Abstract
In a context of expanding early childhood education, this article begins by adopting a critical approach, exploring the technologies being applied to young children in a contemporary society of control, taking the case of England, a country which has seen a marked change in government’s attitude towards early childhood education over the past 20 years, from indifference to high priority. England also illustrates the relationship between changing state attitudes to early childhood education and the growing influence of neoliberalism on politics and economics. The second part of the article changes tack, from a critique of a powerful discourse of control to the disruptive potential of a discourse of hope. While recognising that ‘everything is dangerous’, not least education and the institution of the school, and that the dangers should never be downplayed, there are alternatives, for example, a discourse of education and the school that foregrounds democracy, emancipation and potentiality, a discourse that many have sought to enact and continue to do so.
The widening reach of education
The advent of mass public education in the 19th century greatly enhanced the capacity of nation-states to govern children, using the disciplinary power deployed through universal schooling to achieve a variety of economic, political, social and cultural goals, impelled by concerns and discontents generated by migration, urbanisation, imperial rivalry and economic competition. Nor were schools the only means, with the spread of health and social services, especially focused on the performance of mothering, providing further means to govern children. These moves formed an important part of the increasing exercise of biopower by the nation-state, ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations’ (Foucault, 1998: 140); techniques that Nikolas Rose (1999) has called ‘human technologies’, ‘[t]echnologies of government … imbued with aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects and averting certain undesired events’ (p. 52). In the case of schooling, an assemblage of ‘human technologies’ made the schoolroom a powerful machine as early as the 19th century: This was an assemblage of pedagogic knowledges, moralizing aspirations, buildings of a certain design, classrooms organised to produce certain kinds of visibility, techniques such as the timetable for organizing bodies in space and in time, regimes of supervision, little mental exercises in the classroom, playgrounds to allow the observation and moralization of children in something more approaching their habitat and much more, assembled and infused with the aim of the government of capacities and habits. (Rose, 1999: 53)
The 20th century has seen the extension and intensification of compulsory and post-compulsory education, with the time spent in school and the age of school-leaving increasing. There has also been a spread of formal services for children below compulsory school age, some under a broad heading of ‘childcare’, others ‘education’. As the distinction between ‘care’ and ‘education’ for this age group has blurred, to the extent that a single, integrated birth to primary school system has emerged in some countries, I will use the term ‘early childhood education’ to refer to this range of services.
This downward spread of education provision, encompassing the youngest age group of children, has gathered momentum in the last part of the 20th century, attracting the attention and support of international organisations and nation-states, political classes and policy experts. Countries that have previously neglected early childhood education are now putting money into developing services. Worldwide, between 1999 and 2010, the number of children enrolled in preschool (for children from 3 years of age) rose by 46% to a total of 164 million, albeit there continue to be large differences between attendance in affluent and poorer countries (UNESCO, 2012: 50).
This spread has, once again, been driven by growing concerns and discontents, including governmental alarm at the persistence and increase in various social problems and at the threat to national survival arising from intensified global competition. As a Minister responsible for early childhood education in England put the matter in a speech, The 21st century will belong to those countries that win the global race for jobs and economic advantage. In order for every adult to fulfil their potential, they need to be properly equipped with essential skills from the very beginning of their lives. (Truss, 2013)
The government policy paper that accompanied that speech insists that ‘[m]ore great childcare is vital to ensuring we can compete in the global race’ (Department for Education, 2013: 6). What, in particular, has refocused governmental attention on early childhood education is a belief, fed by the influence of relatively new disciplines and theories, in particular neuroscience and human capital, that early intervention, in the very first years of life, provides an effective and relatively cheap technical fix for both social and economic failings, often expressed in terms of a high rate of return on ‘social investment’ in this field (Moss, 2014b). The main condition for such profitability is that interventions apply the correct human technologies, in a context where biopower is now increasingly deployed in ways that are more continuous and without limit, a shift described by Gilles Deleuze (1992) as from societies of discipline to societies of control.
This article will explore and exemplify some of the technologies being applied to young children in a contemporary society of control, taking the case of England, a country which has seen a marked change in government’s attitude towards early childhood education over the past 20 years, from indifference to high priority. England also illustrates the relationship between changing state attitudes to early childhood education and the growing influence of neoliberalism on politics and economics, apparent globally since the 1980s, particularly in the English-speaking world. Neoliberalism brings with it not only new rationales for state support of early childhood education but also a seemingly strange mix in how that support is enacted, increasing both choice and control, a phenomenon I will seek to explain.
In the second part of the article, I propose to change tack, from critique of a powerful discourse of control to the disruptive potential of a discourse of hope. ‘Everything is dangerous’, Foucault rightly observed, not least education and the institution of the school. But while we should never downplay the dangers, I will argue that there are alternatives, a discourse of education and the school that foregrounds democracy, emancipation and potentiality. While certainly meriting critique and contestation, education and the school can also, under certain conditions, be sources of hope.
Discourses of control in early childhood education: The case of England
The spread of controlling technologies
[T]he more we seem to know about the complexity of learning, children’s diverse strategies and multiple theories of knowledge, the more we seek to impose learning strategies and curriculum goals that reduce the complexities of this learning and knowing. Policy makers look for general structures and one-dimensional standards for practices. These are based on contemporary and updated developmentally appropriate practices … In fact, the more complex things become the more we seem to desire processes of reduction and thus increase control. (Lenz Taguchi, 2010: 14)
I have already quoted an English Minister waxing eloquent about the need for early education; she, as it happens, was a right-wing politician. But the awakening of government interest in this subject in England took place with the coming to power in 1997 of a centre-left ‘New Labour’ government; today, early childhood has cross-party support, the rationale for state involvement accepted across the political spectrum. That rationale is in part economic, a belief that early intervention enables personal and national survival in an increasingly competitive and global marketplace, both through facilitating women’s employment, the ‘childcare’ element of early childhood education, and as the first stage of a process of lifelong learning, intended to secure a flexible and compliant workforce responsive to shifting market demands, the ‘education’ element. (Deleuze (1992) offers ‘perpetual training’ – lifelong learning – as one example of the emerging societies of control.)
But the rationale is in part social. Persuaded by certain American studies, ‘endlessly recycled in the literature’ (Penn, 2011: 39), policy-makers see early childhood education not only as a means for boosting employment and productivity but also as a fix for stubbornly persistent dysfunctions. Both rationales, the economic and social, infuse this optimistic government statement: Childcare can improve educational outcomes for children. Childcare enables parents, particularly mothers, to go out to work, or increase their hours in work, thereby lifting their families out of poverty. It also plays a key role in extending choice for women by enhancing their ability to compete in the labour market on more equal terms, helping them to overcome the glass ceiling, and by ensuring that they themselves may not face poverty in old age. Childcare can also play an important role in meeting other top level objectives, for example in improving health, boosting productivity, improving public services, closing the gender pay gap and reducing crime. The targets to achieve 70 per cent employment amongst lone parents by 2010 and to eradicate child poverty by 2020 are those that are most obviously related. Childcare is essential for these objectives to be met. (Department for Education and Skills and Other Government Departments, 2002: 5; emphasis added)
It is not my intention in this article to assess the credibility of these rationales, with their attendant claims that early childhood education provides a very high rate of economic return on investment (for such an assessment, see Moss, 2014b). What I want to consider is how this new-found belief in the value of early childhood education has been enacted in the case of England under a New Labour government (1997–2010), producing a template that was largely followed by the subsequent Conservative-dominated coalition government (2010–2015) (for a full analysis of early childhood policy in England between 1997 and 2013, see Moss, 2014a). First, policies increased the supply of services and levels of attendance: an entitlement to a period of free early childhood education for 3- and 4-year-olds was introduced, later extended to 2-year-olds from lower income families; childcare provision was stimulated and subsidies provided to lower income families; and new forms of multi-purpose provision, Children’s Centres, were opened, with particular attention given to delivering a range of child and family support services in areas with higher levels of poverty.
Supply and use expanded in a system increasingly defined by two features: private provision and marketisation. The spread of private day nurseries, gathering momentum since the late 1980s, continued unabated post-1997, leaving England with a large for-profit sector. These providers competed in a ‘childcare’ market, but marketisation was extended by opening up early education to any provider, subject to meeting certain conditions; the new entitlement was delivered not just in schools but by playgroups, day nurseries and even childminders. By 2008, a senior civil servant could publicly assert that a ‘diverse market [in early childhood services is] the only show in town’ (Archer, 2008).
But quantity was not deemed sufficient. Behind a mantra of improving ‘quality’ and ensuring value for money, a range of technologies were deployed intended to ensure certain desired outcomes were achieved. As a first step, administration and policy-making were unified, to increase the capacity of an already highly centralised state to exert control over its new priority. Previously split between health and education ministries, responsibility for all early childhood services was now located in the Department for Education, culminating in an integrated ‘Sure Start, Early Years and Childcare Unit’ overseeing a budget that rose from £2.1 to £7.8 billion between 1997 and 2010. This was complemented by concentrating regulation of all early childhood services (as well as all schools) within a single national inspectorate, the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), when previously much inspection work had been undertaken by local authorities.
A national curriculum was introduced, setting out detailed standards and outcomes for early childhood education. Initially, from 2000, the Foundation Stage covered the 2 years of early education (3- and 4-year-olds) and the first (reception class) year of primary school. In 2008, this was superseded by the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), incorporating curriculum and standards for services for children from birth until the end of the first year in primary school. In two volumes, a statutory framework and practice guidance, the EYFS set out 69 early learning goals, educational programmes for each of ‘six areas of learning and development’ and assessment arrangements. Funding for providing early childhood education was made conditional on applying this curriculum.
This curriculum was issued by the central administration and its application monitored by the central inspection regime. Its precise application was further regulated through a national system of assessment, the EYFS Profile that rated children in the final year of the EYFS on 13 scales, each divided into nine ‘points’. The EYFS was revised by the subsequent coalition government (2010–2015), with a reduction in the number of Early Learning Goals from 69 to 17, at the same time as placing more emphasis on literacy and number and on the role of early childhood education in ensuring ‘school readiness’ (Department for Education, 2012). The basic structure of regulation and control has been fine-tuned, ensuring all children (and their educators) are governed by technologies of normalisation, which define their experience of early childhood education and initiate them into ‘perpetual training’, in which each stage of education ‘readies’ children and young people for the next and, ultimately, for a flexible labour market.
Other complementary technologies play important roles. The technique of observation, subjecting children constantly to the normalising adult gaze, has a central place in practice, with government advising that [o]ngoing assessment (also known as formative assessment) is an integral part of the learning and development process. It involves practitioners observing children to understand their level of achievement, interests and learning styles, and to then shape learning experiences for each child reflecting those observations. (Department for Education, 2014: 13)
What Lingard et al. (2013) terms ‘datafication’, governing through numerical data, is increasingly apparent (Roberts-Holmes, 2014), made more potent when linked to the introduction, since 2013, of performance-related pay for teachers. Large-scale, national evaluative studies, positivistic in character, have been funded to add yet further oversight and to provide evidence on most effective technologies – ‘what works’. A drive to improve low levels of qualification in the childcare workforce has adopted a highly normalising approach, based on demonstrating competence against nationally agreed and detailed standards, hence ensuring a workforce attuned to the precise application of technologies. Further technologies are being explored and evaluated, with a growing interest in identifying and applying ‘evidence-based’ programmes, with payment by results to ensure their precise application.
Underpinning and shaping these technologies are concepts, knowledge and norms generated by a particular discipline, developmental psychology, the study of child development, whose emergence in the 19th century ‘was prompted by concerns to classify, measure and regulate’ (Burman, 1994: 18). Early childhood education policy, practice and evaluation are inscribed with the concept of ‘developmental appropriateness’. But the effect of developmental psychology runs deeper than the rationale and guidance it provides for external measures of control. It also ‘governs the soul’, as Fendler (2001) describes: I argue that the interweaving of developmental psychology, efficiency and behaviourism in educational curriculum becomes a technology of normalisation. I call this technology developmentality as a way of alluding to Foucault’s governmentality, and focusing on the self-governing effects of developmental discourse in curriculum debates. Developmentality, like governmentality, describes a current pattern of power in which the self disciplines the self. (p. 120)
Through this technology of developmentality, both child and adult come to embody developmental norms, which ‘have expanded from cognition to affect, temperament, self-esteem, and love’ (Fendler, 2001: 138), governing or disciplining themselves to become ‘normal’, self-constituted in terms of developmentally prescribed outcomes.
An apparent paradox
What has emerged over the last 20 years in England is a system of early childhood education that appears, at first sight, paradoxical. On the one hand, provision that emphasises diversity of providers, competing to win the favour of parent-consumers exercising individual choice in a marketplace. On the other hand, a highly regulated system, exercising strict and centralised control over children and adults alike. Competition and individual choice crossed with rigidly enforced national standards – diversity of providers delivering uniformity of outcomes.
This apparent contradiction can be read as a consequence of living in a neoliberal regime. That regime’s belief in the virtue of markets, private provision and individual choice dictates the form of delivery for early childhood services. But the same regime creates an increasingly cut-throat global market. To succeed, or at least survive, requires the state assume an active role in shaping subjects fit for that market, to ensure ‘we can compete in the global race’ (Department for Education, 2013: 6) – governing the child through deploying human technologies.
But neoliberalism shows its hand in other ways. Suspicious or downright hostile towards government, it can understand and justify public spending on early childhood services only in highly instrumental and economistic terms: as ‘social investment’ in ‘human capital’. To ensure supposedly ‘high returns’, very precise ‘human technologies’ need to be applied to ensure outcomes that must be predefined and predictable – or, as one high profile researcher put the matter to a parliamentary select committee, ‘[v]ery tightly defined programmes [produce] good results’ (House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee, 2010). The (female) technicians applying technologies need be neither well educated nor well paid, but trained just enough to apply ‘evidence-based’ and ‘tightly defined’ programmes. If schools have become what Coffield and Williamson (2011) call exam factories, early childhood centres are factories for early learning goals and ‘school readiness’.
Last but not least, a neoliberal regime de-politicises. It acts as if there are no alternatives, either to its own utopian and totalising project of a world constituted by calculative market relationships or to the conditions needed for its practice, including a particular approach to education. The ends of education are taken-for-granted, ensuring neoliberal subjects. The only question is about means, ‘what works?’, a question to which experts can supply the one right answer. Education is thus reduced to a supremely technical practice, requiring no democratic deliberation about critical or political questions – ‘[n]ot mere technical issues to be solved by experts … [but questions that] always involve decisions which require us to make choices between conflicting alternatives’ (Mouffe, 2007) – and policy alternatives. In the search for ever stronger control, there is no place for contestation, no call for argument about ‘where to?’
There are alternatives
The progressive education tradition
Unfortunately, educators and citizens alike seem to have no collective memory of the many successful attempts at building more democratic schools. The history of progressive school reform documents the fact that thousands of teachers, administrators, community activists, and others spent their entire professional lives trying to build more educationally and socially responsive institutions. We have much to gain by reconnecting with their successes and with how they approached and overcame difficulties. All progressively inclined educators stand on the shoulders of these people. (Apple and Beane, 2007: 153–54)
The new policy priority given to early childhood education in recent years in England has been accompanied by the dominance of one discourse, a discourse of control that I have termed elsewhere ‘the story of quality and high returns’ (Moss, 2014b). The moral of this story is that high returns on investment require strong control to be exercised through human technologies – ‘quality’. Rooted in a strongly positivistic tradition, the story is instrumental, economistic and technical in tone, allowing no room for the political or ethical. Uninterested or deaf to other stories, the story of quality and high returns strives to impose what Unger (2005) calls a ‘dictatorship of no alternative’ or what De Sousa Santos (2004) terms ‘hegemonic globalisation’, ‘the successful globalisation of a particular local and culturally-specific discourse to the point that it makes universal truth claims and “localises” all rival discourses’ (p. 149).
To contest and critique such dictatorial tendencies and hegemonic claims are important. Critical thinking and research are called for, to deepen awareness and understanding of ‘human technologies’ and their regulatory effects. There is a need, too, for developing critical practices that can make visible and deconstruct these technologies, practices such as pedagogical documentation. Pedagogical documentation evolved in the early childhood education created in the post-war years in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia (of which more shortly) and has since spread world-wide – although not into other fields of education. It involves making practice visible through many methods of documentation (e.g. note-taking, video and audio recordings, the display of children’s work) and then subjecting that documentation to dialogue, contestation, reflection and interpretation: collective processes of meaning-making. Pedagogical documentation has many purposes, including research, professional development, participatory evaluation – and challenging dominant discourses. It can act, therefore, as a way not only of understanding these discourses better but also of helping loosen the grasp they have over us: Through documentation we can unmask – identify and visualize – the dominant discourses and regimes which exercise power on and through us, and by which we have constructed the child and ourselves as pedagogues. Pedagogical documentation, therefore, can function as a tool for opening up a critical and reflective practice challenging dominant discourses and constructing counter-discourses, through which we can find alternative pedagogies ‘which can both be morally and ethically satisfying, but also aesthetically pleasing’ (Steedman, 1991: 61). It can be understood as one of the ‘technologies of the self’, whose use makes it possible to criticize and free ourselves from embodied concepts and produce new concepts. (Dahlberg et al., 2013: 160–161)
But important as they are, to contest and critique are not enough. We may wish to disrupt discourses of control and their capacity to regulate and govern. Yet, even assuming discordant voices were to be heard by the tellers of dominant stories, then what? What is the next step? To argue for the end of education and schools as too dangerous, as unavoidable instruments of an authoritarian will to control?
That seems to me both improbable and a counsel of despair, which risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Improbable because there is a deep desire for education world-wide, both among children and adults. A counsel of despair because education and schools need not be reduced to institutions for regulating childhoods, to produce subjects fitted to the needs of a global market capitalism and participants in the global race. They can be something else; rather than normalisation and control, education and schools can be sites for democracy, emancipation and potentiality.
This has been the hope and lifetime work of many educators, past and present. One notable tradition cast in this mould has been progressive education. While it can be argued that progressivism is largely a product of the late 19th century that came to hold sway, according to which country is considered, during the 40 years between 1930 and 1970, its roots go back much further to writers like Comenius and Rousseau, and its legacy remains a significant presence today (Darling and Norbenbo, 2003: 289). Given the richness and longevity of its traditions and the range of countries across the world that have embraced its thinking, there is, inevitably and properly, no one account that can claim to be uncontested.
That being said, Darling and Norbeno offer a useful starting point. They suggest five recurring themes that characterise progressive approaches to schooling – criticism of traditional education, the nature of knowledge, human nature, democracy and the development of the whole person. These themes have inspired many past educators, and continue to do so today, as an example of early childhood education from Italy can readily demonstrate.
Reggio Emilia
What is so terribly impressive and exceptional about the Reggio experience and the work of Loris Malaguzzi is the way they have challenged the dominating discourses of our time, specifically in the field of early childhood pedagogy – a most unique undertaking for a pedagogical practice! This was achieved by deconstructing the way in which the field has been socially constituted within a scientific, political and ethical context and then reconstructing and redefining children’s and teachers’ subjectivities. That is, they have tried to understand what kinds of thoughts, conceptions, ideas, social structures and behavioural patterns have dominated the field and how these discourses have shaped our conceptions and images of the child and childhood, the way we interact with children and the kind of environment we create for them. (Dahlberg, 2000: 178)
In the current climate, progressivism struggles to survive in compulsory education. One place where the values it espouses – the ideal of a democratic and emancipatory education that works to realise the unknowable potentiality of children – are enacted today is the municipal schools for young children in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia. Reggio’s schools and early education are often referred to as ‘the Reggio Emilia Approach’, but this is, I believe, to misunderstand this experience. For what Reggio Emilia has undertaken is a local cultural project, constructed over time in a particular context by a particular group of participants, and laying no claim to offer a universal solution to education or schooling. While some people may believe it offers an exportable template or model, to be replicated irrespective of time or place, the Reggio project is better understood as a provocation to others to think about and construct their own local cultural project within their own context; Reggio is an example of possibility, not a model for replication.
Starting with the opening of a first school for 3- to 6-year-olds in 1963, and now with a network of 47 schools for children under and over 3 years, the educational project of the comune of Reggio Emilia has been explicitly democratic and emancipatory, expressed in this statement from the 2009 edition of the municipal Regulations: Education is the right of all, of all children, and as such is a responsibility of the community. Education is an opportunity for the growth and emancipation of the individual and the collective; it is a resource for gaining knowledge and for learning to live together; it is a meeting place where freedom, democracy and solidarity are practiced and where the value of peace is promoted. Within the plurality of cultural, ideological, political, and religious conceptions, education lives by listening, dialogue, and participation; it is based on mutual respect, valuing the diversity of identities, competencies, and knowledge held by each individual. (Istituzione del Comune di Reggio Emilia, 2010: 7)
These broad principles have been enacted in an epistemological approach that views knowledge as a co-constructive process of meaning-making in a pedagogy of listening and relationships. This involves processes of theory-building in relationship with others and values the production of new and unexpected thought and emotions of wonder, surprise and amazement. Learning in this way occurs mainly through project work, which is constructed through advances, standstills and ‘retreats’ that take many directions and often lead to unexpected places. It is a process of constructing, testing and reconstructing theories [in a group process] … [T]he word ‘project’ evokes the idea of a dynamic process, a journey that involves the uncertainty and chance that always arises in relationships with others. Project work grows in many directions, with no predefined progression, no outcomes decided before the journey begins. (Rinaldi, 2006: 131–132)
This pedagogical work is premised on an initial political question: what is our image of the child? Loris Malaguzzi, the first director of Reggio’s municipal schools, made the centrality of this foundational question and Reggio Emilia’s (2012) answer very clear when he wrote of starting from a very open, explicit declaration of our image of the child, where image is understood as a strong and optimistic interpretation of the child. A child born with many resources and extraordinary potentials that have never ceased to amaze us, with an autonomous capacity for constructing thoughts, ideas, questions and attempts at answers. (p. 109)
In such statements, by Malaguzzi and Rinaldi, education is understood as a process of realising children’s potentiality, something that cannot be predicted or managed, something that is endlessly amazing since (in the words of the philosopher Spinoza) ‘we never know in advance what a body can do’. Unsurprisingly, Reggio Emilia has little time for the technical, controlling approach that characterises the dominant discourse in today’s early childhood education, with its fetish for certainty and predetermined outcomes – what Malaguzzi termed ‘prophetic pedagogy’, which ‘knows everything beforehand, knows everything that will happen, knows everything, does not have one uncertainty, is absolutely imperturbable’ and which is ‘a complete humiliation for children’s ingenuity and potential’.
Reggio Emilia’s success in sustaining a democratic and emancipatory education in its municipal schools over 50 years has drawn on a willingness to research and experiment, to border cross and make connections between different disciplines and theories, and to embrace complexity and uncertainty. This willingness has enabled them to turn answers to political questions into innovative and dynamic pedagogical practice. But it has also required very strong organisation, building systems and structures over time to support the values, purposes and goals of this local cultural project of childhood. These include the widespread use of ateliers and atelieristas to support the ‘hundred languages of children’; the deployment of two teachers per group of children; dedicated time for professional development, to enable dialogue and reflection; a support team of experienced educators, pedagogistas, each working with a small group of schools; and the widespread use of pedagogical documentation, already mentioned, with the possibility it provides ‘to discuss and to dialogue “everything with everyone” (teachers, auxiliary staff, cooks, families, administrators, citizens) … real, concrete things – not just theories and words’ (Hoyuelos, 2004: 7).
Reggio Emilia was and is not alone, but part of what has been termed the ‘municipal school revolution’, a 1960s movement when many comuni in Northern and Central Italy ‘pre-empted State-run services by starting up their own services for young children’ (Catarsi, 2004: 8). Reggio Emilia may have led the way in deciding to start a municipal early childhood education, but close behind were other towns and cities. Today, although depleted in numbers, a network of such local experiences continues, with important similarities in approach as well as some local differences (see, for example, Fortunati and Catarsi, 2012, for the Tuscan approach to early childhood education).
The pedagogical ideas and ways of working that have evolved in Reggio Emilia have attracted global interest and emulation. Since the late 1970s, thousands have visited the city’s schools from all over the world, while the exhibition The Hundred Languages of Children has brought Reggio’s pedagogical work to the attention of a vast new global audience and helped create an international network of people engaged with the city and its schools for young children. This is evidence, indeed, of a widespread resistance movement to the dominant discourse in early childhood education, so strongly heard in the case of England, that controlling story of quality and high returns.
The school
A physical, local school where community members are encouraged to encounter each other and learn from each other is one of the last public spaces in which we can begin to build the intergenerational solidarity, respect for diversity and democratic capability needed to ensure fairness in the context of sociotechnical change … It is therefore the time both to defend the idea of a school as a public resource and to radically re-imagine how it might evolve if it is to equip communities to respond to and shape the socio-technical changes of the next few years. (Facer, 2011: 28–29)
Although education and school have been linked in this article, education is not confined to the school, but can and does occur in many settings, both formal and informal. The school has no monopoly on education. Concerns about the potential of the school to govern, discipline and normalise child and teacher alike have also been recognised. This danger is particularly associated with a common understanding, or image, of the school (whether compulsory or pre-compulsory) as an enclosure into which children can be gathered so that human technologies can be applied to them to produce predetermined outcomes: the school as factory for learning goals or examinations.
Such images of the school should and can be contested, while at the same time offering alternative, more hopeful images, associated with an understanding of education as emancipatory and democratic. Carlina Rinaldi (2006), a former director of Reggio schools, uses a variety of such images: the school as a forum, a place of encounter, a construction site, a workshop and a permanent laboratory, all implying a place where citizens meet to create projects. Developing this theme, it has been suggested that early childhood institutions can be understood as public forums situated in civil society in which children and adults participate together in projects of social, cultural political and economic significance … Forums are an important feature of civil society. If civil society is where individuals – children, young people and adults – can come together to participate and engage in activities or projects of common interest and collective action, then forums are places where this coming together, this meeting, occurs. (Dahlberg et al., 2013: 78: original emphasis)
There has been some discussion about the future need for schools, especially for older children, with one scenario envisaging ‘the abandonment of schools in favour of a multitude of learning networks … as part of an emerging “network society”’ (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, 2003). In a world of distanced and networked learning, ‘the school itself should simply be dissolved into the learning landscape and replaced by personalized learning environments’ (Facer, 2011: 27). But for others, the school envisaged as physical, public space retains a vital role, because ‘it may be one of the most important institutions we have to help us build a democratic conversation about the future’ (Facer, 2011: 28).
Rather than a place for ‘future proofing’ children, creating flexible souls able to respond effortlessly to changing market demands and training them up to participate in the ‘global race’, Facer (2011) envisages a democratic and emancipatory role for schools of ‘future building’, in which the school acts as a a powerful democratic resource and public space that allows its young people and communities to contest the visions of the future that they are being presented with, and to work together through the spaces of traditional and emergent democratic practice, to fight for viable futures for all. (p. 15)
This is a school of contestation, of hope and of unknowable potentiality.
Cautious hope
I have argued that early childhood education today, not only in England but also increasingly in other countries under the influence of a neoliberal regime and a resurgent positivistic science, is subject to ever more powerful human technologies capable of regulating childhoods and exerting strong control over children and adults alike. The dominant discourse, what I have called ‘the story of quality and high returns’, is instrumental, economistic and technical in character, focused intently on the predictability, certainty and closure of predetermined goals achieved. A rhetoric of choice and diversity, in terms of provision of services, is matched by extreme uniformity and standardisation when it comes to pedagogical goals and outcomes.
But as I have touched on, there are alternatives. Other images, constructions, and understandings of education and school that welcome complexity, diversity and multiplicity are emancipatory and democratic in character and intent. More than this, there are examples, past and present, where such images have been enacted, to a greater or lesser extent, sometimes for just a few years, in a few instances for decades.
For despite the best efforts of the ‘dictatorship of no alternative’, early childhood education is, in fact, alive with a multitude of narratives, perspectives and debates, including educators and academics working within post-foundational paradigms; with transgressive theorists such as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Levinas; and with a range of disciplines including philosophy, political science, human geography, sociology, science studies and feminist studies. Evidence of this global resistance movement, contesting the hegemony of the dominant discourse, can be found, inter alia, in networks (e.g. the Reconceptualising Early Childhood Education movement and the many national Reggio Emilia groups), researching and writing (e.g. many articles in journals such as Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood and books in the ‘Contesting Early Childhood’ series), and the doctoral theses of a younger generation.
Discourses of control can be disrupted, childhoods can be less regulated, and there are alternatives and resistances. Much more remains to be done, not least on identifying and elaborating conditions that might be needed for transformative change to develop and be sustainable; for the dominant discourse in early childhood education, as witnessed in England today, is the product of much effort, time and money expended on creating conditions for its enactment and the effective control of childhood. But if there is one general lesson we can draw from the long life of Reggio Emilia’s local project of innovative education, it is that conditions for such sustained transformative change can be created. All in all, then, there is cause for cautious hope and qualified optimism, not complete despair.