Cornerstone of the Commons: Building equity through new-public spaces for the education and care of the very young

Abstract

Whereas universal public access to early childhood education and care has long occupied a prominent place in feminist demands to end patriarchy, not only has such access gone largely unmet in most countries, save some noteworthy exceptions, but privatized childcare and early education has only gained momentum through neoliberalism, a process that has been steadily privileging the few, not the many. It has hit southern European countries such as Spain hard, especially after additional crisis-related restrictions were imposed on public spending in education and other sectors in 2012. Who, then, does the neoliberal agenda for early education actually serve? Pedagogically speaking, such discriminatory provision can hardly benefit the great majority of children it is supposed to serve, if we take the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as a guide. On the contrary, its purpose is more likely to select and mold youth in inequitable ways that benefit school investors, proprietors or other economic players, more than the children themselves. And, as numerous scholars assert, corporative elite interests behind the commodification of social provision exert increasing control over the decisions made not only in education but in all areas of political economy and social organization.

So how might we begin to counter this “business as usual” of our times? An important starting point involves developing robust and creative collective support for attending to and educating the youngest members of society. Their right to equitable education and accessible, optimal, public care is envisioned and explored here from a critical intersectional perspective as one of the essential building blocks of the Commons. Some inspiring initiatives in this regard will be identified around the globe, their key ideological and organizational tenets laid out, and their implications for forging transformative projects elsewhere discussed.

Keywords

Early childhood education public childcare the Commons intersectionality eco-social transition Spain

How might universal public access to early childhood education and care fundamentally contribute to forging the Commons, as a process of collective transition towards more humane, just, and solidary relations and spaces of eco-social coexistence? This is the basic question addressed in this article. Whereas public support for the care and education of the very young has long occupied a prominent place in feminist demands to end patriarchy (Federici, 2012; Fraser, 2008, 2013; Friedan, 1983; Castro García, 2017; hooks, 2015), not only has such support gone largely unmet in most countries, save some noteworthy exceptions, but privatized childcare and early education has only gained momentum through the dominant economic organizing principal and practice of our times: neoliberalism,¹ the operations of which have been steadily privileging the few to the detriment of the many, especially the working classes, the poor, and other sectors of society that do not fit the healthy, economically solvent, white, heterosexual, male norm.

As a female Anglo-Italo-American scholar of Critical Pedagogy who has been living in Spain since the early 1990s, I take the case of Spain as a natural and, in some ways, unique starting point for analyzing public policy around early childhood education and care. However, I will also draw from certain key policies developed in a few additional countries located not only in Europe but in South America as well, only to return to Spain via my native California, where I briefly pause to examine a history of public childcare provision there, as a point of comparison.

In order to gain a theoretical perspective on this policy, I have broadened my epistemological and ontological scopes for analysis by moving beyond dominant standpoints produced mostly by white scholars situated in the geopolitical North. Here is where the recent writings of intersectional feminists² (Collins and Bilge, 2016; Evans-Winters and Piert, 2015; hooks, 1981, 2000, 2015; McBean, 2013; Yuval-Davis, 2012) will guide this study’s focus on the role that collective support for early childhood care and education can play where the interactions or intersections of various forms of oppression, such as hetero-patriarchy, classism, racism and coloniality, converge in distinct ways on different communities and members of societies. Likewise, decolonial feminists from the Global South (e.g., Mohanty, 2003; León, 2011 or Lugones, 2013)—whose discourse is partially inspired by intersectional feminism (Mendoza, 2016)—will also weigh in to offer some eye-opening alternative perspectives on the critical (neo-Marxist) feminist views that otherwise inform this inquiry. Additional perspectives from critical social theory and critical education and pedagogy will offer further important insights as they relate more or less directly to the role of early childhood care and education in building the Commons.

To foreground the empirical reality of today’s early education and care as a public good, and returning to policy, the very notion of the public, as well as its materialization as provision, has for decades been under attack from transnational neoliberalism, the 2008 global financial-market crash only adding fuel to the fire (Apple, 2013; Ball, 2012; Castro García, 2017; Hursh, 2016; Peters et al., 2015; Torres Santomé, 2001, 2017). Regarding the impact of the financial crisis on southern European welfare states such as Spain, since 2012 the conservative Spanish Administration has used the crisis to justify imposing additional restrictions on public spending in education and other sectors, such as not replacing retired educators; increasing the student/teacher ratios; freezing salaries; and eliminating winter and/or summer bonus payments to teachers; among other measures (see Government of Spain, 2012).³ Meanwhile, the Spanish Ministry of Education drafted the latest Education Act known as the LOMCE,⁴ which was enacted in 2013 in order to institute policies such as cost-effectiveness, privatization, individual choice schemes, competitive distinctions, accountability, and a general culture of meritocratic assessment and control over manifestations of opposing ideologies in educational systems.

Who, then, does this neoliberal agenda actually serve, in Spain or anywhere? Pedagogically speaking, such discriminatory, market-driven provision can hardly benefit the great majority of children it is said to serve, considering that children’s human rights to a decent education and nurturing care are clearly laid out in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. By contrast, neoliberal educational policies are more likely to select and mold youth in inequitable ways that benefit school proprietors, investors and other economic players, more than the children themselves (Anyon, 2005; Ball, 2012; Hursh, 2016; Lipman, 2011; Macrine et al., 2010; Torres Santomé, 2001, 2009, 2017).

So what can be done to counter this “business as usual” of our times? An important starting point involves developing robust and creative collective support for attending to and educating the youngest members of society. Their right to equitable education and accessible, comprehensive public care is envisioned and explored in this article, as mentioned above, from intersectional—structural-materialist, feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, and queer—points of view, because such a lens, as will be argued, is crucial to apprehending the potential of early childcare and education as one of the essential building blocks of the Commons. In the first section of this article, then, intersectional perspectives on the Commons and on the education and care of the very young provide an epistemological framework for the analysis reflected in these pages. The second section includes a brief theoretical overview of the Commons as a collective project, and of the role early childhood education and care play therein. The third section and the conclusion together offer a closer examination of the transformative potential of public support for the earliest years of learning. Throughout the article, some inspiring policy initiatives in this regard will be identified in Spain and across the globe, their key ideological, pedagogical, and organizational tenets laid out, and their implications for forging transformative projects elsewhere discussed.

Intersectional perspectives on the Commons

The Commons are conceived here primarily as a symbolic realm for rethinking and promoting equitable and fulfilling wellbeing, common or shared wealth and social goods, and cohesive, reciprocal and sustainable relations among all forms of life on Earth. The Commons may also be perceived as a set of variously formed and multiply situated physical and virtual spaces from which to act on the aforementioned aims, and thus create alternatives to the pervasive, all-consuming and ultimately unsustainable logics of neoliberal capitalism, as an organizing system based on competition rather than mutual support, which has consequently curtailed the development and expression of democracy itself today.⁵

Although early childhood education and care are understood in this article to play a key role in this equation, they represent merely one of the cornerstones of the Commons because forging this larger project is inevitably an intersectional concern in which, as critical feminist D. Emily Hicks (1981) asserted decades ago, the daily operations of class, gender, and race in school systems, policy institutions, and workplaces often interact in contradictory, nonsynchronous, and mutually influencing ways, a reality that was brought to bear by African American feminists such as bell hooks in her book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), or Angela Davis in Women, Race and Class (1983). These subaltern feminists underscored the urgent need for intersectional perspectives (without yet naming them as such) within radical feminist movements, even prior to Kimberle Crenshaw coining the term intersectionality in 1989 (Crenshaw, 1989). Much more recently, black and other feminist theorists on both sides of the Atlantic offer their respective approaches to intersectional analysis to show how focusing on the solutions to singular forms of oppression, such as classism, runs the risk of rendering invisible or even deepening the combined effects of other injustices, such as racism or (hetero)sexism, on the production of classism, and how it is experienced, for instance, by women of color (Collins and Bilge, 2016; Evans-Winters and Piert, 2015; McBean, 2013; or Yuval-Davis, 2012). Concerning intersectionality and education, bell hooks (2000), Venus Evans-Winters and Joyce Piert (2015), and Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge (2016) have all found inspiration in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970):

Freire rejects a class-only analysis of power relations in favor of the more robust power-laden language of the “oppressed.” The oppressed of Freire’s twentieth-century Brazil are similar to those oppressed today: homeless/landless people, women, poor people, black people, sexual minorities, indigenous people, undocumented immigrants, prisoners, religious minorities, disabled people, and the young. (Collins and Bilge, 2016: 160–61)

As these critical scholars also point out, sub-standard schooling, little or no access to public childcare, and limited health and reproductive rights are overwhelming realities among such social groups, especially when two or more forms of oppression converge on their daily lives.

The inequities and injustices caused by intersecting forms of oppression are grounds for initiating dialectical struggles for the common good. The Commons, then, is a symbolic space of confluence where such struggles can take place. As critical educationists Noah De Lissovoy, Alex Means and Kenneth Saltman (2014) point out, education and its associated settings are among the most frequented and familiar sites for daily encounters with difference among fellow inhabitants, and, therefore, for potentially democratic deliberation. Such settings are thus “partly constitutive of the shared social condition and experience that is the common” (p. 86; their emphasis). This is where the aim to establish free and universal access to the publicly supported care and education of children from birth to six years of age becomes central because it sets the stage, early on, not only for meeting the needs and rights of diverse publics, but for creating a common ground from which to confront ongoing oppressions and future collective needs as well. And while this goal may seem utopian, it is nonetheless rooted in reality as well, not only because some such promising policies have already been enacted both historically and currently in various countries, as shall be explored ahead, but also because, as Erik Olin Wright (2010) argues: “The idea of ‘real utopias’ embraces [the] tension between dreams and practice. It is grounded in the belief that what is pragmatically possible is not fixed independently of our imaginations, but is itself shaped by our visions” (p. 6).

The general goal described above represents a “real utopian” response⁶ not only to David Hursh’s call in this special issue to move beyond neoliberal capitalism through education, the economy, and society, but to three additional calls as well. One comes from the critical “black and brown”⁷ feminists addressed above, as well as other critical feminists from around the world who are concerned about the (re)productive role of equitable human support and caring in forging post-capitalist societies.⁸ Another call comes from the critical pedagogues cited earlier: De Lissovoy et al. (2014), who aim to subvert the neoliberal enclosure of the global Commons by forging a new Common School movement. And a third call comes from critical scholars of early childhood education in Spain (Alcrudo et al., 2012; Hoyuelos Planillo, 2009; Sánchez Blanco, 2008; Torres Santomé, 2009, 2017), Italy (Cagliari et al., 2016), and the United Kingdom (Moss, 2014), all of which are inspired by the example set by the community schools Loris Malaguzzi initiated in Reggio Emilia, Italy, while at the same time recognizing that so much more needs to be done if free, universal and full-coverage early childhood education and care from birth to six years of age are to become realities elsewhere. In the following sections, epistemological and ethical rationales for focusing on public strategies for supporting such early care and learning will be explored, as they relate to intersecting forms of identity and oppression in the struggle to transition to a new era of prioritizing and building equitable and sustainable coexistence locally and around the planet.

Theorizing the Commons: What role for early childhood education and care?

Theoretical and location-based mobilizations for the Commons have been transversal in nature, and necessarily so, given that the project itself of promoting solidary forms of collective wellbeing is complex and ambitious in a world whose eco-social equilibrium is ever more threatened by the highly exploitative and destructive excesses of modernity, especially capitalist extraction, production, and accumulation (Harvey, 2016; Shiva, 1997, 2005). Thus, notions of the common good, commonwealth, and the Commons in general have been approached from various interconnected fields, but most notably from scholars of ecology, social geography, law, cyberspace, and socio-cultural and political economy.

Given, then, the scope of the Commons as a concept and as praxis, the role of early childhood education and care per se in this political project is somewhat overshadowed by what are considered to be broader and more basic issues. For instance, in their recent book, Commun, French authors Laval and Dardot (2014) promote “the common” first and foremost as a general political project through which the dominant economic paradigm must be revolutionized for the sake of the collective good. They propose various ways that the people themselves—rather than representatives or corporate and charity lobbies—can reclaim the requisites and means for fair and viable common existence. And although carework is mentioned in cursory terms throughout this volume, early childhood care and education is not addressed specifically.

Extending our gaze outwards towards the southern hemisphere, the Quechua notion of Sumak Kawsay or, in Spanish, Buen Vivir (Good Living), offers an alternative to the understandings of social progress and development promoted from the Global North, and has been gaining influence in Latin American countries (Escobar, 2012; León, 2011). In Ecuador and Bolivia, where since the year 2000 the Buen Vivir has gradually been instituted, it is approaching a level of implementation similar to (and in some ways surpassing) that of a welfare state, that is, within the means available to these two formerly colonized and thus impoverished countries. As an organizing and governing principle, it advances a decolonial and a de-growth orientation towards life in common, as seen from indigenous communities, this constituting an essential contribution to the transition away from neocolonial extractivism and levels of poverty largely induced by the top-down decisions made by unelected agents controlling global capital management organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization. Their decisions regarding loans to developing states have all but incapacitated these countries’ ability to pay off their debts due to the untenably high interest rates imposed (Escobar, 2011). According to Ecuadorian decolonial feminist researcher Magdalena León (2011: 2):

In a relatively short period, we have gone from total neoliberal hegemony to experiences that, from a post-neoliberal starting point, have moved on to a radically different horizon, adopting the organizing principle of Good Living [Buen Vivir], which in economic terms means directly questioning the logics of accumulation and the greater reproduction of capital, as well as affirming the logics of sustainability and the greater reproduction of life. (emphasis in original)⁹

Although childcare and early education are not addressed specifically in her article, León does analyze the central role of “the caring economy”¹⁰ in Ecuador’s constitutional redefinition of what is considered “productive” work in an economy as it transitions towards the Buen Vivir. Inasmuch as this project parallels that of the Commons (albeit mostly “from above,” as the Buen Vivir is a statewide agenda), the persistent worldwide pattern of greater levels of poverty and disempowerment experienced by women—especially by black and brown women in both the Global South and the North (Collins and Bilge, 2016; Mohanty, 2003)—poses significant challenges to this and similar projects around the world. The comments of another decolonial feminist analyst, Indian scholar Chandra T. Mohanty (2003), prove highly relevant to the need for an intersectional focus on this and other issues related to developing alternative structures of power:

My claim is not that all marginalized locations yield crucial knowledge about power and inequity, but that within a tightly integrated capitalist system, the particular standpoint of poor indigenous and Third World/South women provides the most inclusive viewing of systemic power. […] Three out of five Afro-Americans and Latinos live near toxic waste sites, and three of the five largest hazardous waste landfills are in communities with a population that is 80 percent people of color […]. Thus, it is precisely their critical reflections on their everyday lives as poor women of color that allow the kind of analysis of the power structure that has led to the many victories in environmental racism struggles. (p. 232)

Turning our attention back to the Global North, autonomous Marxist authors of Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009), have taken important steps towards incorporating aspects of this decolonial view into their understanding of the common, as well as feminist notions of equity, care, and affect, among others (anti-racist and queer perspectives, for instance), and in similarly broad terms. Their critical, materialist perspective, which is centered on the potentialities of cyberspace as a medium for change, is thus inflected with the intersectional influences of subaltern standpoints, in opposition to the enclosures that discriminate against or oppress specific groups while privileging others. However, for these authors as well, early childhood education and care is just one of many basic rights and services to be secured through a strong common. Childcare is discussed indirectly through their critique of the traditional (and still hegemonic) patriarchal family unit, the interests of which are among the most self-serving of all social institutions, this leading the nuclear family norm to function, according to these authors, as a veritable antithesis of the Commons on at least four counts: as a “machine of gender normativity” (p. 160) and thus of patriarchy and heteronormativity; as “the sole paradigm for relationships of intimacy and solidarity” (p. 161); as the source of some of the most extreme forms of narcissism, individualism, and egotism (e.g., “Some things might be fine for other kids, but not for mine!”); and as a “core institution for the accumulation and transfer of private property” (p. 161), as well as other forms of enclosure. Nonetheless, as shall be explored ahead, some feminist theorists establish closer links between carework, families, and the Commons.

From the field of education, De Lissovoy et al. (2014) directly approach the role of education in general as a means towards and as a component of the Commons, as do Alcrudo et al. (2012) and Moss (2014), where early childhood education is concerned. A purely public or common education thus constitutes a privileged site for experiencing and developing a deeper sense and kind of democracy through daily encounters. In fact, a landmark case in Spain proves particularly illustrative of this point. In 2010, a Constitutional Court judge determined that homeschooling during the compulsory period of education (from ages 6 to 16) was unconstitutional because, among other reasons,

[…] the exclusion of minors from the official system can generate serious problems in their future development, as much in the area of academics — considering, for example, the difficulties in accessing the University — as in the area of social integration with other children of the same age. (Government of Spain, 2011: 114)¹¹

The premise that formal educational settings provide a kind of social integration that cannot be experienced in the same way from the social isolation of the home offers powerful support for common schooling. And the Spanish educational system stands out in another way: since 1990, guaranteed, non-compulsory, public schooling for children aged three to six has become a solid reality, reaching nearly 100 percent enrollment in this age group (Alcrudo et al., 2012). Both of these aspects are significant not only because they bring Spanish education closer to the Commons, but also because they are largely the products of counter-hegemonic political mobilizations (Torres Santomé, 2011).

Even so, schooling in Spain remains far from the Commons. Dating back to 1985, State subsidized private (chartered or “concerted”) schooling has been in place and is only multiplying under neoliberalism (Alcrudo et al., 2012; Hoyuelos Planillo, 2009; Sánchez Blanco, 2008; Torres Santomé, 2001, 2017). Moreover, the same early childhood education guarantee does not cover children from birth to three years of age despite popular demand (Alcrudo et al., 2012; Sánchez Blanco, 2008). In rural Galiza/Galicia (northwestern Spain), however, one highly valued program did exist for some 35 years, called Preschool in the Home (Preescolar na Casa). Unlike homeschooling, however, educators would make monthly visits to families lacking access to early childhood education centers, bringing learning materials and ideas to parents for use with their infants and toddlers. The parents welcomed the visits, which the attending teachers had always hoped would become much more frequent, but because public funding for the program was discontinued in 2011, it was forced to shut down.¹²

Today, the various regional administrations of Spain increasingly use their discretional funding to charter private (mostly parochial) schools—which receive about 65 percent of their budget from the State—this to the detriment of opening new public schools or equipping existing ones with adequate human and material resources. According to the current educational code of Spain, an average urban “class” of three- and four-year-olds may contain more than the maximum limit of 25 children after accounting for those who repeat a year or enroll late. This situation, needless to say, severely limits the attention teachers can offer to each child’s personal and learning needs (Lorigados, 2013; Sánchez Blanco, 2008).

Another problem resides in educational spending priorities: in 2011, the parents of children attending a public/state school in one rural Galizan town took to the streets en masse and marched four kilometers to protest the regional Administration’s refusal to hire an additional early childhood educator for the school, which was also in need of structural expansion. The Administration had instead opted to charter the early childhood levels of two nearby private schools (La Región, 2011). Similar cases abound in Spain, especially in Madrid. In total, about 70 percent of chartered private schools are run by the Catholic Church, the indoctrinating forces of which contradict the constitutional principle of freedom of religion in the public sphere. Moreover, most chartered schools expect parents to “donate” monthly fees, and resort to various (illegal) strategies to reject those families who cannot pay or are deemed as somehow undesirable (Ortuño Escarabajal, 2016; Torres Santomé, 2001). How then might free and universal early childhood education and care contribute to a deeper, intersectional understanding and realization of democratic values and participation, as pro-Commons praxis?

Why universal early childhood education and care (ECEC)?

Borrowing from Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) notion of a “war of position,” ECEC is strategically positioned to advance equity and social justice on various fronts. A starting point can be found in what neo-Marxist Italian feminist Silvia Federici (2012) has to say about the common:

[…] I look at the politics of the commons from a feminist perspective where “feminist” refers to a standpoint shaped by the struggle against sexual discrimination and over reproductive work, which, to paraphrase Linebaugh […], is the rock upon which society is built and by which every model of social organization must be tested. This intervention is necessary, in my view, to better define this politics and clarify the conditions under which the principle of the common/s can become the foundation of an anti-capitalist program. (p. 139)

Federici (2012) also makes several critical observations about Hardt and Negri’s (2009) consideration that the digital media are among the most promising tools for building the common. For instance, she finds that their theory “skirts the question of the reproduction of everyday life. [However, this, she adds,] is true of the discourse on the commons as a whole” (p. 142), at least in Westernized societies. Federici’s is a significant critique in that, metaphorically speaking, if the seeds are not properly sown, or the garden not sufficiently tended, there will be few crops to reap. In what follows, then, the implications of reproductive work in ECEC and the Commons are explored.

Universal ECEC as a site of intersection and (re)production

A major part of reproductive work corresponds to ECEC, most of which is carried out by women in the unpaid domestic sphere, or in the poorly paid working sphere.¹³ This overrepresentation of women in carework is directly related to world-dominant patriarchal culture, with its biased organization of so-called productive labor. It works to the detriment of women whose (re)productive work, under capitalism, is generally undervalued and underpaid as compared to men’s work in the same jobs.¹⁴ Women are blocked by a glass ceiling against upward mobility; they are offered fewer stable jobs than men; and they are laid off at higher rates—most notably pregnant women, single mothers, older women, and black and brown women, all of them are more likely to live in poverty (Collins and Bilge, 2016; Federici, 2012; Fraser, 2013; Lugones, 2013; Mohanty, 2003).

In Spain, this pattern is especially evident where working migrant women from the Global South are concerned (Insituto Nacional de Estadística, 2015; International Organisation for Migration / Organización Internacional para las Migraciones, 2015). And even as employment rates have finally begun to recuperate nearly a decade after the 2008 financial market crash hit Spain in 2010, the gender gap has only grown back to its pre-crash state because those who are returning to the workforce are mostly men (Salido, 2015). In Spain and beyond, the single working parent, or even the parent who would prefer to be the primary caretaker of the family, is faced with increasing difficulties to provide that necessary attention, considering the relentless neoliberal drive to devalue wage labor: since the initial development of this trend in the 1970s and 1980s, most households throughout the world have needed two wage earners to raise children adequately without sinking into poverty (Friedan, 1983; Harvey, 2005; Klein, 2008; Navarro, 2015; Piketty, 2014).

If child poverty statistics may serve as an indicator of the plight faced by Spanish youth and their parents—many of the latter being single mothers—a recent survey conducted by the Spanish National Institute on Statistics (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2016) has revealed a highly disconcerting figure: nearly one out of three (28.8%) inhabitants under 16 years of age are “at risk” of poverty and social exclusion. Furthermore, according to an earlier report by representatives of the State Platform in Defense of 0–6 (Alcrudo et al., 2012),¹⁵ while education for children aged three to six is universally covered by public and chartered schooling, only 26.7% of the total demand for ECEC for children aged zero to three is met (the system is currently short of many more than 300,000 placements), and then only half of those offered are covered by public schools. But these so-called public institutions, most of which are municipal schools, also charge fees, the average family having to pay 301 Euros per month, although means-based reductions may be applied (Alcrudo et al., 2012). The fees vary according to the municipality and regional government, which generally charter out such schools, but little or no State funding is provided for this level. A Statewide investment plan, called Educa3, had been designed in 2005 to expand and build public ECEC centers for infants and toddlers, but having enjoyed a brief period of implementation during the 2005–2009 legislature controlled by the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), its funding base has since been eroded and the program all but abandoned (Alcrudo et al., 2012).

Another form of support, parental leave, runs in Spain for a total of 16 weeks for mothers, ten of which may be “yielded” to fathers, who, as of January of 2017, may take an additional four weeks off. These leaves are compensated at 100 percent of the mother or father’s officially declared base salary, which is often quite a bit lower than the total monthly paycheck received. Additionally, since 2010, every child born in Spain receives a State allowance of 17.75 Euros per day over a period of six weeks (about 650 Euros in total).¹⁶ Needless to say, these measures are helpful, but are hardly enough given that one-in-three children now straddle the poverty line in Spain (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2016).

To this regard, but moving farther afield, the following excerpt on the economics of childcare published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) brings to the fore capitalist priorities regarding carework. It is taken from the second of 25 yearly reports on employment produced by the OECD since 1989. Only the 1990 report contains a section devoted entirely to childcare and early education, and at least two distortions and two omissions can be detected in its narrative:

No child under a certain age can be left without supervision of some kind. Child-care arrangements must therefore be found by the parents for all 24 hours of the day. Traditionally, in the OECD countries, it was the family which took on this responsibility and the mother usually looked after the children full-time, while the father alone provided for the family’s financial needs. Nowadays, the economic activity of mothers with young children requires that parents resort to outside child-care services. At the same time, more and more parents — whether the mother works or not — are seeking services which foster children’s intellectual and social development, even before compulsory school attendance age. (Goulet, 1990: 123)

Firstly, referring to working mothers—not to working fathers—as the cause for “requiring” parents to “resort” to childcare services transmits two unacknowledged assumptions: that the default or preferable situation is the traditional one in which such care is provided primarily by the unemployed or partially employed mother; and that it should ideally take place in the home. Then, two important reasons are missing from this explanation as to why mothers increasingly engaged in economic activity back in the 1980s and 1990s, thus demanding more childcare services. One reason can be found in the cultural influence from the women’s and queer liberation movements (Fraser, 2013), but a separate and seldomly cited cause is related to the devaluation of labor itself since the advent of neoliberalism: most people today work more for much less, relatively speaking, than in the 1950s or 1960s (Brown, 2015; George, 2015; Harvey, 2005, 2016; Piketty, 2014).

What is more, in a much more recent publication on ECEC in the European Union (European Commission, 2014), the following statement contains another kind of neoliberal bias: “The age of a child is also usually a factor because fees for younger children are often higher. This is probably due to the fact that staff costs are higher for these children as child/staff ratios are lower” (p. 87). Clearly, this brief speculation does not venture beyond a market-centered imaginary through which high returns take priority over other values, in this case regarding ECEC provision. No matter how essential this stage of collective support is for both children and parents, the cause of the problem is not further pursued in other terms such as the historical-materialist, intersectional, critical feminist or decolonial perspectives reflected throughout this article. Given this ideological bias, then, perhaps it is not surprising that said “staff” is generally poorly paid and that ECEC provision is scarce (Alcrudo et al., 2012; White, 2015).

Epistemological, ontological, and axiological understandings of a pro-Commons ECEC

As these last two citations demonstrate, a major transnational ideological barrier exists to the universalization of public ECEC. It consists of the naturalization of the currently hegemonic patriarchal and capitalist options of either having one or more family members care for children at home (usually the mother or other female members) with little or no public support, or paying someone else (mostly poorly paid women, many of whom are black and brown, immigrants, or from rural areas (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2004; Fraser, 2013; Mohanty, 2003) to do so either in the home or elsewhere. Even in Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania where, legally speaking, education is a free public service available from birth onward, the “supply” overwhelming fails to meet the “demand” for ECEC (European Commission, 2014).

Beyond neoliberal policies, then, there is an epistemological form of containment at work here (Teasley, 2013), or a kind of knowledge enclosure (Boyle, 2008; De Lissovoy et al., 2014; Hardt and Negri, 2009; Shiva, 1997), which seems to emerge from a process that Roswitha Scholz (2014) has referred to as value dissociation. As this German Marxist feminist explains, even though the reproductive work of caring and nurturing exercised more often by women than men represents a set of relations that partially constitute value, they are simultaneously and asymmetrically dissociated from the value generated by abstract (“productive”) labor under capitalism because they do not produce commodities that can be exchanged on the market; instead, they produce workers. But such reproductive relations are in fact a precondition to value. “Value and dissociation therefore stand in a dialectical relation to each other,” says Scholz (2014: 128), this demonstrating that “value dissociation is a pervasive social formal principle that is located on a correspondingly high level of abstraction […] that cannot be mechanistically separated into different spheres” (p. 131) such as the productive/reproductive or the public/private.

León’s (2011) views parallel Scholz’s, albeit from the standpoint of the Buen Vivir: León asserts that the care we depend on during our life cycle requires access to goods and services that are not dissociable from material flows. This is why the principles of solidarity, reciprocity, and interdependence represent the axiological core of the Buen Vivir. Indeed, it is also why “the personal is political” (Hanisch, 1970), because caring, loving, and relations of solidarity are necessary for supporting life itself, and they require time, effort, and energy; to deny or inhibit access to such affective support is to deprive people and other living beings of one of the greatest goods on Earth (Lynch et al., 2009). And critical and/or radical feminists such as Castro García (2017), Federici (2012), Fraser (2013) or Léon (2011), among others, have each been working on ways in which carework can occupy a much more prominent place in the transition to a more equitable and life-supportive political economy and social sphere. For instance, Spanish radical scholar Amaia Pérez Orozco (2014) advances a feminist economy of rupture, arguing that the current system’s logics render reproductive activities—and even certain lives—unprofitable and therefore more disposable than sustainable. This symbolic violence, to use Bourdieu’s powerful term (2000), is further exacerbated by the intersection of oppressions. As Argentine decolonial feminist María Lugones asserts,

I think the coloniality of gender shows us greater levels of oppression and complicity than does intersectionality. What I call “coloniality of gender” is precisely the introduction via the Colony of a system of social organization that divided people into humans and beasts. (2013: 4)¹⁷

Back in the imperial centers of the North, however, that same divide seems to find expression as well, as it affects (to various, nonsynchronous degrees) distinct groups of women according to their racial, ethnic, material, and sexual characteristics.

It is for this very reason that our gaze will now turn back to the North, and to the concrete: Iceland is one of the most resilient states hit by the 2008 crash, in part because Icelanders have been more determined than other European peoples to protect majority wellbeing (Hart-Landsberg, 2013). Iceland offers a prime example of such investment by re-associating value to the work many women do. That is, in 1975 the United Nations (UN) declared that year International Women’s Year (IWY), this coinciding with a rapidly growing feminist movement around the world.¹⁸ In Iceland, it led to a significant event occurring on 24 October 1975. Prior to that date, representatives from five of Iceland’s largest women’s organizations had been working together to organize a series of commemorative activities for IWY 1975. Among others, they supported a call from the radical feminist movement Red Stockings to mobilize all women citizens to a general strike, or to what they preferred to call “A Day Off” in order to maximize participation while minimizing the risk of reprisals from employers. The aim was not only to protest their lower salaries with respect to men’s, but to bring to the fore the glaring lack of recognition of their role in public life as a whole, as well as to debunk the myth that women—as potential mothers—were “risks” for businesses. An estimated 90 percent of the female population of the tiny Nordic country dropped everything they were doing and took to the streets. The result: their massive collective action made Iceland’s “productive” (remunerated) economy grind to a veritable halt for one day (Martins, 2013; The Guardian, 2005). But the cultural side effects of that outcome, in terms of gender equity, proved to be much more lasting.

Since then, and according to reports on ECEC provision in Iceland (European Commission, 2014; Eydal and Olafsson, 2003), public support for the very young has taken two general forms. First, Iceland provides one of the most comprehensive, equitable, and fairly compensated parental-leave policies in the world: three months for each parent plus another three that may be shared (this period may be extended to one year, but at reduced compensation after nine months). Consequently, women today are not perceived as the only “risk factors” for employers, as more and more men are taking their father leave as well. Secondly, contracted help inside or outside of the home is subsidized according to family means. These two policies, according to Icelandic feminist scholar Annadís Rúdólfsdóttir (2014) (see also Martins, 2013), have been crucial not only to improving the wellbeing of children and their families as a whole, but to promoting equity between women and men and between the poorer and wealthier social classes as well. That said, the situation could still improve, among other reasons because the demand for ECEC after parental leave is not completely covered by the State. Currently, parents merely receive means-based subsidies to purchase services until compulsory public schooling begins, at ages six–seven (Eydal and Olafsson, 2003). By contrast, in Spain, public school provision starts at three years of age, and is overwhelmingly attended (Alcrudo et al., 2012; European Commission, 2014).

Returning to Spain, critical educators such as those supporting the aforementioned State Platform in Defense of 0–6 are actively vindicating the need for universal ECEC as a human right (Alcrudo et al., 2012; Hoyuelos Planillo, 2009; Sánchez Blanco, 2008; Torres Santomé, 2001; 2009, 2011). These educators are affiliated with the “Green Tide” movement, also known as “Public School By All For All,”¹⁹ which arose in 2011 when the conservative Popular Party started planning the 2013 education reform law (LOMCE) that tightened the neoliberal enclosure of education. Other movements arose as well, many initiated by unions, parent-teacher associations, and grassroots progressive education associations called “Movements for Pedagogical Renovation.” Their loosely unified struggles have been partially fruitful in that the Administration has very recently announced plans to negotiate, with the opposition, a new more broadly acceptable education law.

Critical educator Alfredo Hoyuelos Planillo (2009) is very active in these movements and has brought to Spanish education, from Reggio Emilia, Italy, Malaguzzi’s pedagogy for ECEC (Cagliari et al., 2016). This pedagogy was forged from a history of local, radical, and anti-fascist mobilizations that advanced the value of a free, public ECEC which fosters discovery-based exploration and experiential cooperative learning, mutual support, and community involvement. It is one whose small, welcoming schools count on schoolwide assemblies as the main decision-making dynamic; on teachers as collaborative researchers and community mobilizers; and on parents and service personnel as actively involved decision makers. British ECEC scholar Peter Moss (2014) also promotes Malaguzzi’s approach, especially as it applies to what Moss calls the educative commune: a municipal organizational body that “acts as an advocate, mediator and interpreter between the very local early childhood centre and the more distant nation state” (p. 175), its primary objective being to develop deeply democratic public education. For Moss (2014), Reggian pedagogy advances what he calls “an ethics of care and an ethics of an encounter, both of which emphasise responsibility for the other and the planet” (p. 102), this in keeping with the aforementioned transnational feminist call for a caring economy based on the sustainablity of eco-social life in common. Moss adds:

So taking the two sides of living well — the environmental and personal — into account I might perhaps develop Aldrich’s concept and propose an ‘education for survival and flourishing’, understood as living well and within limits […]. (p. 103)

These values, which parallel those of the Buen Vivir, undergird an education that reinforces “the rich and complex relationships, and ‘conjoint communicated experience,’ that characterize democratic societies. Democracy is not simply a form of government but a form of life” (De Lissovoy et al., 2014: 87). It is a pedagogy that stands to counterbalance, or ideally prevent, early on, the formation of dispositions through which social organization, including education, is conceived predominately in competitive, exploitative, market-value terms. On this point, French critical theorist of sociology Pierre Bourdieu (1998, 2000) has argued that the socially determined development of a set of dispositions early in life leads to the formation, in adulthood, of a habitus, which he defines as a system of embodied perceptions, attitudes, and gut feelings—even postures and accents—that are inculcated in the very young, and are repeatedly reinforced throughout life via social interactions, interests, and norms. The gradual construction of the habitus, or of a socially and ideologically informed mindset that predisposes one to interpret reality in certain ways and not in others, can become quite resistant to change, although not absolutely so (May, 1999).

Likewise, Lynch et al. (2009) see a similar process emerging in children socialized not only in an uncaring but in an anti-caring model of society that prioritizes high returns and personal gain over mutual support, reproductive work, and participation in collective democratic life. Thus, returning to Bourdieu’s (2000) theory that the habitus significantly contributes to the perpetuation of enduring forms of social distinction and hierarchies, offering the very young alternative modes of perceiving the world may help lay the foundations for their developing other kinds of habitus later in life. Here is where putting into praxis a “critical pedagogy of becoming” (Malott and Ford, 2015) plays its part by exposing, in this case, young children to alternative values and ways of living life in common. And as several of the aforementioned intersectional feminists assert, Paulo Freire’s (1970) focus on oppression, liberation pedagogy, and conscientização (developing critical awareness) can further influence axiological and interpretive dispositions in both youth and adults. All of these perspectives thus point to the need for a level of pedagogical commitment that goes beyond merely joining the struggle to secure the material conditions for free and universal ECEC; rather, an ontological shift through education must also be forged at this level by exploring, learning, and teaching new ways of “being” in a world we all inhabit and share.

In Conclusion: Mobilizing for Transition Glocally

What has been argued in the previous sections is that the struggle to change the material conditions of ECEC must go hand-in-hand with the advancement of pedagogies that prioritize common, eco-social values and dispositions that encourage youth to both question and seek alternatives to globally-dominant neoliberal ideology in education and society. Nevertheless, some readers may think that, after all, universal ECEC is not entirely necessary given that public support for the care and education of children up to six years of age can and does take various forms under the current system. Indeed, some such policies, as we have seen, can be quite helpful. The fact remains, however, that they do not meet the demand, not even in Iceland (European Commission, 2014; Eydal and Olafsson, 2003). ECEC in the European Union, for instance, can be summed up in the following general terms: there is an average compensation of 65% of one’s household income for childbirth leave, which ranges from 16 weeks to six months depending on the country, and includes options for extending the leave at reduced-compensation rates even as it is available to a much lesser extent to fathers (although full parity, full pay, and longer leaves do exist in some Nordic countries); temporary support allowances and subsidies are issued either to all parents or just to some, according to family means; subsidized in-home professional care is available and scaled to need; vouchers are issued for purchasing private services; general tax credits are available to parents with very young children; and sliding-scale fees or fee waivers do exist for chartered or private daycare centers (European Commission, 2014).

Even so, it is an internationally known fact that, for decades, the demand for ECEC for infants and toddlers has been strikingly undersupplied not only within the public sector but via market forces as well; put simply, as a business, ECEC is rarely considered sufficiently profitable (European Commission, 2014; Fousekis, 2011; White, 2015). Therefore, if our goal is to contribute to a new Commons, this mixture of Keynesian or welfare-state compensations and neoliberal schemes (e.g., vouchers, charters, etc.) not only does not challenge but in fact perpetuates the underlying logics of value dissociation, private ownership, competition and capital accumulation, as well as intersecting forms and degrees of social oppression and distinction, with all of their unjust effects. Indeed, as a human right, ECEC should never be subordinated to the whims of market supply in the first place. We may also beg to differ about the suitability of relying mostly on top-down public measures, especially when they take the form of monetary or market-exchange value (as in vouchers), as opposed to service or use value (as in free childcare or schooling). This view is based on the conviction that, in order to seed the common values of equity, solidarity, collective interdependency and reciprocity in local communities, a bottom-up, hands-on, participatory approach to meeting ECEC needs is much more desirable.

In Spain, grassroots organizing has long constituted the main ideological tenet of leftist anarcho-libertarian movements, which are currently mobilizing for eco-social transition (Taibo, 2016). However, such locally based initiatives do not replace the need for struggles to get demands met “from above” as well. In Portugal, for instance, the Socialist Party administration of 2005–2009 brought parental leave closer to the Icelandic model in 2009 (Castro García, 2017), and the current Socialist Party administration began dismantling chartered schooling in 2016 (Íñiguez, 2016), among other important steps. Even in the United States, historian Natalie M. Fousekis (2011) has revealed how rapidly free and universal childcare actually became a reality throughout the country—a real utopia—during World War II, but then how it was equally swiftly taken away after the war, its existence silenced everywhere except California, where grassroots and union organizing was strongest and succeeded in keeping much of it in place until the dawn of neoliberalism in the 1970s.

And as the various cases presented in this article have shown—in Spain, Iceland, Italy, Ecuador, Bolivia, Portugal, California, and elsewhere—local collective struggles such as unionization, coupled with key political and pedagogical projects, are essential catalysts for change. But Canadian social analyst Naomi Klein (2001) has crucially argued that such struggles need also find points of articulation with more global mobilizations as well. In this sense, organizations and initiatives such as Education International,²⁰ or Otras Voces en Educación (Other Voices in Education)²¹ hold promise. These networking efforts stand to reach more corners of the world when guided by intersectional and decolonial feminist agendas, Freirean pedagogical praxis, and deeper understandings of the impact of early education on the formation of ideological outlooks (habitus) later in life. Maybe one day soon, our collective “flourishing” and very survival will become reason enough to motivate similar cultural, political, and economic strategies for transition to the Commons.

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.

Notes

Cathryn Teasley, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum, Instruction and School Organization at the University of A Coruña. Her research is focused on the pursuit of anti-racism, socio-cultural justice and gender equity through decolonial and critical pedagogies, and feminism. She has co-edited, with Cameron McCarthy, the book Transnational Perspectives on Culture, Policy and Education: Redirecting Cultural Studies in Neoliberal Times (Peter Lang, 2008), and is contributing author to works such as Practicing Critical Pedagogy (Springer, 2016); Roma Education in Europe (Routledge, 2013); Globalizing Cultural Studies (Peter Lang, 2007); or the two-volume book Volver a Pensar la Educación (Morata, 1995).

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