Abstract
The theory of belonging as it arises in the theme of the Australian Early Years Learning Framework suggests a complex arrangement of philosophical concepts, which deserve rigorous explication and interrogation. In this article, the author draws out some of the most pertinent implications of ‘belonging’ for the theory of early learning in Australia. In particular, the author addresses the risks associated with simplifying the term as a kind of knowledge that arises through social experience, without a meticulous explanation of what is meant by the ‘social’. The author also unpacks the possibilities surrounding ‘belonging’ if it is possible to think it outside vernacular definitions of property, with which the idea of belonging may easily be conflated. The aim is to provide a preliminary outline of philosophical approaches to ‘belonging’ to demonstrate that the Early Years Learning Framework may provide an important platform through which to think a new range of issues arising from the task of educating young children in Australia.
Keywords
Introduction
The theme of the Australian Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), published in 2009, is ‘belonging, being and becoming’, which, as I have written elsewhere, brings an ontological philosophy into the curriculum for early childhood education. When educators use the term ‘ontology’, it is often as shorthand for a theory of ‘reality’. Educators, like the psychologists and sociologists from whose disciplines we take our authority, tend to privilege a theory of knowledge (epistemology) ahead of a theory of reality; I mean that teachers are accustomed to probe how we humans think and know things, and to assume that the things we think about and come to know need to be truths.
This tendency reflects the predominance of pragmatist epistemology in educational debate: pragmatism, as Axel Honneth (2000: 118) has argued, is a ‘context-transcending critique’ that posits a ‘world, or reality, “out there”’ to which we cannot refer. It privileges the rationality of participants in debate; it casts doubt over the ability of such rational individuals to fully know a permanent truth. So, pragmatism effectively settles on an idea of truth that infers the universality of rational mediation. Education would subsequently be defined as an instance of such rationality. One result of this transcendentalism for educators in general is that the theoretical question of whether there is a distinction between truth and reality is often too academic to merit deep consideration.
By contrast, I think that when approaching the question of belonging, we educators may benefit from exploring debates within ontological philosophy; this is a practice reaching back into Greek antiquity, referring to the term ontos or onta, which is an ancient Greek word that has been translated by modern philosophers as a reference to being (Heidegger, 1962). ‘To be’, as all early literacy teachers will know, is a verb that takes several forms – for example, ‘I am’ and ‘you are’ are, respectively, first- and second-person conjugations of the verb, referring to subjective existence or ‘being’.
When I first reviewed this theme of ‘belonging, being and becoming’ in the Australian early childhood curriculum, in an article co-written with Marilyn Fleer (2014), our argument skirted around the edges of the grammatical implications of the decision to draw ontological ideas into a curriculum for young children. We mentioned that ‘since the Enlightenment, the purpose given to the concepts of being and becoming has been with a rationalization of human development i.e., the unfolding stages of human consciousness’ (Peers, Fleer 2014: 915), and that a psychological program, or theory of psychology and human development, had emerged in alignment with this rationality. But there are a number of points that we had to set aside due to lack of space, which I hope to outline here.
I notify the reader that these expansions on aspects of my earlier collaboration with Marilyn Fleer in no way exhaust the possibilities for debate about the philosophical import of the EYLF, especially with regard to ‘belonging, being and becoming’. They focus almost entirely on the meaning of the term ‘belonging’ and the kinds of philosophical questions that arise from the decision to adopt it as the principal term of the EYLF. I regard ‘belonging’ as the principal term because it is first in the sequence of the three words and, whatever the reason that particular sequence was chosen, the arrangement of the three words alters the developmental logic that ontological philosophy carried when it was converted into a psychological program.
What does ‘belonging’ mean?
The thrust of my argument here is that the specific application of the term ‘belonging’ with reference to infants and young children demands deeper, more extensive exploration. As it stands in the EYLF, the connotations placed on the word are to property. Yet the connections between belonging and property are by no means straightforward and self-evident. 1 Much of this article is spent preparing the reader to grasp why it is so complicated.
An initial element of this account of belonging as property requires the reader to follow an argument proposed by Martin Heidegger (1962), where he suggests that philosophy should distinguish between the transcendental view of consciousness in which self-consciousness ‘does not have the being of a self, but of a thing’ (Large, 2002: 134). This theory refers to the Enlightenment view, on which developmental psychology depends, in which consciousness of self involves splitting the self into subject and object, and by which the self becomes a thing-for-itself. In other words, I am using this premise of Heidegger’s argument to show that there is an inherent risk of understanding ‘belonging’ as a means of reducing the self to a thing, because we lose something essential to the character of human beings if we make ourselves into things (Heidegger, 2000). 2
That essential characteristic of humans, at least from the point of view of Heidegger, is language. My aim here is therefore partly to raise the significance of a definition of belonging as property, which may imply that we see ourselves as things for-ourselves, or that belong to ourselves, as well as to suggest other ways of addressing the meaning of belonging. The opening definition for ‘belonging’ in the EYLF suggests that children shall experience belonging, ascribing a passive tense to the child, who undergoes an experience: Experiencing belonging – knowing where and with whom you belong – is integral to human existence. Children belong first to a family, a cultural group, a neighbourhood and a wider community. Belonging acknowledges children’s interdependence with others and the basis of relationships in defining identities. In early childhood, and throughout life, relationships are crucial to a sense of belonging. Belonging is central to being and becoming in that it shapes who children are and who they can become. (Commonwealth of Australia, 2009: 7)
The experience of belonging is meant to produce a knowledge of belonging, and this knowledge ‘is integral to human existence’. The way in which human existence is inserted here assumes that the meaning of ‘existence’ is self-evident. It might mean ‘integral to living, or to being alive’. It is interesting to me that the experience of belonging by a child is, on the one hand, passive and, on the other, institutional – that is, ‘Children belong first to a family, a cultural group, a neighbourhood and a wider community’. This sentence refers the child’s existence, as well as their experience of belonging, to social institutions – principally, the family. In fact, the sequence of terms employed here rehearses a developmental framework of its own, separate from but aligned with the psychological project. This is because the political assumption underlying these social institutions is that, as sovereign individuals, human beings enter the ‘world’ by way of the family, as an original site of existence.
After finding herself located ‘in’ the family, the child then takes on a social existence, as opposed to a natural or even a private existence, by way of a recognition that the family is not the whole world. While much psychological theory would casually conflate family life with socialization, the relevant distinction here is a political one, between private and public. The enlightenment philosopher GWF Hegel argued that the child must abandon the family at that point where he (since Hegel demarcated strongly between the lives of men and women and the roles they could play in society) seeks to fulfil his functions in civil society. So, the sense of belonging to these different social institutions, provided in the EYLF, actually can be taken to reinforce an Enlightenment argument that the citizen is destined to alienate himself from his family (Hegel, 1967).
The irony here is that the EYLF does not acknowledge that sequence from private to public as a force that the child could somehow resist. It regards the development of a child’s autonomy as compelled by a force that it does not elucidate, even while implicitly relying on that logic which involves a contradiction between family and society. I am pointing to the fact that the EYLF implies that the child could enter a social network while remaining tied to the family, retaining membership of the family; however, this is actually in conflict with the logic that explains the notion of autonomy and freedom of will. If one remains tied to something, it is evidence that one is not free; rather, one is constrained by obligations to the family. Such obligations as caring for one’s parents are social and ethical rules that westerners tend to take for granted. We do not usually see them as producing a conflict with the notion of freedom. I make this observation to highlight the political framework within which the EYLF should be read: although the EYLF merely reflects prevalent social mores, it would be naive to assume that the EYLF offers a neutral and apolitical guide to the developmental experiences of young children.
The passive experience of belonging
One of the assumptions that underpins the way the EYLF uses the term ‘belonging’ is that the child ‘is’, in an a priori sense. I mean that being – that is, ‘is’, ‘are’, ‘am’, and so on – forms the operative verb on which belonging is predicated in this case. A child cannot belong unless the child already ‘is’ – that is, unless the child exists. The reader will forgive me for interrupting the ordinary, familiar sense in which it is commonplace to think about a child as existing; I do so in order to more rigorously interrogate the terms advanced in the EYLF document.
The term ‘a priori’ refers to an object that does not have to be observed in order for us to know that it exists. The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant identified a few very specific ideas, such as ‘man’, ‘god’ and ‘world’, as a priori. The primary example of an a priori concept is ‘time’, which, for Kant (1979: 47), was ‘not an empirical conception’, since no aspect of temporality, such as ‘co-existence’ or ‘succession’, could be observed if the idea of time was not already installed in that range of concepts from which we choose in order to describe ‘co-existence’ or ‘succession’. 3 When we refer to the child, we are referring to a generalized child, an idealization, which means that we must add or subtract characteristics in order to particularize the specific child in her diversity from the ideal, and distinguish from the generic. It may also be observed that the idealization of a child is an elementary form of regarding the child as an object (or, indeed, a thing). Yet the EYLF does not engender this kind of distinction in relation to ‘belonging’.
This idealizing operation also places the child outside time – that is, in an a priori sense, we accept that children have a presence (which is infinite, not unstable) that we cannot take away. My aim in pointing to the ‘presence’ of the idealized child, to the child whose characteristics ‘are’ set in advance, is that it allows us to question whether we have submitted our own views of the children we teach to an ideology that we have not effectively analysed. For example, Joanne Faulkner has written of the innocence that is normatively imputed to the child: In spite of its apparent obviousness, the privilege of childhood innocence is complexly overdetermined by a variety of adult exigencies, desires, and crises, which, once exposed to scrutiny, may become less self-evident, even questionable. As a virtue, innocence is not cultivated through self-discipline, sustained effort, or special giftedness. It is, rather, an empty trait, valued rather as a deficit of experience, as if experience itself were corrosive of virtue. (Faulkner, 2013: 127)
The sense that is advanced in the EYLF is that the child already enjoys an existence; this may have been written with the expectation that we, as readers, practitioners, researchers and parents, would never be placed in a position where we would need to question the ontological status of a child. And yet, by writing the document in a manner that suggests all children will experience human existence in the same way, we are already obliged to conceptualize children in isolation from their extant being – that is, to assume that the child exists in advance is to inscribe the child with an ontological essence or presence. When a human comes into the world, we assign the name ‘child’ and, in doing so, we ascribe all of the ideological values that ‘child’ carries to that new being, regardless of who they are. This is to say that if the child already exists, it is because the child is that the child has an absolute, essential, atemporal quality (outside time), which the EYLF is not disposed to interrupt.
The connection between existing and knowing
Let me recapitulate the earlier point raised in the EYLF definition of ‘belonging’: that ‘[e]xperiencing belonging – knowing where and with whom you belong – is integral to human existence’ (my emphasis). The way this is written suggests that the experience of belonging by a child is something that teachers, parents and other adults responsible for the implementation of the EYLF should aim to achieve in universal terms – that is, because belonging is integral to human existence. There is an extent to which this is a moral judgment which seeks to stipulate the kind of activity, the kind of practices, that the EYLF as a curriculum requires (because they are deemed appropriate, correct, etc.) of those adults teaching it.
Such a stipulation is a moral judgment to the extent that it implies (in a manner that suggests certain elements of the child’s early life are taken for granted) that there is a unity of learning to think (or know) and learning to be. 4 A human will gain access to their inherent, natural rights, and understand their duties as a social being, by dint of the coincidence of knowing and being. This is the fundamental assumption underlying the pragmatist epistemology that imputes rationality to human beings. Belonging to a family, for example, would entail knowing who your parents are and following the structure that your parents present you with. In this context, belonging seems to denote a unification of self-consciousness and social existence. It might be that the EYLF authors were convinced that children gain self-consciousness by way of their social experience.
To the extent that this accords with a psychological paradigm of human development, the idea of belonging pursued in the EYLF aims to accommodate and reinforce a prevalent sense that children must learn to become (i.e. this is the link between belonging and becoming) by becoming conscious of themselves. The logic might then proceed: the child learns to be self-conscious, to say ‘I am’, when she participates in a social and linguistic universe that invites her to identify herself as herself.
This would align with the Hegelian doctrine that logic begins with being, as the ‘indeterminate immediate’ (Hegel, 1969: 81). Transposed on psychological thinking about development, this phrase might be interpreted as that earliest point in the development of self-consciousness – a moment in the child’s life whereby she is ‘immediate’ (not mediated by thought of the self or relatively unconscious) and indeterminate (not determined or caused by an Other from outside the self).
Importantly, when the EYLF positioned ‘being’ as the second term, rather than the first, it reversed the Hegelian dialectical sequence, such that the logic of the EYLF now begins with a social experience rather than a moment in the child’s existence where they are waiting to develop. I mean that we can take the EYLF theme as follows: belonging (fullness), being (emptiness), becoming (negation). My interpretation is aimed at explaining the difference between the EYLF theme and the ontological philosophy to which I am comparing it. Enlightenment philosophy regards ‘being’ as pure, which means that it is empty, and it assumes that at that moment when the child begins to learn, or to use reason, they gain the capacity to acknowledge to themselves that they ‘are’, in a manner that entails looking back at a past moment of existing, a moment that is empty, nothingness.
For Hegel, before that moment of acknowledgement, the child does not know that they are empty, nothing or pure. Knowledge entails a ‘transition from Being to the nothing: becoming. Both the same [i.e. being and nothing are recognizably identifiable with each other, or the same] each disappears into its opposite, is overcome – becoming’ (Heidegger, 2010: 58).
So, when the EYLF opens the thematic sequence with a sense of fullness, in reference to a social experience, it may seem to suggest that the child is already capable (in a priori terms) of experience, of knowing, of absorbing. This could potentially be made to align with Heidegger’s (2000: 89) theory that ‘being’ should not be regarded as an emptiness, but rather that ‘everything that is not simply nothing “is” – and for us, even Nothing “belongs” to “Being”’. And with some additional exploration, we may even theorize the alignment between the human child and the theory of human being more generally, so that we legitimate the passive tense that the EYLF may currently ascribe to the child, insofar as it implies an emptiness.
Yet, the EYLF may have been written in the absence of a rigorous analysis of the terms of its theme: belonging, being and becoming. In Hegel’s ontological philosophy, those terms are stated as ‘being-nothing-becoming’. This allows for the third moment in the sequence to designate the moment at which knowledge is activated. So, to position ‘belonging’ as the immediate status of the child could be interpreted, accordingly, as inadvertently overturning the negative functions of the dialectic, and stipulating a social experience as the ground on which a child ‘is’ and ‘becomes’.
Putting ‘belonging’ first
There is an implication that putting ‘belonging’ first signals a temporality that inheres within the sequence, as I mentioned earlier. The dialectic is meant to form a succession of moments, as if it described moments in time that are consecutive. Can we detect evidence that the EYLF authors also intended such a temporalization? Hegel’s account of the development of consciousness is one that implies, but does not explicitly theorize, the temporal character of existing; where Kant (1979: 47) had asserted that time was necessary for our capacity to represent the nature of how things, objects, can be experienced (i.e. ‘without this presupposition we could not represent to ourselves that things exist together at one and the same time, or at different times, that is, contemporaneously, or in succession’), Hegel prefers to emphasize the form taken by temporality, so as to render the a priori concept as a concrete activity, rather than an empty abstraction.
This means that the developmental program we encounter in psychological theory is decidedly more Kantian than Hegelian, since psychology attempts to fix particular sequences of human development as both chronological and empirical. This means that we can see and observe the characteristics of a theory of human development (e.g. a child should be able to read by age X) – a theory that relies on the a priori concept of time – that is, chronology (Fleer, 2003). Empiricism is the bedrock of psychological practice – a fact that led Kant himself to oppose psychology as a form of dogmatism (Teo, 2006). 5 By contrast, Hegel would emphasize the activity of consciousness, in a manner that is comparable, in my view, to the activity theories we nowadays encounter in neo-Vygotskian explanations of learning (Chaiklin et al., 1999). 6
If there is a possibility that the authors of the EYLF sought to challenge or contest the idealist framework in which a child’s capacity for rationality was theorized in Enlightenment philosophy, it is of considerable interest that it should position ‘belonging’ (even inadvertently) as a temporal priority. This is because the social experience that appears to follow from such a prioritization of ‘belonging’ in ‘belonging, being and becoming’ can now be taken as a strategic basis for understanding the EYLF. For example, we could produce a theory of early learning that places a social context in the foreground, much as Thomas Popkewitz (1997) does in his critique of curriculum reasoning.
However, there is a significant risk associated with taking this approach. For example, it presents the community who adopt the EYLF with a mode of institutional validation; this is visible as that sense of belonging in which we anticipate that a child will have a family to whom they ‘belong’ and with whom they identify (Spivak, 2012: 204–205). This is fairly close to the EYLF definition, in which it is stated that ‘[e]xperiencing belonging – knowing where and with whom you belong – is integral to human existence’. The suggestion is that ‘knowing where’ entails identifications, on the part of a child, in relation to a ‘where’ – that is, a place, such as a home, a street, and so on. In my view, such identifications are vehicles by which a cosmopolitan framework could be imposed by the EYLF. I mean that the EYLF may be interpreted as assuming a cosmopolitan approach, whereby two related matters are embedded in the theory of early learning. These two issues are explained by Pheng Cheah as follows: Any theory of cosmopolitanism [will] address two related questions, first, an empirical question concerning the cosmopolitan extensiveness of a regulatory power embedded in institutions, and second, a question about the normativity of these institutions, whether they can be in a relation of mutual feedback with a global political consciousness that voices the universal interests of humanity and tries to maximise human freedom. (Cheah, 2006: 486)
The problem of the social institution as a vehicle by which regulatory power is maintained and enforced is, moreover, visible as that apparently naive conception of belonging in which a child may be presented as needing a family, whereby the ‘family’ is installed as a necessity for life – that is, the ‘home’ is transformed from a natural environment into an institutional mechanism, without analysis or examination. Yet the family as an institution has been under sustained critique for at least the last century, through various debates involving psychoanalysis and feminism, each of which addresses the patriarchal model of the family as a social structure. I mean that it is naive to treat the home or the family as if they were naturally safe and always necessary. As Faulkner remarks: Innocent childhood is an idealized and artificial field in which harm, or at least its traces, is deliberately occluded while its vulnerability is heightened and fetishized. Affluent, democratic societies need a contingent they can nominate as innocent, for the sake of their smooth psycho-social functioning – as moral cause célèbre, as alibi and sacred absolution; the part of the innocent is to cleanse the community of crimes perpetrated in the name of its protection. (Faulkner, 2013: 127–128)
So, the assumption that children should belong to a family is a moral judgment that rests on leaving intact the purity of a family, and this assumption is manifestly problematic in contemporary Western society, let alone in any other culture, owing to the overwhelming attention that must now be paid to children’s services of various kinds, aimed at protecting the child from the family, which has somehow failed this moral responsibility. Perhaps there is a self-evident expectation that the implementation of the EYLF will serve to ameliorate that risk merely by insisting on the moral duties of adults with respect to children in general. But this would only provide evidence for the kind of paradox that Faulkner is observing.
Belonging to or with?
This analysis aims to foreground the temporal implications of a particular notion of social being, which points to the child as an institutionally validated social being (Spivak, 2012). But I do not suggest that this is the only possible way to understand the impact of using the term ‘social’ in relation to belonging. Rather, I am outlining issues that ought to be considered by us in theorizing the EYLF and the ways it may be interpreted.
‘Belonging’ can be thought of in isolation from ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, but the risk in doing so is that it comes to lack proper conceptualization. In the same way that Heidegger (1962) argued that ‘being’ had been ‘forgotten’, and the task of comprehending it set aside as superfluous, so we can explore educational concepts such as ‘belonging’ with a willingness to comprehend the weight and value they carry in educational discourse.
Here I return to the proposition that the connotations placed on ‘belonging’ are to ‘property’. Although ‘property’ should not necessarily be reduced to a conception of ownership and control (where, as I mentioned in my collaboration with (Fleer 2014: 919), a child belongs to their family as a part belongs to a whole), it signals a metaphysical relationship that involves risks such as those in which self-consciousness takes a negative pathway. This is because to make such a reduction is effectively to concede either that the child is a thing or that the possibility of completion is tenable only in relation to an idealized unity – one that is greater than and transcends the individual human. And the reader may recognize that such logic already rehearses the same problems that I just outlined in respect of institutionally validated action. In other words, we would be obliged always to think of the child as the property of the family, for example, rather than allowing for a different, more reciprocal sense of belonging.
In order to trace the meaning of ‘property’ in a different way, I propose an example that takes up a model not irrelevant to the domain of early childhood: that ‘belonging’ might be conceptualized as a reference to issues arising within the relationship between a woman and pregnancy. Note that I am not stating that this relationship – woman and pregnancy – as a relation between a woman and the foetus, although the latter relation is clearly also significant to ways of approaching ‘belonging’. The relationship between a woman and pregnancy is qualitatively different to that between a woman and a foetus because the problem we address is about the way that we are allowed to think, or conceptualize, the relationship: pregnancy is not the same as a foetus. For example, there is a possibility of thinking pregnancy as a concept that does not entail automatically thinking the foetus as a person, or as a thing (Mills, 2014).
The sense of ‘belonging’ that could emerge from working through such differences is one that refuses the necessity of imposing a co-extensive framework on the woman as a pregnant woman. This sense aims to hold apart, to open up the between, and separate the parts that might otherwise be unified in a different approach to belonging. Pregnancy is something that belongs to the woman, but not in any essential sense. Woman is therefore not substantively ready for or disposed to pregnancy as an essential element of the feminine (Irigaray, 1993). The design of this sense of belonging aims to make possible a glimpse of how we may appropriate belonging, to pause in that moment before apprehending it as a fixed kind of relationship (a property), whereby, for example, the woman and the pregnancy are a totality that withstands the isolation of its parts.
This sense of belonging addresses the opportunity for a woman to think about herself, to objectify herself, through an opening that might not apply were we to automatically inscribe legal status to the foetus as a person. ‘This break between the human (that is, a thing that belongs to the species Homo sapiens) and the person is a decisional space in which personhood can be attributed or withheld’ (Mills, 2014: 90). So, now belonging becomes a site for attributing or withholding qualities, characteristics and descriptors so as to privilege and valorize the kind of force that necessarily emerges around the saying of ‘belonging’.
Belonging in this case could be a power that is equally afforded to a child so as to model the right to refuse, as well as the right to assimilate. It may be that this is precisely in accord with the intentions of the EYLF authors, and yet it does not mean the same thing as institutionally validated action, because it regards institutional structures and rules with caution. It recognizes those rules and steps around them, rather than incorporating them without examination or interrogation.
Conclusion
In attempting to guide the reader through a few of the theoretical issues that arise in determining what should or could be understood by the word ‘belonging’ in the EYLF, I am addressing that risk of being casual and complacent. The EYLF functions to direct the educational outcomes of generations of children in our community. So, the reason why early childhood educators in particular should be attentive to these problems with the meaning of ‘knowing’, and the kind of ‘knowledge’ that the EYLF exhorts them to inculcate in their students, is that without a satisfactory critique of epistemology, there is a risk of educational practice falling into the abyss of hubris. It is a risk to which much of educational policy, debate and practice, as it applies to other tiers of schooling and post-school institutions, has already succumbed. When we speak about education these days, ‘we’ (i.e. the policy writers who govern much of public debate) speak about standards of achievement by an idealized being whose characteristics have been settled long ago, and about whom no serious scholar will inquire, for fear of being ridiculed and ignored. This is hubris because psychology – especially as a pragmatist framework for interpreting the developmental structure of human beings – has become so dogmatic that it ‘presumes to hold court over Being itself’ (Caputo, 1983: 664).
In order to approach another way of thinking about the EYLF, one that maximizes what can be retrieved from the incapacities of what is, after all, a government-sanctioned policy document from a moment in history when governments have no appetite at all for intellectual inquiry, I think we have to refer to debate outside the field of education – in philosophy, to be precise, where the practice of interrogating the meanings of words and the logic that they activate is still robustly pursued.
But philosophical discourse in education need not be arcane and difficult, making little or no impact on everyday practice and daily routine. The opportunity to supply thoughtful spaces where educators and policy writers can debate the implications of their various responsibilities and disciplinary knowledges in early childhood education is too valuable to give up easily.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
