Abstract
Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education is an extremely ambitious, brave and important book. It begins by offering a comprehensive and thorough political and socio-economic explanation for the current crisis in early childhood education. Thereafter, the book offers an alternative vision based on a radically different conceptualization of the child, based on democracy, experimentation and potentiality. Thus, the book attempts to do two things: firstly, to situate the current crisis and, secondly, to move us forward to other possibilities, imaginings and alternatives. Building on Moss’s post-foundational paradigm, which challenges the hegemonic arguments of regulatory modernity and ‘quality’, Moss offers a comprehensive interdisciplinary critique of the current neo-liberal crisis in the values and purposes of early childhood education. In chapter 1, Moss clearly sets out the current economically reductionist justification for early childhood education in the form of an equation: early intervention + quality = increased human capital + national success.
Moss argues that this simplistic economic equation fails to explain the relative situation of poor children deteriorating under neo-liberalism as inequalities widen.
Without a significant redistribution of wealth, early childhood education, as one of a number of human technologies, continues to fail in closing the gap between disadvantaged children and their families and their more advantaged peers. Thus, Moss argues that despite ever earlier intervention strategies and more tightly regulated quality technologies, inequalities will continue to rise, as inequality is a central tenet of neo-liberalism itself.
Moss’s critique of neo-liberalism is convincing because it draws on the diverse fields of philosophy, economics, sociology and education, which is refreshing and extremely welcome. Moss argues that as neo-liberalism produces greater inequality leading to further uncertainty, the state has responded with increased governing and regulation of teachers, children and families: ‘to make the contemporary wave of neo-liberalism work, the state has to penetrate even more deeply into certain segments of political-economic life and become more interventionist than before’ (73).
The beauty of Moss’s thesis is that it helps readers to situate and understand contemporary policy. So, for example, Baseline Assessment, based on a reductive conceptualization of the child and the teacher and driven by the neo-liberal ideology of competition and privatization, comes to mind as one reads the book. Moss’s central contention is that human-technology policy initiatives such as Baseline Assessment are situated within neo-liberalism so that inequalities and injustice are not challenged, but rather early childhood education serves to further govern, regulate and discipline children’s and early educators’ subjectivities. By providing the reader with a comprehensive overview and explanation of the current crisis, the book goes on to encourage the reader to imagine alternative constructions and possibilities of early childhood education, such as chapter 6’s Crow Project. Here, the child is constructed as ‘a creative unknowable potentiality’ (82), where the learning process is participatory and democratic without predetermined outcomes. Through pedagogical documentation, multiple perspectives make the learning visible. The teachers in this ‘democratic meeting place’ no longer act as ‘knowledge brokers’ (163), but rather become listeners and enablers of the learning process. However, the Swedish-based Crow Project, whilst offering rich inspiration, ideals and possibilities, is perhaps, for some, so far removed from the reductionist ‘datafication’ experiment (Roberts-Holmes, 2015) of current English early years settings that it might appear unrealistic and even intimidating. Aware of such tensions, Moss notes that: Even though we cannot achieve transformative change immediately or even immanently, it does not mean that there is no point in starting, no value in moving towards waystations that demonstrate viability, that increase confidence that another future might be possible. (206)
Chapter 7 examines the barriers to such a possibility and offers alternatives. So, early childhood centres that are increasingly run as exclusive private businesses for profit need to be returned to public democratic ownership. The gendered and classed early childhood workforce, which is paid just above the legal minimum and has an ambiguous professional status, needs to receive comparable terms and conditions to qualified teachers. A further barrier to the vision that Moss holds is the reductionist and simplistic evaluation and accountability system, which is focused on a crude and measurable input–output performance model, leading to ‘the tyranny of numbers’ (Ball, 2014). ‘Rather than such a thin account of performance against predetermined outcomes, evaluation in democratic accountability offers a thick understanding of potentiality – both realized and still to come’ (193). Hence, a radically different vision of professional and democratic accountability is required from the current system based on fear and a fabricated performativity (Hutchings, 2015).
The book’s thorough and scholarly explanation of neo-liberalism makes it essential for both teaching and research as it comprehensively situates and explains the current crisis in early childhood education. Moreover, in providing democratic possibilities and reimagining other stories of early childhood, the book ends on an optimistic note of hope.