Belonging to the World. On Children, Education, and Migration
摘要
Gibran’s poem “On Children” (1923) directs our attention to the intricacies of addressing the issue of children’s belonging, a fundamental need of every human being and a matter of recognitional and associational justice. However, although children want and need to belong, Gibran cautions that children do not belong to and are not to be owned by anybody. This raises questions about the world children belong to and the responsibilities of adults to ensure that specific expectations are not overly constraining them by a place they are entitled to call home. The question of children’s belonging becomes more pronounced where the education of migrant children is concerned. Immigrant children’s bonding to the school is crucial to their educational development and economic independence. Yet the price they pay for assimilating into ways of life prevalent in their new home country cannot be underestimated, considering the fraught experiences of living in the borderlands between their original home and new home. Given the increasingly interconnected world, this chapter argues that rather than considering children as belonging to countries, cultures or schools, educators should aim for their belonging to the world.