The Children's Table Podcast

This episode explores moments when adults become completely consumed by the specter (see what we did there?) of children in spiritual danger – and spiritual danger so severe that it threatens their physical well-being. Where do these fears come from? How do our ideas about children’s vulnerabilities feed those fears? How do adults act on their anxieties, and how do kids respond? We consider a range of texts across time that exemplify adults’ fears about children’s potential contact with the darker side of the supernatural – from Henry James’s unsettlingly knowing child protagonist Flora in Turn of the Screw to the images of endangered children circulated by conspiracy-driven organizations such as QAnon – but our conversation centers around a watershed cultural moment when adults' fears about children’s safety reached a fever pitch: the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.  For related materials and a reading list, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/.

Being a young person can be pretty frightening — things are uncertain, and adults can be untrustworthy. For children in the past, violence, and the fear it caused, was a part of everyday life. And then there were other, less mundane threats -- from the world beyond!  It seems that kids have always enjoyed (or, well, not enjoyed) a particular connection with the supernatural, the otherworldly, the creepy, and the weird. In this season, we will explore those connections. Be prepared for scary stories of what happens when adults demonize children.  

Our first episode looks at moments in history when children were imagined as having one foot in both the natural and supernatural worlds. Sometimes children saw themselves as powerful ambassadors to the spirit realm — a realm, it seems important to point out, where there were forces even more powerful than the adults that otherwise ruled their lives. At other points, children were seen as the victims of supernatural forces, often working in tandem with evil adults. These narratives often resulted in adults telling themselves that they were empowered, indeed required, to take on the role of heroic avenger on behalf of beleaguered children. Come for the medieval children who could prophesy the future through crystals, stay for the nineteenth-century spiritualist children who claimed to talk to the dead!  For related materials and a reading list, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/ 

This episode explores how often lesson plans devised for American children reflect adult biases about nation, race, and religion. Where did our current educational standards come from? What power do students have to shape what their schools teach them? Who decides what is written in the textbooks children read? We have some surprising answers. For related materials and a reading list, please visit  thechildrenstablepodcast.com  

We like to imagine schools as places where children are encouraged to explore their environment, to learn new things, and to expand their imaginations. But for many schoolchildren, both in the past and in the present, learning is a process distorted by  fear of physical punishment.  In this episode, we explore the history behind the belief that some children require fear and pain in order to learn. 

Unfortunately, that belief is still with us, particularly when it comes to disciplinary measures deployed against children of color.  We end the episode with a brief exploration of how some schools are seeking to offer alternatives to a disciplinary regime that has become so extreme critics refer to it as the school-to-prison pipeline. For related materials and a reading list, please visit  thechildrenstablepodcast.com. 

If you’ve attended school in the U.S. in the past 50 years, physical education probably has an oversized influence on how you think about the school day—for better or for worse. As we are constantly reminded by popular culture, physical education has been a rite of passage for school children for generations. Today’s episode turns to Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau to explore how eighteenth-century thinking about children’s bodies still resonates with how we think children should learn.  We  then explore other iterations of physical education, including the contortions of handwriting class and the heady dangers of adventure playgrounds. To find related materials and a reading list please visit our website: https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/ 

In this episode we discuss how often children's lives are lost to history,  and then  celebrate one particular child who defied the odds.  James McCune Smith went on to become the first African American to earn an M.D., but before that he impressed his teachers, met the Marquis de Lafayette in New York City, and joined other African American students for advocating for change—all nearly forty years before the Emancipation Proclamation.  For related materials, including a reading list, please visit childrenstablepodcast.com. 

We have talked about how we imagine children through the lessons we feel they need to learn. In this episode, we’re thinking about another part of the schooling process—how to get children to do the work we’ve decided it’s important for them to do, whatever it is! Systems for motivating children reveal what adults think children want. What children do within those systems sometimes tells us something quite different. . .  

For a related materials and a reading list, please go to https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/

If you want to see what a culture hopes for, or is afraid of, look at their lesson plans. What we decide to teach--and what we decide to avoid teaching--tells us a lot about what a society believes in.  In this episode, we ask: how do our ideas about children and childhood impact curriculum? How do changes in curriculum reflect changes in what adults believe children are, what children want, and what children need to learn?  

In response to these questions, we explore the bizarre lessons embedded in nineteenth-century temperance curriculum, which was dedicated to teaching children what not to want (hint: alcohol!).  We also examine the philosophy of German educator Friedrich Fröbel, who was dedicated to placing children’s wants at the center of the school day. Finally, we consider the ongoing struggle over how much say young people have in the content of the lessons that they are asked to absorb. For related materials and a reading list,  please visit thechildrenstablepodcast.com 

Children are usually considered bystanders to history.  The Children's Table podcast seeks to set the record straight.  Three professors draw from their teaching and research to reveal the surprising roles young people have played in history, politics, and culture in the past and in the present. The Children's Table podcast premieres on September 15th! https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/