ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to show how Ralph Waldo Emerson provides a reworking of Kantian understandings of moral education in young children’s Bildung. Emerson’s work thereby serves as an example of how an essayist, mainly studied in the humanities, can shed light on educational issues and how reading his essays can be a form of educational research in itself, and perhaps even an alternative to curriculum theory. The chapter begins and ends by thinking of Emersonian self-cultivation as a form of improvisatory or wild Bildung. It explores the role of Bildung and self-cultivation in preschools through a philosophy that accounts for children’s “wild wisdom” by letting Emerson speak to Kant. The paper argues that Kant’s vision of Bildung essentially involves reason’s turn upon itself and that Emerson, particularly in how he is taken up by Cavell, shows that such a turn is already present in the processes of children inheriting, learning, and improvising with language. This improvisatory outlook on moral education is contrasted with common goals of moral education prescribed in early childhood education, using the Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool Lpfö 98 1as an example.
