Learning care lessons:Literacy, love, care and solidarity – Maggie Feeley – 2014
An ethnographic exploration of learning care carried outwith adult survivors of institutional abuses in the now notorious Irish industrial schools highlights the pivotal importance of care through their retelling of care-less childhood memories. The book argues for the notion of learning care to be given serious consideration and for the state to fulfill its learning care duty to equally resource families, schools and communities to do this pivotal work.Learning care abuses are not confined to Ireland or indeed to the past. Across continents, similar cases of institutionalised educational injustice have emerged, perpetrated against aboriginal, poor and misrecognised minorities. Today, perhaps with less obvious savagery, such disregard persists in learning inequalities rooted in self-replicating systems of privilege, that cherish the potential of some, whilst wasting that of others. We are all diminished by this neglected potential. ‘Learning care lessons develops the potential of the zemiological perspective to illustrate the social harm caused by historic, structural educational and care inequalities. The notion of state learning care usefully identifies that today, as in the past, it is those that make decisions about social structures that are fundamentally responsible for the disparate learning experiences and life trajectories of individuals and groups. Price UK £12.95 ISBN 978-1872767987Available from Amazon and Tufnell Press