L’educazione come mediazione tra i bambini e il mondo

Abstract

Education as a deliberate activity and purposive process necessarily involves me- diation, in the sense that the educator mediates between the child and the world. This can take dif- ferent forms: the educator may function as a guide who initia- tes children into particular practices and domains and their modes of thinking and perceiving; or act as a filter, selecting what of the world the child encounters and how; or meet the child as representative of the adult world. I look at these types of mediation (or aspects of the mediating role of the educator) at the hand of the work of John Dewey, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Richard Peters. The purpose of this paper is to explore the bearing that the mediating role of the edu- cator—as interpreted by these authors—has on the role wonder may play in the educational process. I suggest that initiation highlights the familiarizing function of won- der, and is most readily associated with inquisitive wonder; representa-tion draws attention to the defamiliarizing role of (in particular contemplative) wonder, as well as to its world-affirming role; and selection (the educator as ‘fil-ter’) foregrounds the distinction between momentary and dispositional wonder.