The text looks at some metaphors used in arts education discourses, namely the metaphor of the child as a seed and as a plant, and of the educator as a gardener, whose function would be to conduct, without disturbing, the child's growth. These practices are contradictory and carry various types of violence, whether in the ways of imagining a universal child (having the subject European, adult, male, 'white', non-disabled, as a becoming) from developmentalist perspectives, or in the hope of their future. The idea of child's nature is a powerful ally for maintaining these powers, as the way in which modernity has conceived nature, and the child as a metaphor for nature, naturalizes this same idea of a childish nature as true and universal. Gardening metaphors in education are profoundly moral and colonizing. Like tutors in the world of botany, these gardening metaphors of education are starightening devices.
The original text is in Portuguese and can be downloaded here