Sylvia Wynter's wide-ranging intellectual contributions contain a poetics of being and becoming human that serve to counter the hegemony of developmental psychology and its articulation of the child in teacher education. In this article, I use Wynter's insights to unsettle the universality of this child figure to reveal the child of Man, a genre-specific formulation of the not-yet-fully-human white modal child. In the first part of the article, I demonstrate how the origins of the developing child are conjoined with purely biocentric nineteenth century views of the human as formulated within the context of asserting the hegemony of the Western bourgeois subject. In the second part, I consider how the genre-specific trope of the child of Man persists in teacher education and the kind of subjectivities it compels for teaching candidates. I explore materials relating to the developmental psychology course (i.e. standards, syllabi and textbook), an important site where teacher candidates confront notions of the child. I argue that the white Western bourgeois child masquerading as universal child is key to reproducing our current hierarchical order by inciting the violence of continual measurement, evaluation and ranking, thereby legitimizing and depoliticizing the "achievement gap", and condemning Black, brown and poor children. In conclusion, I suggest ways to use Wynter's poetics of being and becoming human in the constructive sense to inspire other ways of thinking about the child, teaching and learning for a project of re-enchanting humanism.