The Rights and Personhood of Other People's Children

• In Event: Education at the Borders: Rights, Refugees, and Responsibilities

Abstract

Context and Problem:
This paper links Arendt’s (1973) notion of “rightlessness” to political treatments of what educational scholar Delpit (1996) terms “other people’s children” to examine the abject situation of human violation of children separated from their parents and detained in camps in EL Paso, Texas. Delpit’s (2006) study of the domestic, pedagogical processes by which some children are made inhuman (Lyotard, 1991), foreign (Kristeva, 1991), and apart from multiple group membership through the denial of humanness (Oliver, 2001) and rights (Arendt, 1973) provides insight into educational apparatuses by which communities are disabled and decimated through attacks on their children and kinship ties.

Approaches and Sources:
I first discuss what is meant by “other people’s children” through a discussion of Delpit’s findings. I then bring Arendt’s (1958) practice of “political thinking” to my affective reading of news reports, children and parents’ testimony, and human rights worker documents on the crisis and justifications of the detainment as given by political actors enacting family separation. I also turn to pedagogical witnessing (Simon, 2015) of colonial and education histories of child separation to deliberate the pedagogical means by which the private sphere is mobilized to disable and decimate a people. I re-read children with rights of their own as a mechanism by which a group membership might be established, acknowledged, and secured rather than implied by and/or subsumed in the “human” rights of their parents.

Significance:
This paper makes explicit links between pedagogical and in-private practices examined in Delpit’s study of the education of black children to those political ones reportedly being practiced on children by border police and other officials in the El Paso detention and deportation camps. Reading rightlessness on multiple levels as a distinct feature of children’s lives, I suggest that securing political personhood of children intervenes in domestic practices of ethnic conflict waged by state governments between children and their parents. Blurring the private and political domains in human conflict, men commit heinous and unthinkable crimes against women and children. Extending Arendt’s distinctions out of her reluctance to politically think private spheres, I show that there is no project more important than engaging the processes by which private domains are mobilized by governments to commit unthinkable political acts. Without examining the leading role the political weaponizing of the private domains play in what Derrida (1992) calls the “worst violence” sanctioned by state and political actors, schools, teachers, and, at times, parents are unable to protect and preserves the natality and newness of all the world’s children entrusted to adult care and responsibility. Children as a group must have rights of their own protecting their uniqueness, bodies, familial ties, and educational potential that requires legal and educational recognition to be upheld in the private, educational, and public spheres of human life. Without serious consideration of how a weaponizing of the domos feeds human on child violence, we fail to protect and preserve the natality and newness of all the world’s children entrusted to adult care and responsibility.

Author

• Aparna Rita Mishra Tarc, York University