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This article discusses how assumptions about the nature of childhood have been triggered in the confrontations about the legitimacy of gender and sexuality themes in education in contemporary Brazil. We analyse two practical-discursive pitfalls that have been consolidated in these confrontations. The first, forged by anti-gender discussion and education activists, consists in the narrative construction of vulnerable childhood to be protected, and triggers moral panic at the prospect of discussions about gender and sexuality in schools. The second, more subtle trap, concerns the situation of passivity attributed to students in the school context, who are considered to be the subjects of instruction by teachers, including those moments when gender and sexuality issues are addressed in the classroom. The image of a child-prisoner, passive and in danger made-up by the "gender ideologues," populates the narratives analysed in the first part of the paper. It allows us to discuss the political uses of the hyperinflation of this idea of child vulnerability. However, even in educational practices that invest in working gender and sexuality matters in school setting, we observe that children can be conceived as lacking agency, such as discussed in the paper's second part. In order to challenge these logics, we highlight the ludic dimension and playing with conceptual and methodological tools that can contribute to a non-pedagogizing approach to gender and sexuality in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biesta raises questions about the relationship between thinking and education. He wonders whether there are dimensions of education that cannot occur through the advancement of thought alone. In this paper I consider this prospect in relation to the community of philosophical enquiry and also take up Biesta's comment about liking gardens in schools. This is not in order to assert a particular analogy between gardens and gardening and the school and teaching, but rather to explore the possibility of there being practical resemblances between the existence of a garden and the human activity of gardening, and how a school should exist and the kinds of activities taking place in schools. By the close of this short paper I will have opened for further discussion the possibility that there may be some resemblances between what teachers and gardeners need to do, for example the attentiveness to uniqueness as well as creative forces outside human control. I show there is already an awareness of these concerns present in Ann Sharp's writing and close by discussing the implications for this in terms of the role of the teacher in the community of philosophical inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]