The idea that teachers love children is often taken for granted in education. Rarely is the idea of love itself examined. Bringing together the work of educators, curriculum theorists and clinical psychoanalysts, and drawing upon autobiographical and narrative case studies, this groundbreaking collection examines the collision of love and learning, including the ways in which such intersections are provoked, repressed and denied. Contributors turn to psychoanalysis to explore questions of love in all of its varying permutations - ambivalence, sexuality, hatred, desire, projection, and loss - in order to demonstrate how the social ramifications of such work is critical to the ways teachers are currently being prepared for life in the classroom.

Introduction. Introduction to the Interludes Interlude 1: Scenes of Love and Control: Born Into Brothels. I Love Them To Death. Savage Inequalities Indeed: Irrationality and Urban School Reform Interlude 2: Scenes from The Black Couch: Dottie Gets Spanked. On the Vicissitudes of Love and Hate: Anne Sexton's Pedagogy of Loss and Reparation. Mother Love's Education. Interlude 3. The Painful Politics of Love and History. Transnational Adoptions and Queer Diasporas. Parenting and the Narcisstic Demands of Whiteness. Interlude 4: The Child's Question Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and Little Oedipus: On the Pleasures and Disappointments of Sexual Enlightenment. On Knowing and Desiring Children: The Significance of the Unthought Known Interlude 5: Curriculum and the Erotics of Learning. Romantic Research: Why We Love to Read. Reading, Writing and the Wrath of My Father. Love in the Classroom: Desire and Transference in Teaching and Learning. About the Contributors