Abstract
Time is an important driver of pedagogy which is often overlooked in the busy atmosphere of an early childhood centre. Engaging philosophically with three different concepts of time, and drawing examples from literature and art to focus attention on how time is constituted in early childhood centres, this article argues that we inhabit the intersection of several different forms of time. Despite this, we tend to focus on only one form of time – chronological time, a formulation that is at the basis of our western education system. Our understandings of time impact on the way we think about education and the way we teach children. Incorporating different understandings of time in the space of early childhood has transformative potential, the enactment of which is at the heart of a good education. This article accepts the need for young children to be familiar with social conventions to do with time, but also advocates for an expanded subjectivity that flourishes within alternative notions of time.
Introduction
A particular conception of time is valorised in most early childhood curricula – teleological, linear and sequential – promoting understandings of early childhood education associated with development and standardised progress. This article allocates time within the broader idea of temporalities, which is followed by a brief overview of current research in early childhood, suggesting that there is a problem with the concept of childhood as a learning form of linear progress through time. It then engages with three ways to consider time in relation to early childhood education. First, the standard account of
Temporal entanglements
In each situation, time matters differently. Drawing on Adam’s (1995) seminal
Sharma (2014) suggests that the modern fixation with an acceleration of time – we are now living in fast times – is a discourse which privileges certain populations, normalising time in particular ways. It is not the speed of time that is of issue, she suggests, rather where one fits within the ‘biopolitical economy of time’ (138). In describing the temporalities of frequent business flyers, taxi drivers, corporate yoga instructors and ‘slow lifers’, the political economy of time, she suggests, is experienced inequitably, ‘where bodies are differently valued temporally and made productive for capital’ in quite different ways (14). She explores this idea in the entangled relationship between business travellers and the taxi drivers they rely on: as part of their livelihoods, the drivers’ technologies of the self include synchronizing to the time of others. How they understand time is in large part structured and controlled by the time of others. Attention to synchronicity as a relation of power forefronts disjunctive temporal differences in a world that too often claims to be working in organic temporal unity. While there is a rhythm to social life, it is neither an equitable nor egalitarian rhythm. The micropolitics of maintaining rhythm is such that the temporality of the frequent business travelers ultimately governs the time practices of the cab drivers. (79)
The time of early childhood is entangled, and the questions that motivate this article speak to how time governs the care of children. To a large extent, a child’s rhythm is recognised in relation to adults. The temporality of the teacher, the parent and the caregiver governs the child’s experience of time. Although a teacher may calibrate time in relation to expected patterns of children’s focus, institutional arrangements in early childhood education are becoming increasingly commercial and driven by economic imperatives. Given such complexity, this article argues that time has no transcendental or fixed existence, and that it is productive to focus attention on the experience of lived time and aspects of temporality for which the clock is no use at all: ‘the inevitable, the ultimate, the ancient, the backwards, and the hip are aspects of temporality on which clocks have no purchase’ (Moran, 2015: 286).
The time of early childhood
For centuries, philosophers and child/play experts have idealised ‘the child’, espousing normative notions of early childhood, with the archetypal child characterised as being playful, competent, liberated, innocent, natural, risk-taking or curious. At one level, such descriptions are given air by the philosophy of humanism, although these terms have now been appropriated by policymakers within the modernist project of human progress and development, aligned with international demands of neo-liberal economies for an instrumental view of education. Given its failure to respect the unique subjectivity of each child, this economic projection of normative childhood becomes a performative ideal – a kind of template to which the child subject should conform. The young child is behaviourised, regularised, standardised and institutionalised in the acting out of a kind of ‘ready-for-school’ performance. The child is construed as progressing ever onwards through measures of biological maturity and social development, according to prefigured standards of desirable performance and behaviour.
However, as Kakkori (2013) suggests, children live in the present in a different way to adults, in that there is not yet enough past to effectively determine their present. There is, she claims, a fundamental difference between a child’s and an adult’s consideration of time. In our education systems, children are cast in a particular relation to time which orders the opportune time for different things to be taught: ‘It becomes more important that the child learns something at a certain point than whether she learns it at all’ (Kakkori, 2013: 579). In their discussion about early childhood centre routines, Wien and Kirby-Smith (1998) warn about time as a form of tyranny, in which the teacher controls both space and time, noting the positive changes associated with a reduced emphasis on measured time. In particular, they observe, once the clock is removed, children begin to ‘co-own the curriculum with the teachers’ (12). Lest we throw the baby out with the bathwater though, Pacini-Ketchabaw (2012) argues that it is neither fruitful nor possible to completely jettison the clock, nor true that children and educators become automatons that follow the ticking clock. She suggests that it is useful to play with the discursive clocking practices to explore the kinds of work the clock does and the roles humans play in ‘operating and producing clocking practices’ (156). She also argues, however, that the idea of linear development is limited as a conceptual framework for responding to the challenges of growing up in a world that is ‘increasingly complex, mixed-up, boundary blurring, heterogeneous, interdependent and ethically confronting’ (Taylor et al., 2012: 81).
Burman (2008) suggests a number of useful strategies as counternarratives for developmental depictions of time – in short, limiting universal claims to humanness; identifying multiple actors; departing from chronology and causality; attending to diversity, interpretation and incorporation; and highlighting social structuring with human organisation. Burman’s critical discussion of developmental psychology suggests that we should be wary of appealing to the child as a ‘symbol of our ideal/better selves’ (82), and that adults need to recognise children have a different sense of time from them. Thus, the child, constructed as the philosopher’s muse or as the psychologist’s ideal, is a limited projection of particular cultural artefacts that fails to take into account the rich texture of encounters among humans, cultures and political projects.
Uprichard’s (2008) conceptualising of children as both ‘being and becomings’ addresses both the ageing process within childhood and the way that children see themselves within their own contexts. It is, she suggests, the interplay between the different notions of time within each discourse that is key to understanding the notion of the ‘child’. Hence, whilst the discourse of the ‘being’ child accentuates the present, and that of the ‘becoming’ child stresses the future, both the present and the future interact together in the course of everyday life. (Uprichard, 2008: 308)
Pearce et al.’s (2012: 422) discussion of the politics of becoming suggests that a resistance – a move away from ‘the chronometrics of educational institutions’, which gather up ‘pasts, presents, and futures as a series of inter-locking units’ – and a move towards a mode of exploring time will enable ‘us to pay attention to the dis-junctions, the bits and pieces that don’t easily fit together, the disarticulations that lurk between the sayable and the seeable’. It is ironical, they suggest, that the progressive education movement of the mid 20th century put the child to the fore of pedagogical processes, yet currently we are witnessing ‘some of the most punitive, reductive, and limiting educational practices in a generation whereby young people’s affect and imagination have been all but expunged from our institutions’.
In the spirit of exploring different times, the remainder of this article invites critical consideration of how time is constituted in early childhood centres, serving as a springboard for thinking differently about what we are doing in early childhood education. The following three sections engage with different narratives about time: the first as a normative narrative (linear time) and the second and third as counternarratives that simultaneously play with and trouble the linear concept of time.
Linear time
A linear concept of time, conceived as directional, advancing and non-repetitive, has informed western intellectual thought for centuries. A sense of urgency is conveyed in Lewis Carroll’s (n.d.) tale of the innocent Alice staring wide-eyed at the White Rabbit’s anxiety about being late as he races against the hands of the clock. In this respect, the White Rabbit may be seen as a metaphor for the modern bureaucrat under pressure to perform more efficiently and effectively under the relentless pressure of time. Linear time entails a sense that we move in an orderly fashion through sequential episodes in our lives, or that time is flowing by in some kind of steady stream. This linear sense of time is apparent in 18th-century philosophical ideas of human progress – for example, in Descartes’s rationalist vision of the progress of human knowledge or in Rousseau’s progressive vision of mankind’s gradual acceptance of democratic authority as part of the social contract. The linear sense is obvious, too, in 19th-century concepts of evolution, particularly in the teleological view of progress that characterises Darwin’s explanation of the origin of species as evolutionary development, and in Hegel’s ideal of historical progress towards an absolute ideal through the continuous advancement of reasoned thought. We are still caught in a linear modality in 20th- and 21st-century ideas of developed and developing nations, with progress as industrial, technological and scientific advancement, increasingly measured in terms of economic productivity. Linear time, then, has been a significant organising concept in the development of western social and cultural organisation.
A predominant form of linear time is monochronic, with the clock, the watch and the calendar as its ubiquitous cultural symbols. These devices divide time into standardised segments – minutes, hours, days, months and years – essential for the smooth functioning of industrial society and the organisation of large groups of people, so that factories, shops, businesses, schools and transportation systems all operate on coordinated time schedules and manage expectations accordingly. Linear time provides a conventional measuring stick for how quickly events pass or changes occur. Time is also treated as a form of commodified currency that can be traded – spent, saved, wasted or given. It can be free, spare or extra. Time can be converted into money and/or money can be converted into time, in ways that may be precisely quantified. In the modern West, time and work are deeply interrelated, within an overall aim of greater productivity and cost-efficiency. Time is also involved in the ethical notion of making commitments to others – a promise is no good without an appreciation of when it might be fulfilled.
Chronological time in modernist society is the basis of shared understanding, offering a means for establishing conventions and enabling humans to interact socially. Meetings and discussions, for instance, can proceed in an orderly, turn-taking fashion rather than as a random outpouring of spontaneous verbal ejaculations. Through linear time, parameters for communication and community are established, facilitating meaningful metaphors and forms of consensus that we all agree to live by, such as systems of law. The linear construction of time may have no grounds in objective reality, but as a social convention it facilitates practical arrangements for our shared social space by allowing us to order our thoughts in a coherent fashion. Indeed, this article’s telos and structure is one of logical linear development – a deliberate, modernist explication of ideas.
Linear time is a metaphor that allows us to think in terms of educational progress. It features strongly in early childhood education and is intrinsic to the concepts of child development, developmental psychology and ‘age-appropriate’ behaviour, and to measures of maturity. Academic disciplines and theories of development take linear time for granted as the reference point for empirical observation and the formulation of subsequent knowledge. Linear time can be seen, then, as a ‘basis for presumption’ (Kakkori, 2013: 579), underpinning knowledge in the natural sciences and in the human sciences, and entailing a mode of thinking that has a homogenising effect on time and space, in which time is understood as a series of moments. The psychological disciplines and their conceptual models dictate human developmental norms such as ages and stages at which children learn to walk, talk and read. Linear conceptions of time determine when children are to be immunised or when they start school, when young people are considered developed enough to vote, drive cars, drink or inherit money, and when people are to be considered elderly. The linear view of time is promoted, enhanced and sustained through the concept of ‘lifelong education’ – a now commonly used phrase and a good example of what noted New Zealand educationalist Clarence Beeby called a ‘dominant myth’: I have come to believe that what the paradigm is to the natural scientist, the dominant myth is to the educator. The myth offers to those who accept it the unity of a common purpose, shared belief in objectives that are not too closely defined, and a temporary and tacitly agreed suspension of disbelief – for, by definition, a myth cannot be in every sense true. In a profession where healthy scepticism is almost as necessary as faith, it is no easy business to establish such a myth. It is possible only if the myth is an expression, in educational terms, of social purposes that are widely accepted in the community; it is not the prerogative of the profession to manufacture completely new myths. (Beeby, 1986: xliii)
Lifelong education is clearly such a myth – a modern uptake of a social purpose widely accepted in the community, rationalised by a globalised economic logic of time management. Lifelong education requires the performative production of an educated person – a rational
Within a philosophical article, engaging with the aporia of time provides a critical lens through which to destabilise conventional patterns of interaction. In Janet Frame’s (2013) posthumous New Zealand novel In the midst of these politics of permanence I felt as unsafe and foreign and brief as a mayfly out of season; or like someone who growing up in the world and acquiring all the skills necessary for survival, particularly the skill of finding some relation to the passing of time, with the kindly aid of darkness and light and the rhythm of the body and the use of clocks, suddenly finds his biological clock is broken and he is unable to read the meaning of a clock- or watch-face, and, worst of all, it is dark because his eyes are blind. (Frame, 2013: 55)
Frame’s novels typically provide intimate social commentary.
Disordered time
In this section, disordered time considers ideas of emotion, place, randomness, play and leisure. Disordered time is associated with ideas of chaos and messiness, which arguably has a place in the creative expression of early childhood education. It may involve an understanding of time based on emotions – that is, how one is feeling: ‘Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun!’ It could be represented by the problem of the chicken and the egg: ‘Which came first?’ We could talk about the cycle of the four seasons, where there is no natural starting place – summer comes both before and after winter. In traditional agrarian societies, for example, time may be experienced as the repetitive cycle of the seasons. Some Asian religions incorporate a cyclical view of human time in concepts of reincarnation such as samsara – the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth found in both Buddhism and Hinduism.
Disordered time could also result from intentional manipulation, as is the case of the introduction of clock time in Sijie’s (2002) story of Everyone came to consult the clock, as though our house on stilts was a temple. Every morning saw the same ritual: the village headman would pace to and fro, smoking his bamboo pipe, which was as long as an old-fashioned rifle, all the while keeping a watchful eye on the clock. At nine o’clock sharp he would give a long piercing whistle to summon the villagers to work in the fields. (Sijie, 2002: 14)
Tiring of their mundane existence and the humiliating surveillance to which they are subject, the two protagonists set about adjusting the hands of the clock, deliberately interrupting the flow and regulation of work life. Their dull existence is animated by a unique adaptation of the western clock, as they are soon in the habit of readjusting the time on the alarm clock, depending on how they are feeling. Sometimes, they move the hands backwards; at other times, they put the hands forward by an hour or two so as to finish the day’s work early. In other words, they change the length of the working day by manipulating the hands on the clock – an early form of daylight saving time, perhaps. Disrupting the social and cultural significance of sunrise and sunset as the accepted reference points in the day, the adjustable clock disorders familiar and habitual patterns in village working life, establishing new and irregular rhythms. In the end, the boys have changed the hands of the clock so many times they have no idea what the time really is.
Disordered time embraces ideas of randomness and anarchy, as highlighted in the work of 1960s Swiss assemblage artist Jean Tinguely. His kinetic assemblages, built from discarded metals, steadfastly avoid fixed readings by continuously creating uncertainties. Referring to his assemblages as meta-machinic, Tinguely plays with notions of time and change, with clear analogies to metaphor, metaphysics and metamorphosis. Generally, in creating a machine, an engineer tries to reduce irregularities as much as possible in the quest for predictability and control. Tinguely does just the opposite, by creating mechanical disorder. His machines are constructed so that the cogs jolt, jam and turn unpredictably. The same movement may occur a number of successive times and then may never be repeated. Or there may be long periods of time when nothing happens at all. This is not merely a matter of allowing for chance in action, but a case of deliberately inscribing chance within the act of creation. Tinguely’s writing and drawing assemblages produce random art (‘scribblings’ may be a more appropriate term) in their own time. Each time the machine starts up (random in itself), unique movements occur in unrepeatable sequences as erratic scratchings are etched onto a piece of paper, with a new image being printed each time – a case of art pieces creating other art pieces. Tinguely’s machines are vital and spontaneous, eternally changeable, with no requirement to mean anything or refer to anything else. ‘Tinguely’s machines exist in an enviable freedom … subvert the established order and convey a sense of anarchy and individual liberation which would otherwise not exist’ (Hultén, 1965, quoted in Andersson, 2001: 54). Tinguely’s writing and drawing machines invite the viewer to activate/deactivate the assemblage, drawing attention to the now, to the moment, and creating an acute and disordered sense of time.
Another take on disordered time is inspired by Hannah Arendt, where Masschelein (2011) advocates the notion of suspended time. He traces the notion of ‘school’ back to the Greek
Distended time
Another departure from the linear account is distended time, a formulation involving irregular patterns of memory (past) and expectation (future), both of which are interpreted in the present. Time may be thought of as a kind of extended present – as a timeless gap between past and future. Augustine argued that time is not an event that can be measured, but an
Ricoeur (1984) offers three concepts of time: cosmic, human and historical. What marks out
Distended time allows us to conceive of intergenerational projects, either historical or futuristic. In medieval Europe, the building of a cathedral would often extend across several generations of families of stonemasons. Longer periods of time may be involved in the burying of time capsules, with precious memories forwarded to our future descendants, or when electronic signals are sent to outer space in the hope of a possible response in some distant future. Distended time is ingeniously represented in the Doomsday Clock, a conceptual project represented by the clock appearing on the cover of a science bulletin since its foundation in 1947 to symbolise ‘the urgency of the nuclear dangers that the magazine’s founders – and the broader scientific community – are trying to convey to the public and political leaders around the world’ (‘Timeline’, 2016). Currently, in response to political turbulence and environmental concerns, the clock shows three minutes away from global destruction. This clock is intentionally manipulated by the scientists to depict a particular distention of time; it is not ticking away in any regular pattern, but reminding the world about the threat of impending ecological disaster – an alarm clock, one might say.
A further intergenerational project is the 10,000 Year Clock, an undertaking by a group of creative artists and entrepreneurs whose goal is to build a clock that ticks once a year, with a century hand that advances every 100 years, and a cuckoo that comes out every millennium for the next 10,000 years (Long Now Foundation, 2016). It is a challenge to our everyday sense of time to consider historical time over the next 10,000 years – based in the present, futuristic in its outlook, but reflecting our current concerns about past events. According to the
The clock requires little or no human intervention, and may be thought of as the world’s slowest computer, with no apparent practical purpose apart from stimulating our thinking about the future. Employing science, technology, philosophy, and a lot of time and money, the Long Now project aims to foster long-term thinking and responsibility now and for an arbitrary period in the future: If you have a clock ticking for 10,000 years what kinds of generational-scale questions and projects will it suggest? If a clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well? If the clock keeps going after we are personally long dead, why not attempt other projects that require future generations to finish? (Long Now Foundation, 2016)
The credibility and the wisdom of the project may be debatable – it is a myth, an extravagant hoax or mere human folly, perhaps. Although, as American comedian Raymond Teller (Hillis, 1995) suggests, building the
Past–present–future projects have also captured the public imagination over the past decade. Populist books such as Sue Palmer’s (2006) Poor child. Poor parents. Poor Western civilisation – indeed the whole of the developed world – which now teems with miserable little creatures, male and female, toddlers to pre-teens. In a global culture whose citizens are wealthier, healthier and more privileged than ever before, children grow up unhappier every year. (Palmer, 2006: 1)
Reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture engagement with environmental concerns, community living and whole foods, there is now an increasing educational focus on the conditions of childhood, the state of the planet and sustainability. Early childhood centres and schools in increasing numbers are engaging in long-term projects of recycling, reassembling, gardening and sociopolitical projects around conservation. Indeed, the focus on the environment as teacher is a key element of the forest schools movement, and sustainability education has been the focus of a number of funded Ministry of Education early childhood education projects in New Zealand (e.g. see Duhn, 2010; Ritchie et al., 2010). These projects engage children in long-term thinking about the future of the planet, leading to consideration of future generations and material engagements between people, places and things. Such projects encourage children’s political agency in attempts to connect to wider communities of practice and creative imaginings of a future not yet lived. According to Greene (1988), we create ourselves by going beyond what exists, by trying to bring something into being, and by envisaging things as if they could be otherwise. It should remind us, she says, of ‘the relation between freedom and the consciousness of possibility, between freedom and the imagination – the ability to make present what is absent, to summon up a condition that is not yet’ (16).
Conclusion
Clearly, there is a place for linear time and developmental theory in early childhood – both are important to the way our society functions, valorising various cultural and social ways of being and their playing out in education. Gibbons (2013) suggests, however, that normalised stages of development function to organise and regulate individuals and communities, and that they may now have reached their use-by date. It is important, he argues, ‘to resist a rationalisation of educational practices and experiences … measured by a limited set of aims’ (506). As Bloch (2003) points out, universal development expectations and milestones have been used as a normalising and categorising technology, in which time is implicated in the very definition of normal. In this view of time, there is no space for different experiences of time.
There are numerous ways to reconsider time in the technological age. The exploration above of disordered and distended time plays with futuristic, random, cyclical and seasonal notions of time, indicating different social and cultural understandings of time. It engages with notions of free time, uninterrupted time, intergenerational time, and chaotic and cosmic (eternal) time – all of which play havoc with the day-to-day acceptance of the regularity of linear time. This article’s exploration of time provides just a few different ways to think about time. It is not a case of any one way being better than another so much as questioning the hegemony of received truths that are informed by, and perpetuate, particular cultural priorities.
Entertaining different philosophical, artistic, ethical and cultural understandings of time allows us to follow Greene’s (1988) advice to summon up quite different possibilities for childhood, curriculum and pedagogy. On such advice, we could usefully investigate with children their perceptions and experience of time, and work with them in time and across time on projects of national and international significance. Rather than implicating children in the myth of lifelong learning and development – as not yet adult or not yet ready – we could work on new myths, vesting young children with their own knowing and/or reinventing their own understandings of what it means to live in an increasingly institutionalised, globalised, stratified and networked world. Engaging children with cultural artefacts like the Doomsday Clock or the 10,000 Year Clock, or with random drawing machines, we could work with a new matter of childhood, inclusive of past and future, developing projects that give expression to children’s lives in their own time.
Biesta (2013) hits the nail on the head with his view of education as inherently risky – in the sense of belying preformulated certainty. Accepting the need for what might be considered the traditional purposes of education as forms of qualification (acquisition of knowledge, skills, values and dispositions) and socialisation (becoming part of existing traditions and ways of doing and being), he foregrounds the idea of subjectivity/subjectification as a form of radical openness and unpredictability – to do with ‘emancipation and freedom, and the responsibility that comes with freedom’ (4). After all, it is through their unique subjectivity that children bring something radically new into the world, with all the risk that entails for us, as educators. Perhaps it is time for us to embrace that risk with a new mythology of time.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.