Familiar or strange? Rediscovering the ‘real’ child of educational policy through film

The working thesis of my latest research is that cinema can offer a viewer something of a ‘re-education in education’. In the case of policymakers and researchers in the field of education, this means looking again at the reality of the conceptual phenomena with which we occupy ourselves in writing to see whether the two groups are aligned. This article will first look at how the figure of the child is commonly constructed as an object of knowledge within policy and philosophical discourse, suggesting that this approach affirms frameworks in which it is possible to know what a child is, but may fail to do justice to the child of our ordinary experience. I then turn to a discussion of some of Iran’s so-called ‘children’s films’, exploring how their presentation of a world, and the representation of children within that world, allow for a re-education in the lived reality of children. It is suggested that this aesthetic turn in observing the child's behaviour may encourage a more faithful representation of that reality within educational policy and research also.