Early Childhood, Aging, and the Life Cycle

In this book, Silin maps the common ground between early childhood and the period sociologists call “young-old age.” Emphasizing the continuities that bind children and adults rather than the differences that traditional developmental psychology claims separate us, he focuses on the themes we all manage across a lifetime. Building on memoir and narrative, Silin argues that when we recognize how the concerns of childhood continue to thread their way through our experience, we look anew at the shape of our lives. This book highlights the powerful generative acts through which people of all ages find new meanings and relationships to compensate for the individual and social losses that mark our lives. 

“Silin tells us early in this astute, artistically crafted book that he has not yet ‘reached the assessment of completion that has allowed authors like Phillip Roth and Alice Munro to announce that they have given up their pens.’ To those of us in the field of early childhood education who have been eagerly reading his books for thirty years, Silin is our Roth, our Monro, which makes his continuing to write very welcome news indeed.” (Joseph Tobin, Elizabeth Garrard Hall Professor of Early Childhood Education, University of Georgia, USA)

“Reading this memoir, you understand why Jonathan Silin must have been such a gifted teacher, first of children, and someone who himself has never stopped learning. This is a story of how he finds the power to live and mourn the challenges of ageing parents, the loss of a beloved partner, the transformations and presence of new life and new love, and the endless encounter with the changing body. This is also a story particular to its time: haunted bythe AIDS epidemic, funny and thoughtful around coming of age as a gay man just post Stonewall, and joining the movement of radical education that transformed schools and teaching.” (Adrienne Harris, Faculty and Supervisor in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York University, USA)

“Jonathan Silin’s beautifully worded soulful study invites readers into the remarkable course of life with the sophistications of temporality. Memory then becomes reawakening and rewriting of interest in the play between the young and the old. These stories of learning are those of learning to live, told with grace, wit, honesty, and capacious involvement with the surprising idea that the personal, after all, is intersubjective.” (Deborah P. Britzman, Distinguished Professor of Research, York University, Canada)

“This archive in the form of a memoir is threaded through the remarkable life of an important early childhood educator, curriculum theorist, andAIDS activist. Like an archive, like a classroom, this autobiography is ‘a pledge of responsibility to and for those who will follow.’ It is a pledge to which we owe allegiance.” (William F. Pinar, Professor and Canada Research Chair, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)

“Silin’s beautifully worded soulful study invites readers into the remarkable course of life with the sophistications of temporality. Memory then becomes reawakening and rewriting of interest in the play between the young and the old. These stories of learning are those of learning to live, told with grace, wit, honesty, and capacious involvement with the surprising idea that the personal, after all, is intersubjective.” (Deborah P. Britzman, Distinguished Professor of Research, York University, UK, and author of Melanie Klein: Early Analysis, Play and the Question of Freedom)

Jonathan G. Silin is Editor-in-Chief of the Occasional Papers Series at the Bank Street College of Education, USA, and a fellow at the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. His previous books include Sex, Death, and the Education of Children: Our Passion for Ignorance in the Age of AIDS and My Father’s Keeper: Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents. http://www.jonathansilin.com