousseau 1925, 97). This learning of the senses was part of the government of the self of the child, and if it had a moral purpose, its great importance was that it would be transformed into a self-governing practice. Children would learn how to conduct their own conducts according to an ideal of freedom that corresponded with the taking of the right behavior.
C.M.