Abstract
This article unpacks how neoliberal discourse functions as a dominant but problematic system of reasoning that changes and shifts the ways in which we come to think about early childhood education and care. A post-structuralist lens is deployed to understand the production of fears and hopes under the looming shadows of contemporary education reforms and social policies. Highlighting Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea as three cases from East Asian cultures, this article seeks to elucidate how a similar neoliberal economic and political imaginary is at work to (re)construct East Asian children as human capital for the alchemy of productive citizens in the 21st century.
Introduction
The field of early childhood education is undergoing extraordinary challenges and changes. (Re)shaped by complex mixtures of private interests and public rhetoric, the contemporary democratic conception of education has been coated with a dangerous layer of neoliberal economic and political imaginary. Influenced by waves of global circulation and local (re)articulation of the neoliberal economic and political imaginary, education has been conceptualized as an important form of socioeconomic investment (Ball, 2012; Klees et al., 2012; OECD, 2012; Urban and Rubiano, 2015; World Bank, 2011). Such an economic linkage between children’s education and future social returns and capital gains has been established through the articulation of human capital theory in education (for examples, see Becker, 1993 [1964]; Heckman, 2012). In particular, since early childhood education and care have been deemed a foundation and starting point for a child’s lifelong learning (OECD, 2001, 2006), the idea of investing in children’s early learning has been articulated as an economically and politically correct concept in the 21st century.
Seeking to destabilize the dominant neoliberal economic and political imaginary in early childhood education, this article focuses on several education reform policies and discourses from selected East Asian geopolitical spaces such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea to illustrate how similar logics on the economics of early childhood education are at work. Situated within a poststructural conceptual/theoretical framework, I problematize the system of reasoning embedded within reform policies and discourses through which the production of fears and hopes is at play to create new parameters to (re)define early childhood education. I also highlight that through the mobilization of education policies and reform discourses, (pre)schools are (re)conceptualized as new sites of sociocultural governance for the alchemy of new, acceptable and desirable attributes of ‘ideal’ children/citizens (Popkewitz, 2004, 2008).
In order to make the invisible neoliberal economic and political imaginary in early childhood education visible again for critical reconceptualization, this article is organized into three major sections. In the first section, I highlight selected samples of (inter)national documents and reports to elucidate what sorts of economic logic have come forth as strong voices/advice to suggest what early childhood education is and what early childhood education can do (or should mean) for all nations and children in the world. Through examining these authoritative and influential ‘texts’ and the system of reasoning supporting them, I engage in a critical theoretical discussion on the problematics of the neoliberal economic and political imaginary in early childhood education. In the second section, I pull together several selected East Asian early childhood education policy documents from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea to pinpoint what similar neoliberal logics or systems of reasoning are at work in the (re)landscaping of the field of early childhood education and care. In the third section, I work to problematize and critique the production of fears and hopes in education policies as governing strategies and tools of a neoliberal economic and political imaginary through which a new norm of be(com)ing is made.
Through these discussions, my overarching goal is to de-familiarize and destabilize the golden equation of education as an investment in contemporary projects of education reforms. I pay attention to the g/local productions of the webs of power/knowledge through which the desirability and formation of the neoliberal economic and political imaginary are made intelligible. Additionally, I hope to open up possibilities for rethinking what education is and ought to be to move towards social justice perspectives concerning equity in education.
The looming shadow of a neoliberal economic and political imaginary
That early childhood education holds the key to children’s future success, development and well-being has been a familiar and frequently emphasized global theme. Since the turn of the 21st century, there have been numerous government and non-government reports, whitepapers, policies and the like coming together to assert the significance of quality education and care for children as a policy priority across different national boundaries. Here, I take a critical look at selected samples of documents by the OECD, the World Bank and a report by the White House in the US to interpret how a neoliberal economic and political imaginary is at play to (re)construct the importance of early childhood education.
Now! It’s time to invest: Education as an investment
OECD reports
The idea of
Translated into multiple languages for OECD member countries, these reports and documents are influential and powerful as authoritative knowledge in shaping g/local policy formations around the world. However, why talk about early childhood education and care as an investment? As explicitly elaborated and explained in one prominent OECD (2011) document:
Private returns are those that the individual gains. For example, higher earnings from education or better health.
Social returns are the private returns plus any extra benefits for society as a whole, such as better citizenship, larger tax base, lower crime rates, etc. (OECD, 2011: 1, my italics)
Undoubtedly, early childhood education matters and is important. Shaped by an economic conceptual framework and perspective, early childhood education has shifted and it has newly added ‘benefits and values’ attached to currency values as it entails future private and social returns as positive outcomes. Hence, the financial advice is to invest in early childhood education and invest now if we desire positive returns and dividends for all. In particular, the work of James Heckman, an American economist and Nobel laureate, has further promoted the importance of education as a form of social investment. The Heckman Equation has been noted as a significant and promising equation that enhances our knowledge and understanding of the power of investment in early education and care to reach the human potential. As illustrated in the official webpage, the building blocks/elements in the Heckman Equation are: + Invest Invest in educational and developmental resources for disadvantaged families to provide equal access to successful early human development. + Develop Nurture early development of cognitive and social skills in children from birth to age five. + Sustain Sustain early development with effective education through to adulthood. = Gain Gain a more capable, productive and valuable workforce that pays dividends to America for generations to come. (abstracted from: https://heckmanequation.org/the-heckman-equation/)
A World Bank report
Another example along the same line of economic rationality about the idea of investment is a World Bank report,
A White House report from the United States
Initiatives to invest in early childhood education and care can be seen in different national plans or formations of new education policies. As articulated in one US White House (2015) report, [e]xpanding early learning initiatives would provide benefits to society of roughly $8.60 for every $1 spent, about half of which comes from increased earnings for children when they grow up. (White House, 2015: 2)
Additionally, it is important to note the political power and influence of the United States in the East Asian locations such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea post World War II. Playing a significant ‘Big Brother’ role with great influence in shaping the social development and policies across different parts of East Asian contexts through economic and political power, a White House report on the importance of early childhood education and care would have visible ripple effects. In other words, an initiative like this can further mobilize the concept of early childhood education as an economic benefit to travel across national boundaries in East Asian geopolitical spaces.
Why is it dangerous to ‘treat’ early childhood education as an investment?
In these reports, the purpose of early childhood education has been (re)defined through a neoliberal economic and political imaginary, which is not only dangerous but also problematic, because it shifts social democratic meanings of education to neoliberal economic connotations. As Rizvi and Lingard (2009 ) elaborate: [e]ducational purposes have been re-defined in terms of a narrower set of concerns about human capital development, and the role education must play to meet the needs of the global economy and to ensure the competitiveness of the national economy. (Rizvi and Lingard, 2009: 10)
While the linkage between education and economic benefits of individual personal and social returns helps to emphasize the importance of education in the early years, laced within such rationality is a commodification of early childhood education and care. When education and care are commodified, the question of which families may have the stronger ‘buying power’ to invest in their children’s education and development cannot be downplayed.
(Re)landscaping education through education policies: Focusing on Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea
Why highlight East Asian geopolitical regions?
Education in East Asia has gained much global attention in recent decades. Particularly, global attention and discussions on how/why East Asian students are outperforming their peers in other regions of the world have taken centre stage in contemporary education reform debates. Questions and discussions that look to East Asian students’/children’s academic or educational success in testing schemes such as the Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA) are making news headlines. However, there are multiple historical, cultural, educational, economic and social factors that have merged together to shape the importance of education in East Asia. For instance, it is important to note that most East Asian children are thought of as students from early childhood (for example, see Lee and Yelland, 2017). Therefore, education in East Asian cultural contexts is laced with multiple layers of meanings. Adding another layer of a global neoliberal economic and political construction of education as an investment, education reforms and policies in East Asian geopolitical spaces such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea can shed new light on how education is being reconstructed as a sociocultural ‘commodity’ for investment.
What is education in East Asia? Past, present and future
Seeing the past
For centuries, education in East Asia has been strongly influenced by Confucianism. Confucius’ philosophical belief defined education as a way of cultivating ‘junzi’ (君子), which is often translated to English as ‘gentleman’. Junzi in Confucianism is a well-educated man with high and pure virtues. The Confucian school of thought shaped East Asian education philosophies and came to see the practice of benevolence as the ultimate goal of education. Within such philosophical beliefs, education is about scholarship and study in order to develop towards the goal of being a well-educated man, ‘junzi’, who is self-regulated and self-disciplined.1
Confucius believed that education can be instrumental for all ‘men’ if they desire social mobility. However, what came with this philosophical education belief of the Confucian school of thought was the establishment of a national examination system as a key mechanism to ‘select’ and ‘identify’ who has the ability and merit to rise up in the system as a ‘junzi’. Under this philosophy, education for all and education for social welfare or social harmony and peace rather than economic benefits were and until recently continued to be the backbone of education for East Asian countries. However, in the 1980s, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea experienced remarkable economic growth and development. Acclaimed as ‘little dragons’ from East Asia, these different yet similar success stories of significant national and regional transformation and economic progress became linked with productive education systems (Chen, 2010).
Being in the present and leaping into the future: A new definition of education?
At the turn of the 21st century, the emergence of multiple events such as national, regional and global financial crises, different political transformations and changes, alarming and significant low birth rates, and global circulations of a neoliberal economic and political imaginary have all merged together to open up possibilities and challenges for (re)crafting new and different definitions of what education is and what it ought to be.
In Hong Kong, as stated in the welcome message by the Secretary for Education in 2013: The aim of education for Hong Kong is to promote students’ whole-person development and life-long learning capabilities. Education helps to unleash human potentials and enhance people qualities and the competitiveness of the HKSAR. (www.edb.gov.hk/en/about-edb/info/welcome/index.html) Education is the foundation of personal development, social advancement, vibrant economic prosperity, and national sustainability, and it shoulders the mission of enhancing national literacy, cultivating highly-skilled people, and promoting social progress. (MoE in Taiwan, 2014 ) Korea is the one and only country that transformed itself from an aid recipient to a donor through its turbulent times of struggle for democracy and industrialization solely with the power of education. We had no money or natural resources, but we still invested in people, and thanks to the power of education, Korea took a major turn to become what it is today. (MoE in Korea, 2016 )
Therefore, when a prevalent slogan of
Across the nation/state geopolitical boundaries between Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea, common themes relating to the economics of early childhood education can be found in education policies and reform discourses as well as in contemporary education development plans. The neoliberal economic model of
Tinkering with the early childhood education system through vouchers
In Taiwan, a preschool voucher policy was implemented in the late 1990s. The Taiwanese preschool voucher policy has gone through multiple modifications and revisions over the past few decades including increasing the face value of the vouchers and extending it to include both public and private preschools to keep its original promises of ‘fixing’ accessibility and affordability issues and providing quality education for all. For parents, this voucher policy has brought in some public subsidy to support their expenses in children’s education and learning in the early years. For preschools, this voucher policy has mobilized parents to become a mechanism of ‘buying power’ when selecting their children’s education and care services. Particularly, for private preschools, though, the vouchers have come with both government funding and regulations.
In Hong Kong, a Pre-primary Education Voucher Scheme (PEVS) was introduced and implemented in 2006. Pledging to improve the quality and address the issue of the affordability of early childhood education for all children, the HKSAR government’s version of vouchers funds all ‘eligible’ children between three and six years old who are attending half day programmes at nonprofit private preschools. For parents, this voucher scheme appears to bring in ‘government/public’ funding in the form of tuition reimbursement, seeming to ‘shoulder the burden’ of family spending for education in the early years. For preschools, PEVS legitimatize multiple government regulations in private education through the requirement of quality inspection/assurance schemes.
In Korea, the government introduced the Nuri Curriculum in 2012 for all five-year-old children in kindergartens and childcare centres. In 2013, the Nuri Curriculum was expanded to include all children between the ages of three and five years old. Through implementation of this Nuri Curriculum policy, a universal government subsidy, all children between three and five years old are eligible to receive public financial support from the local Office of Education under the administration of the MoE. For parents, this tuition subsidy from the government covers the financial cost of children’s education and care. For kindergartens and childcare centres, receiving government funding in the form of children’s tuition subsidy means increased government inspection and regulation for quality assurance to address the issue of accountability.
Education policies such as education vouchers for all children demonstrate how the effects of a neoliberal economic and political imaginary have no geopolitical borders or cultural limits (Ball, 2012). While these different East Asian systems of education face different challenges, similar reform discourses and policies are at play under the neoliberal economic rationality and political imaginary. Transcending the nation/state boundaries, education voucher policies have travelled both near and far to everywhere to reconstitute what education is as well as how to (re)make it better. Education policy embodies grids of power/knowledge to function as an effective tool for (re)landscaping the field of education.
In these voucher policies across different East Asian geopolitical spaces, while early childhood has not been recognized or organized as part of the free and compulsory education system, East Asian interpretations and re-appropriations of vouchers are creating paradoxical and complex landscapes for education and care in the early years. In other words, the East Asian variations of voucher policies have not only embodied the cultural and philosophical construction of the importance of education with Confucianist roots from the past, but they have also leapt into the weaving of a dangerous neoliberal landscape of early childhood education. Additionally, while these voucher policies may appear to promise some ‘quick solutions’ for promoting education equity and providing quality education for all, what is problematic and ironical is how the system of reasoning behind these policies through the neoliberal economic and political imaginary is mobilizing an economic logic as the new organizing principle to dangerously materialize education and care as commodities.
Mind hacking through the reform policies
Education policies like vouchers can be analytically conceptualized as ‘technologies of the self’ through which the governing of others and the governing of the self are interlaced to ‘hack’ or ‘reprogramme’ our commonsense and govern how we should act or think (Foucault, 1990 [1978]). Thus, reform policies are very much about specifying the parameters of conduct (e.g. see Lather, 2006; Popkewitz and Fendler, 1999). How we ‘see’ children and education as well as who we are and how we should act in making the ‘right’ decisions as autonomous and productive beings are very much internal rather than external. How we are governed while we simultaneously become self-governed and self-disciplined as we accept the reform policies and discourses with their face value and logics entails significant and dangerous mind hacking.
In other words, through voucher policies, a new regional East Asian truth is being (re)constructed. Early childhood education is being commodified, while parents are being reconstituted into buyers/investors minding and managing their children’s education and care as a business, ‘treating’ their children as human capital. Dangerously, a neoliberal economic and political reasoning is at work to reconfigure a new layer of meaning and purpose of education and care in the early years.
Critical reflections on the paradoxical production of fear and hope in the East Asian neoliberal economic and political imaginary
Interplay of fear and hope in education policies
Shaping a new landscape of early childhood education, the governments in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea have come to an interesting synchronization in their efforts to ‘fix’ issues concerning affordability, accessibility and accountability in the field of early childhood education through policies like vouchers with a shared vision to provide quality education and care for all children. The formation of such education policies entails the production of both fear and hope, simultaneously. Under the neoliberal economic and political imaginary, education has been reconstructed from a social democratic concept to an economic idea of investment. This new imaginary of education has created an interplay of fear and hope.
Fear of falling behind in the global games of competition such as international assessment schemes like PISA, governments in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea feel that the need to
Paradoxes and complexities
The deployment of these various East Asian voucher policies evokes complex paradoxes and ambiguities. On the surface, the vouchers appear to wear the skin of ‘free to choose’ as the policies encourage and allow parents to exercise their ‘parental/consumer’ power to choose quality education and care for their children in a market approach to education. Without paying critical attention to the disparity in tuition fees among different private programmes, one could mistakenly fall into the false belief about free choice (Lee, 2010 ). The material reality is that most parents need to ‘pay’ additional money from their own pockets to fill the differences after redemption of the vouchers to ‘buy’ their children access to quality education and care. Hence, the issues concerning affordability and equity are not ‘fixable’ through voucher policies. Rather, voucher policies can dangerously marginalize the already disadvantaged and underprivileged.
From a critical perspective, vouchers have the inherent, dangerous potential to amplify socioeconomic differences and sustain or even perpetuate the existing status quo for children and their families. At face value, these East Asian voucher policies appear to embrace the neoliberal logic by moving public money into private preschools/kindergartens/centres in the form of vouchers. However, in the already highly privatized systems of East Asian early childhood education, the appearance of vouchers presents complex ambiguities in that, with public money through vouchers, governments are legitimately regulating private schools/businesses.
Contradictory to Milton Friedman’s original neoliberal economic conception of school choice and vouchers in which the role of government should be reduced as much as possible to enhance the freedom to choose and efficiencies created by the free market (see Friedman and Friedman, 1980), the East Asian appropriation of education voucher policies is the complete opposite. Rather than deploying vouchers to facilitate the deregulation and decentralization of education towards a free or semi-market, East Asian voucher policies introduced substantial government regulation in an education sector that is already highly privatized.
Through the deployment of vouchers, the role of government in early childhood education has become more prominent than ever in East Asian contexts. For instance, the production of curriculum frameworks and guidelines as well as a quality assurance framework and rating system are new rules that came along with voucher policies. East Asian variations of voucher policies have interjected and legitimatized government regulations into the field of early childhood education. Government intervention and regulation in early childhood education is not an absolute good or bad thing. Rather than being trapped by a binary analysis of good vs. bad that holds any reform policies as the solution for all issues concerning affordability, accessibility and accountability, it is important to look into the complexities of social conditions.
Some concluding thoughts
This article has deployed an epistemological and ontological shift to problematize how a popular economic imaginary with a neoliberal logic is infused across different Asian localities, as well as to challenge the contemporary dominant logic of thinking about what early education and care should be for all children in different nations/states. My attempt to look into the policies and texts on how ‘problems’ are understood in relation to how ‘goals/outcomes’ are anticipated, may open up possibilities for multiple ways of understanding the contemporary conditions that accelerate the dominance of the neoliberal economic and political imaginary for solving education problems. My intention is not to discuss whether education policies like vouchers are inherently good or bad. Rather, I shift to a different discussion to problematize the neoliberal economic and political imaginary as the new grand narrative that prescribes magical solutions for all. While I do not ignore the importance of quality education and care for all children, I question the ways in which we come to ‘see’ and ‘treat’ education as an investment.
Equating education with investment is dangerous for multiple reasons. If we ‘see’ education as an investment, this economic imaginary treats education as a commodity that is purchasable and consumable, as it is attached to currency values. Thus, a cost-benefit analysis for the social returns and earnings of education is at play. If we ‘see’ children as human capital under an economic imaginary, there will be some human capital with a higher price-performance ratio than others. Again, this is an economic rationality and logic about what children are. Therefore, while we invest in children with a higher price-performance ratio, we are dangerously practising social exclusion and inequity. From a critical perspective on social justice and education equity, the neoliberal economic and political imaginary is very dangerous, as it shifts the democratic constructions of freedom, equity and justice to a single and narrowed economic rationality and imaginary.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
