Do ‘we’ really live in rapidly changing times? Questions concerning time,childhood,technology and education

Abstract

The arrival of digital media in early education appears to have been both the cause and effect of an idea of a universal experience of rapidly changing time. In this article, the role and purpose of the phrase ‘we live in rapidly changing times’ is of critical concern. The phrase is questioned in order to avoid taking its meaning for granted, arguing for an openness to the ways in which such a phrase might impact on teaching and learning, adulthood and childhood, education and school. The article engages with time as a universalising and colonising experience, and looks at how the times and time are talked about in particular ways and for particular purposes. The analysis in this article theorises time in relation to technology, economics, development and the broader politics of progress. These ideas are situated as critical to how the times are seen as rapidly changing. In exploring a range of texts and contexts, the article makes apparent the politics of the phrase. The article argues for questioning and resisting claims regarding the times on the grounds that studying and teaching childhood and technology will be more open to the ways in which their educational subjectivities are constructed. The article concludes with a turn to resistance to ideas about the inevitability of the times in which the teacher finds herself. Looking briefly at the writing of Albert Camus, strategies for resistance are offered that promote to teachers the idea of playing with time.

From day to day teachers engage with the idea that ‘we live in rapidly changing times’. The snowballing of the production of electronic devices and associated educational applications invites teachers to regard times as rapidly changing. Teachers are under pressure to ensure that the early childhood curriculum keeps up with the rapid pace of these times of technological change (e.g. see Gibbons, 2008). Hence, the arrival of digital media in early education appears to have been both the cause and effect of this idea of the rapidly changing times in which ‘we’ all appear to live. In this article, the role and purpose of this phrase is of critical concern. The phrase is questioned in order to avoid taking its meaning for granted, arguing for an openness to the ways in which such a phrase might impact on teaching and learning, adulthood and childhood, education and school. The questions that are asked include: How does the phrase work and how can it be understood within a broader critique of time in early childhood? In addition, who uses this idea of rapidly changing times and why? What counts as the evidence of changing times, and how might this evidence be understood critically through different critiques of the construction of time, politics, technology and development?

In particular, the article engages with time as a universalising and colonising experience – that we all live in rapidly changing times. This perception is influential on account of its widespread and, it is argued here, uncritical use in the study of childhood and of education. The article looks at the way the times and time are talked about, and the purposes for talking about the times in particular ways. For evidence of this condition and for exploration of its purpose and outcomes, the article is particularly interested in the ways in which new relationships between childhood and technology are legitimated on account of the perceived rapidness of the changing of ‘our’ times. The universality of the times of rapid change legitimates intervention in the curriculum and, in particular, in the subjectivities of the child, parent and teacher.

The analysis in this article takes on three phases in order to theorise time in relation to technology, economics, development and the broader politics of progress. These four ideas are situated as critical to how the times are seen as rapidly changing. The purpose of this article is to explore the ways in which these ideas can contribute to the task of theorising temporality and, in particular, to the task of questioning the taken-for-grantedness of the rapid changingness of the times. In exploring a range of texts and contexts, the article makes apparent the politics of the phrase. The purpose is to show what wants to be said and what is hidden. The article argues for questioning and resisting claims regarding the times on the grounds that studying and teaching childhood and technology will be more open to the ways in which educational subjectivities are constructed. The article concludes with a turn to resistance to ideas about the inevitability of the times in which the teacher finds herself. Looking briefly at the writing of Albert Camus, strategies for resistance are offered that promote to teachers the idea of playing with time.

Technology and economics, and the times

The modern age is defined by time, by a temporalization of experience, that is, an understanding that events and change are meaningful in their occurrence in and through time. (Lesko, 2001: 35)

To say that ‘we live in rapidly changing times’ is, following Lesko, to recognise the problem of modernity: the problem of time. Modernity is the times of time in a way that other times, premodernity and postmodernity perhaps, are not times in which time is regarded as a significant or central problem. This problem appeared to Martin Heidegger (1993) as the problem of forgetfulness. Following his theorisation of the essence of technology, a characteristic of modernity is to consider the problem of the times in a very paradoxical way. For instance, to consider that we live in rapidly changing times requires that we think of these times as a universally experienced problem, at the same time as the times are a highly idiosyncratic problem that makes the times in which we live unique to ‘us’. For Heidegger, this approach to thinking about modernity and, in particular, to industrial and post-industrial eras draws on a concern for progress. This concern for progress is believed to have significant implications for childhood and for education (e.g. see Bolstad et al., 2012; Hallett and Prout, 2003; Loveless and Williamson, 2013; McPake and Plowman, 2010; Popkewitz and Bloch, 2001; Selwyn, 2014).

In particular, a child’s ‘life narrative’ (Lesko, 2001: 35) is constructed in relation to technology – whether or not technology is regarded as having life-giving or life-harming ends. Digital technologies are seen to have a particular effect on the time of childhood, speeding up childhood such that it might pass us by in a flash, almost disappearing (Postman, 1994). A discourse of ‘digital childhoods’ predominates thinking and generates anxieties about the ways in which the child and the society around her are experiencing a new kind of digital time.

Central to these anxieties is a concern that the present is rapid in its changingness and, given such conditions, education requires a particular kind of approach that is sensitive to (e.g. see Loveless and Williamson, 2013) or mitigates against (e.g. see Selwyn, 2014) the times. In terms of the former, digital-age discourses regularly advise on the critical reality of the rapidness of change and the essentialness, therefore, of taking up some kind of matrix of new media, new pedagogy and new ideas regarding knowledge and intelligence. For early childhood education, these concerns have led to policy and practice focused on children’s appropriate learning with and for new media.

The lives that children born in the first decade of the 21st century will lead are likely to be very different from those of their parents. Digital technologies are transforming the way people work, shop, study and play so rapidly that it is difficult to anticipate what these activities will be like in twenty years’ time, when the children in our case studies will be completing their studies, beginning work and starting their own families. How can parents best prepare children for adult life in an unpredictable future? (McPake and Plowman, 2010: 224)

McPake and Plowman’s (2010) concerns suggest that unpredictability is something quite specific to the times, while not specifically stating that in earlier times parents had an easier job predicting the future for which they should prepare their children. In the study of early childhood education, the idea of preparing children for the future has been critiqued for some time and so there is likely to be an openness to releasing any anxieties regarding preparation for the future. However, the arguments that begin with educational uncertainties in times of rapid change are typically not talking about a relaxation of the preparation of the child for a particular future. Rather, they focus on preparing in different ways through different relationships to technology. For instance, in their education, children’s preparation must now be focused on collaborative processes of adaptation and production rather than individualised processes of familiarisation and consumption (Bolstad et al., 2012).

These ideas of being are intimately connected to ideas about technology. The kind of being that predominates thinking ‘is one of flexibility and activity, preparing for a society of an as yet undefined type but reflecting universalized ideas of flexibility and activity’ (Popkewitz and Bloch, 2001: 103). However, it is not just technological thinking, but rather a connection between technological and economic thinking that should be explored in relation to childhood in rapidly changing times.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the education sector is expected to respond to the rapid nature of 21st-century economic, social and technological change. Education must be future-focused given any agreement on the rapid nature of the times. The essence and purpose of this focus on the future is economic – for instance, ‘[e]very young New Zealander is a confident, connected, lifelong learner equipped to live a full and active life, and contribute to a thriving and prosperous economy’ (21st Century Learning Reference Group, 2014: 4) – rather than technological: ‘We recognise that technologies are not an end in themselves’ (21st Century Learning Reference Group, 2014: 6). So, technology and time are of interest here inasmuch as they are closely related to progress as an economic never-ending point. The 21st Century Learning Reference Group’s (2014) report to the Ministry of Education highlights that, through technology, time becomes more profitable: learners can learn for their entire lifetime and at any time. A teacher’s critical reflections on the contemporary influences on her work should therefore include assumptions about the technological benefits and costs of electronic devices, applications and websites, and also assumptions about the economic contexts which produce and justify the use of these technologies in relation to ideas about the development of the child as a particular kind of economic subject and object.

For early childhood education, technologies, which are constructed as in a state of rapid advancement, have to be in some way timed to the timing of the development of the young child, who is also seen to be in a state of rapid advancement. In early childhood, this phenomenon is played out in the apparent tensions, or perhaps the paradox, of having time to play and being ready in time for school.

The nature of play, however ‘present-focused’ and however resistant to speeding up a child’s educational progress, has become a strong metaphor for 21st-century learning – in other words, a connection between play and preparation for the future of learning and working in a hi-tech and profitable society. For instance, in Tina Bruce’s (1991) Time to Play in Early Childhood Education, one of the critical elements of play to value for children’s development is their understanding of education as relationships and processes above content, reflecting a perception of the world as complex and fluid. The ongoing theorisation of play becomes critical to progress; the constant refining and developing of theory is something that takes ‘us forward in our understanding, and in what we manage to do’ (Bruce, 1991: 119).

Bruce’s thinking in the 1990s suggests that there is, arguably, nothing particular or significant about regarding ‘the now’ as a faster temporal experience than ‘the then’. Then was the now for people who had similar concerns about a previous then in relation to the now (e.g. see Goodson and Buras, 2013, in Loveless and Williamson, 2013: xi). In terms of a concern regarding technology and childhood, we can look back at least as far as Rousseau’s (1957) observations on the changing experience of time in childhood, or to Robert Owen’s ordering of the child’s productive day (e.g. see Lascarides and Hinitz, 2000). By the beginning of the computer ‘revolution’ in education, concerns were being shared that children were learning in a world where ‘old knowledge [was] being superseded so fast that it [was] often a hindrance’ (Spock, 1969: 192).

Concerns about the educational and developmental implications of rapidly changing times are thus very reiterative and tend to avoid, or gloss over, questions concerning what it means to talk about time in this way. The great irony here is that with the new and rapidly changing world of electronics, we were to be convinced of the benefits of such newness and speed, of the acceleration of the experience of time, because it would gift to us more time. The future, put simply, was supposed to have more time because new-world electronics would do all the things we did not want to do. However, the idea of a leisure society has not been all that was promised in the ‘age of automation’ (Bagrit, 1965). More than this, the promises of utopian technological futures operate as a kind of legitimation for perceptions of times of rapid change, and for the things that adults and children must do in order to be the right kind of subject in these times.

Question time: discipline and progress

An anxiety regarding fast times is not only evident in a rush to get new media into the early childhood curriculum. It is also evident in calls to slow time down, in order to fit the experience of time to beliefs about the nature of the timing of childhood (e.g. see Taylor, 2013). Concerns about the natural timing of childhood reflect a moral panic associated with speeding up childhood through increasing the association with 21st-century fast times. However, in addressing the perceived moral panic, similarly moral concerns are raised regarding depriving children of the tools seen as necessary to cope in these fast-changing times. Neither position is particularly new (Lesko, 2001), suggesting that there is nothing particularly significant about the time, and that time is a shifty concept.

There are ‘public and private times, slower and faster times, and more and less rationalized times’ (Lesko, 2001: 35). Hence, the argument that there is some great universal experience of acceleration of time becomes an important narrative to explore for its purposes and functions – in other words, it is insufficient to ignore these or take for granted claims about time because they have a significant impact on early childhood education. In addition, attention to such claims opens up different ways to think about the construction and machinations of time.

Just as Foucault’s reading of the panopticon promoted an understanding of its totalized mode of surveillance, with both prisoner and guard subjectivities affected, so too can linear, historical time moving towards ‘progress’ be examined for how it disciplines subjectivities and objective knowledge. (Lesko, 2001: 40)

The observation that time has a panoptic role requires an understanding of the time-disciplined self who no longer needs a school bell or a school year. Rather, the self-governing time-conscious child learns to judge herself as if she was always being measured in time. It is her responsibility both to accept the inevitability of and then keep pace with the accelerations that are seen to be evidence of the 21st-century techno-economic society. The individual then learns to administer a particular kind of measurement:

time is thus no benign medium in which to be and grow. This ‘time’ is always intended and planned, it governs and it manages, and, most serious of all, it is internalized to become the regulator and arbiter of all experience (all the time we think that we are exercising free will). (Jenks, 2001: 74)

That the times are understood, even marketed, as rapidly changing – that time is accelerating – is an important observation in relation to time-measuring technologies. ‘We live in rapidly changing times’ because of our interest in, and invention of, the measurement of time in particular ways. It is the mechanical clock, Lesko (2001) asserts, and not the steam engine which has been the invention that defined modernity and, as such, the measurer of progress is not the yard or the metre but the second. Lesko argues that the

temporalization of experience utilized clock time, standardized world time, active measurement, and counting of time. Time was tracked in order to use it … And productive use of time became a central measure of better, more valuable individuals and groups. (Lesko, 2001: 36)

Time becomes something that we are bound to, and we are bound panoptically inasmuch as ‘we’ judge ‘ourselves’ to be out of time and/or using time poorly.

Ironically, the digital timekeeping devices that appear to keep time consistent at the same time appear to speed time up. However, Lesko’s (2001: 36) point is not to work out which perception is more accurate, but rather to disrupt the idea that time is ‘natural and inevitable’, and the ways in which it is used to classify and order individuals and communities in relation to progress and achievement. On this point Heidegger has an important contribution. The problem of time being taken for granted is observed in Heidegger’s work on being and time. Following Heidegger (1971: 228), the problem does not seem to be the invention of time and of timekeeping, but rather the excess and the anxiety with which the measurement of time has become an occupation: ‘Thus it might be that our unpoetic dwelling, its incapacity to take measure, derives from a curious excess of frantic measuring and calculating’. The outcome of this anxiety may well be the failure to observe the possibility of other ways to experience time or the possibility that time is not as we observe it. In Being and Time, Heidegger (1962) searches for a thinking about time that reaches beyond the confines of a given history of being. The past of being is something that both pushes and runs ahead of being. This leads Heidegger to a question of tradition.

The tradition that is of interest here is ‘progress’. Progress calls for the acceleration of time. And, more importantly for Heidegger, this tradition obscures its nature as tradition so that it only appears as something to take for granted. What is significant is the tendency to accept without question that ‘we live in rapidly changing times’, rather than take such a statement as being a particular interpretation of time and the times, for particular purposes. This taking for granted of certain ways of thinking about time, education, technology and childhood is evident in the ways in which government agendas for children are expressed in seemingly incontestable terms of lifelong-connected technology-rich learning for economic and societal prosperity.

Yet, as concerns about rapidly changing times are not new, so too systemic arrangements of time are not new. The organisation of schooling into times and ages has had particular governmentalities (e.g. see Lesko, 2001). Educationalists in the 19th century introduced the now familiar practice of grouping children by age and measuring them against their same-age peers. The development of an age-based curriculum for children entrenches the idea that there is a right age to be at – textbooks use theories of ages of development to drive pedagogy (Lesko, 2001). Time becomes critical to the structure of the school day. Lesko (2001) notes that, in this temporalisation of childhood, the child is always something to be fashioned into something else. This allows for the child’s nature as investment and as something to gather data on, and then for the use of that data to generate new economies and new thinking about investment. More than this, children, families and teachers became, and continue to be, convinced of this way of thinking. It is largely taken for granted that children are fast or slow, based on a measurement of their progress against their same-age peers and the standardised age-based curriculum – a symptom of ‘the age of measurement’ (Biesta, 2009).

The notion of development is critical to the notion of time. Development in the right time allows for increased surveillance and ordering of the child. Increased surveillance and ordering constructs a range of norms through which the child can be measured, treated and disciplined:

Piaget’s stages emphasized the individual’s natural path toward reason and the teacher’s constant watchfulness to provide the appropriate material, stimuli, and tasks. Teachers who either pushed too fast or lagged behind their students’ developmental needs were faulted. (Lesko, 2001: 49)

While developmental stages may have waned as operating frameworks, and their application has softened as a result (arguably) of concerns regarding their normalising functions, the replacement frameworks are no less susceptible to the narratives of progress. Students of teaching may be advised of the normalising powers of development psychology and the saving powers of sociocultural theorisations, of being over becoming, of process over product. However, they are at the same time presented with these narratives of rapid times. Children are

expected to measure up to finely tuned assessments of productivity, learning, morality, and achievement while remaining in a social position that is dependent and watched over not only by adults but by their age-peers as well. Their dependence communicates their inequality, and their ‘becoming’ status appears to legitimate it. (Lesko, 2001: 57)

Time for resistance: absurdity, irony, politics and education

The first two sections of this article have engaged with ideas of the epochal times of rapid technological change that have significant implications for the ways in which children should learn and teachers should teach. These ideas begin with a tendency to be anxious about the future and forgetful of the past, and a determination to address some apparent societal – mainly economic – problem. It has been argued that time is a universalising construction, particularly evident in the idea of the ‘times’ in which ‘we’ all live. In terms of schooling, an anxiety is evident in concerns that technological innovation has led to the rapid changing of the times that requires, on the one hand, a future-focused purpose for school and, on the other, a space and time in which childhood and learning can be experienced at their natural pace. There tends to be an agreement that technology is speeding the time up for everyone, but a disagreement on the role of education and the ways in which the child should learn in relation to this perceived state.

A focus on futures education has supported a view that children should be prepared for the unpredictable. However, Slaughter, on educational futures, suggests that:

I am more interested in futures in education than I am in futures of education because the former concerns itself with the needs and potentials of real persons in the present, while the latter often reflects a more managerial or technical view. The slide from ‘in’ to ‘of’ parallels the immensely greater investment in controlling the future as compared with the more convivial task of facilitating human development in order to create it. (Slaughter, 1987: 342)

His concerns reinforce a view that the idea of and the tendency to agree on the truth of rapidly changing times operate as a panoptic disciplinary mechanism that constrains and exploits the nature and purpose of both education and childhood. In this final section, the possibilities of reconceptualising the idea of rapidly changing times are explored.

It is not uncommon to hear of concerns about the passing of time. From day to day, the passing of time is expressed as an important concern to be both conscious of and responsive to. The expression of this passing of time can be analysed as both something new in the world, reflecting new relationships and new problems, and something quite reiterative, reflecting an ongoing preoccupation with the qualities of an absurdly repeated scenario in a play, in which the actors are destined to play out the same relationships and problems as if they were always new and unique problems.

Understanding the absurdity of the claim begins a release from the metanarrative restrictions of a belief that ‘we live in rapidly changing times’. So, what are the implications? Why should we worry about this? We perhaps have little to worry about if our educational ideals are of an orderly, serene, efficient, productive and/or societal future. If we can convince ourselves both that such a future is possible and that any means deployed to make this future possible are justified by our utopian ends, then we are very much good to progress with a managerial and technical approach to these times and their perceived future.

However, for critics of the ways in which time is exploited in governing early childhood education, it is insufficient to accept a techno-managerialist approach to educational projects. This framework ‘is simultaneously colonial (with privileged, invisible viewers and hypervisible, temporalized, and embodied others) and administrative (ranking, judging, making efficient and productive)’ (Lesko, 2001: 41). For teachers, then, the colonising and administrative functions of time and progress invoke a series of captures that work together in the interest of making use of the child and the adult. These functions need to be challenged because of the ways they limit some actions and relationships, and legitimate others. In this sense, challenges are not required in order to disprove the observation of the flow of time in times of technological innovations, but rather to explore and challenge the purposes and implications of these observations. For instance, what is to be gained or lost, and by whom, when early childhood teachers are required to accept the role of certain devices in the curriculum because we live in rapidly changing times? What is the perceived scope for teachers and children to challenge these assertions? And if the scope is limited, how does this entrench a particular view of education as prescriptive and working towards particular predominating interests?

Sellers (2013) argues for a challenge to this colonisation of time in terms of reconceptualising the early childhood curriculum. She looks at negotiations of time and space-times to take a more complex approach to understanding how children, and adults, do the curriculum. As already argued, the role of new media in early childhood education is an important example of the colonising of the child and adult. Teachers are of particular concern for advocates of 21st-century learning agendas when they are perceived as resistant to changing times, in that they may not take up the challenge of 21st-century learning in ways that reflect the national future focus (e.g. see Bolstad, 2004). Teachers are frequently reminded that they are too secure in their pedagogical pasts – that they need to be more ‘past-opposed’, more aligned to the idea of the new.

However, it is resistance by teachers that is entirely educational in this concern about changing times. Resistance, following Biesta (2014), involves doing something differently with time. Resistance is a moment in which educational questions are being asked and educational relationships are being explored – doing time differently is entirely educational. In addition, resistance is having a say in what is said about the times; it is a politics of time in Rancière’s (2013) sense of politics.

Biesta (2014) writes, in The Beautiful Risk of Education, on the problem of technocratic forms of education. He is concerned by educational policies, practices and research that narrow the scope of what can be talked about in education. Through Biesta’s reading of education, freedom and politics, the focus becomes one of exploring the conditions for education, freedom and politics:

To exist politically, to act ‘in concert’ without erasing plurality, is hard ‘work’ … also because each situation is in some respect unique – so that in each situation we need to some extent to reinvent what political existence might mean, how we can bear plurality and difference, and how we can continue trying to be at home in the world. (Biesta, 2014: 117)

What Heidegger (1971) notes as a frantic excess of measurement generates a time-consciousness in which the plural and poetic nature of the times is obscured from us. From this position, it might appear that I am arguing for the timelessness of childhood to be revealed, for the child of the Romantics to have her time again. However, this is not the case, for her time is no less politically motivated and no less concerning in terms of the narrative of progress – it is a different trajectory. Teachers are given evidence of the nature of the childhood that requires protection from ‘new’ experiences of time and, in particular, the technological source of these experiences (Taylor, 2013). Fears of the technological consumption of the child, while stemming from differing agendas and notions of what counts as the problem of time, share in the construction of time as accelerating. The point here is to argue that there is something wrong with the way in which time is talked about, not that there is a better understanding of time. Idealisations of an unhurried natural time of childhood (e.g. see Taylor, 2013) are of value here only to the extent that they reveal that there are other ways to think about and make sense of time. In a sense, teachers are in a position to engage in the bold and daring undertaking (Nietzsche, 1997) of slowing things down a little. For this suggestion, I would like to turn to a character in Camus’s novel The Plague:

Query: How contrive not to waste one’s time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; by travelling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queuing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat. And so forth. (Camus, 1960: 24–25)

The character Tarrou takes an ironic approach to the conditions that the city’s inhabitants are experiencing during the event of the plague. Tarrou’s playful approach to his experience of time takes seriously a resistance to the ways in which his subjectivity is governed. Such an approach provides adults (and, in particular, adults who feel pressurised to buy into or take for granted the idea of the rapidly changing times) with an approach to questioning time. Tarrou’s aesthetic approach additionally inspires a way of thinking about working in early childhood centre communities that resists an anxiety towards a future-focused present. Like Tarrou, centre communities can be active, can have a say and can be political in their experiences of time. This resistance can begin with the question: Do we really live in rapidly changing times?

Conclusion

Time is a disciplinary mechanism. This article has looked at the ways in which predominant ideas about time discipline both the child and the adult within the context of early childhood educational goals.

What discussion of the conditions of discipline brings us to, therefore, is a realization that such control functions through a combination of devices; what he refers to as ‘tactics.’ The whole premise of adult intervention with the child, even often in pleasure, is control and instruction. All conditions combine and conspire to that end. (Jenks, 2001: 74)

A matrix of devices operates in early childhood education to convince the child and the adult that the times are rapidly changing. The devices include media, ways of thinking about knowledge, ways of relating to others, ways of understanding the nature and purpose of the early childhood curriculum, and ways of understanding what it means to be a 21st-century citizen.

This article has drawn on the critiques of Lesko, Heidegger and others to question this matrix of devices. The purpose of the critique of time is to challenge the way in which time is understood and experienced. Such a challenge begins with an incredulity towards suggestions of the special nature of the times in which ‘we’ all are believed to and expected to live. The point of this form of resistance is to open up questions concerning the ways in which the times and subjectivity work together, and to ask: What kinds of subjectivity can be made in time?