Brexit, “child as method” and the pedagogy of failure: how discourses of childhood structure the resistance of racist discourse to analysis

Octave Mannoni's (1969/2003) essay, “I know well, but all the same”, identifies how cultural pedagogies involving the deception of children underlie adherence to socially shared convictions that are recognised to be untrue, so illuminating how racist discourse works and accounting for its deniability and (paradoxical) persistence. Mannoni's methods and argument are applied to contemporary illustrations of racism and nationalism - specifically, discussions of “Brexit”. Reading Mannoni through Frantz Fanon’s writings, I indicate how Mannoni is subject to the very (racialised) dynamic he identified. Yet by highlighting the mutual configuration of generational, gendered, classed and racialised attributions that underlie dynamics of othering, Mannoni’s “mistake”/ “failure” enriches interpretation of Fanon’s claims about childhood. Intersecting childhood studies and critical pedagogy, this analysis is exemplifies an analytical approach, “child as method”, which resists the modern, Western abstraction of the child from sociopolitical relations that position it as “other”, and so contributes to decolonizing pedagogies.