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Abstract

This article explores how three well-known conceptual frameworks view child development and how they assume particular figurations of the child in the context of the South African National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four. This new curriculum is based on a children’s rights framework. The capability approaches offer important insights for children’s rights advocates, but, like psychosocial theories of child development, assumes a ‘becoming-adult view of child’, which poses a serious threat to children’s right to genuine participation. They also share the exclusive focus on understanding development as located ontologically in the individualised human. In contrast, critical posthumanism queers humanist understandings of child development and reconfigures subjectivity through a radical philosophical decentring of the human. The relevance of this shift for postdevelopmental child in the context of the new South African early years curriculum is threaded throughout the article. A posthuman reconfiguration of child subjectivity moves theory and practice from a focus on assessing the capabilities of individual children in sociocultural contexts to the tracing of material and discursive entanglements that render children capable. This onto-epistemic shift leads to the conclusion that the National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four requires a fourth theme (with guiding principles), which would express a multispecies relationality and an ethics of care for the human as well as the nonhuman.

Keywords

African childhoods capabilities approaches children’s rights National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four post-development posthuman child posthumanism

Introduction

The South African National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four (2015) (Department of Basic Education, 2015) is published by United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the South African Department of Basic Education.¹ After several consultative processes, including comments from the public, the document has been used in a variety of early-childhood education (ECE) and care settings in South Africa with the ultimate aim of developing a standardised curriculum for the training of early-childhood educators and practitioners.² In March 2017, I had been invited to observe a research team evaluating the National Curriculum Framework³ since its first development in 2012.⁴ My analysis draws on these observations, the curriculum documents and some of the researchers’ findings in the context of life skills⁵ and is guided by the following key questions: How is child positioned in this document? What kind of identity, agency and notion of development is assumed? In exploring these questions, the intention is not to give a critical evaluation of this curriculum, but to draw attention to the philosophy that underpins it and the child subjectivity it assumes.

In the second part, I will show how the capability approaches (CA) address some of the concerns that have been raised about the lack of real child agency and voice in the children’s rights framework. However, the CA also consider the notion of development, as human development only and I explore the implications for how this normative and ethical theory views children’s capabilities. In contrast, critical posthumanism ‘queers’⁶ humanist understandings of child development and reconfigures subjectivity as the result of a radical philosophical decentring of the human. This leads to the conclusion that the National Curriculum Framework requires a fourth theme (with guiding principles), which would express a multispecies relationality and an ethics of care for not only the human, but also the nonhuman. So, although the analysis of the National Curriculum Framework serves as a situated contextualisation, generating a concrete proposal for curriculum change, my justification for a shift in child subjectivity has much wider implications for childhood studies, philosophy of education, social science research and policy-making.

The new South African curriculum 0–4 as context

The National Curriculum Framework needs to be understood within the larger South African educational context. In South Africa, students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are systematically disadvantaged (also educationally) from a very early age and there has been little progress to provide quality education for all (Fleisch, 2008). Thus, with a deeply divisive private school system historically for whites only, remedying structural educational inequality requires transformation starting at birth (Van der Berg et al., 2011). The educational provision for the very young is unevenly distributed, hence the need for a curriculum for 0 to 4-year-olds, which has only recently been put in place. Deep inequalities, the history of apartheid, concerns about quality provision, the professionalisation of ECE practitioners and care workers and the development of an imaginary for a democratic citizenry are driving the National Curriculum Framework. Throughout the document, the figuration of the holistic child features strongly from within a child-centred orientation. Developmental aims are at its core. Explicitly mentioned are physical motor, socio-emotional, cognitive, language, creative and cultural-identity development. As is the case elsewhere, a major objective of ECE in South Africa is to make young children ‘school ready’ for the foundation phase (Grade R- Grade 3). ‘School readiness’ has become a neo-liberal marker globally for ‘quality’ in education including technologies of evaluation (Dahlberg et al., 2013 [1999]; Nxumalo, 2016) as is the case with the National Curriculum Framework’s ‘exit outcomes’ determining children’s suitability for ‘entry’ into the foundation phase. The identification of these exit outcomes was the main objective of the research team I had been invited to observe. The current conceptualisation of ‘school readiness’ is narrow, unilinear and used as an indicator for children’s individual success in a neo-liberal future. With learning residing ontologically in the child, she is expected to ‘master’ a series of tasks successfully in order to proceed to the next level (like mounting steps on a staircase). However, the picture in South Africa is more complex and confusing.

The National Curriculum Framework tries to combine various conceptions of childhood at the same time, thereby arguably sacrificing theoretical coherence. In the report produced by the research team that I observed, it is stated that the National Curriculum Framework promotes a ‘being view of the child’, a ‘belonging view of the child’, but also a ‘becoming view of the child’.⁷ Children are positioned as competent (whose participation must be sought in matters affecting their lives), as capable (adults have to value children in their present state) and always in diverse cultural contexts. It identifies three themes with 12 accompanying principles and expressed from a child’s perspective: Theme 1: ‘I am a competent person’; Theme 2: ‘My learning and development is important’ and Theme 3: ‘I need strong connections with adults’ (see Appendix).

Development as ‘becoming-adult view of child’

Often in curriculum documents, it is helpful to look at the recommendations for practice in order to assess how these theoretical positions are understood and interpreted. In the review document, it states that the child’s learning needs to be scaffolded by the adult expert ‘within the developmental phases’, ‘from one developmental phase to another’ and using spiralling or linear stepping stones ‘towards the exit level outcomes’. This is the first example that clearly shows the underlying bias in the National Curriculum Framework towards the ‘becoming view of the child’ or as I will continue to refer to the ‘becoming-adult view of child’. The reason given for this in the document is the cultural context: ‘a society where the risk factors can overpower the protective factors’. It claims that children are ‘a vulnerable group who are dependent on adult support for optimal development’.⁸

The second example of the ‘becoming view of the child’ is the National Curriculum Framework’s explicit (neo-liberal) political goal to meet the socioeconomic challenges of the 21st century. To meet these challenges, so it claims, there is an overriding need to develop ‘individuals who are intellectually flexible, skilled in problem-solving, emotionally resilient and well able to interact with others in constantly changing social environments and highly competitive economies’.⁹ In order to achieve this, it states that it is ‘imperative to understand (and appreciate) the developmental processes which enable each child to attain neurobiological, physical, psychological and emotional potential’.¹⁰ This developmental orientation is also foregrounded in children’s legal right to development as formulated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). It protects eight domains of children’s development (physical, mental, moral, social, cultural, spiritual, personality and talent). In Article 6, the child’s right to life, survival and development is protected. But what does children’s development actually mean? What are the implications of children having the right to development?

Noam Peleg (2013: 524) suggests we need to begin by answering the first question. She argues that children’s development tends to be exclusively understood in psychosocial terms with the right of development interpreted as the child’s right to become an adult – the ‘human becomings’ conception of childhood and that it ignores children’s agency and voice (Peleg, 2013). In other words, if the answer to the first question is framed only by developmental psychology, the answer to the second question will be that the child only has the right to become an adult and positions child as passive, weak, vulnerable and in need of protection (Peleg, 2013: 526). Peleg suggests we should therefore consider the CA in order to be able to incorporate children’s agency and to include other meanings of childhood. However, before turning to the CA, it is important to understand exactly what is problematic about a psycho-social developmental orientation and the children’s rights discourse, and why this might not be suitable for the South African context in particular. After all, the children’s right framework is in theory widely embraced in South Africa (Ebrahim, 2011), although all activities still need to be ‘developmentally appropriate’ in the National Curriculum Framework. However, as we have seen above, Peleg challenges the idea that the UNCRC assumes an ‘active’ child with agency and voice. So, much seems to depend on what is meant by ‘children’s development’.

The origin of the psycho-social orientation to development

The psycho-social orientation is still dominant in how we think about development in ECE policies, practices and curriculum design globally (File et al., 2012; Hatch, 2012: 43). This particular orientation to development is echoed in the languages of the Millennium Development Goals, Education for All, UNICEF and the World Bank and is informed by a number of theories about physical and psychological development, including Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and Gesell’s theory of maturation (Linington, Excell and Murris, 2011). The purpose of Piaget’s ‘genetic epistemology’ is to describe the structure and modes of children’s thinking that is claimed to be both natural and universal (Jenks, 2005: 21). But Piaget’s intention was not to prescribe a theory of cognitive development by which children’s abilities could be measured and found wanting (Aslanian, 2018: 418). So, it is the simplified, popularised and normative uptake of Piaget’s scientific theory in education that assumes that children gradually develop to think and reason correctly (Aslanian, 2018: 419). Children are supposed to develop innately, according to general laws, through clearly identifiable stages of intellectual growth¹¹ that are chronologically ordered and hierarchically arranged. Progress in thinking is made along a continuum that proceeds from ‘low status, infantile, ‘figurative thought’ to high status, adult, ‘operative’ intelligence’ (Jenks, 2005: 22), unless a child has some abnormality (Dahlberg et al., 2013 (1999): 49). In other words, child’s maturation process and the project of genetic epistemology are completed when child’s mind is scientific and rational, that is, thinks like an adult. Hence, ‘development’ means the individual ‘child-becoming-adult’ climbing a ‘ladder’, accomplishing successive stages or milestones (rungs on the ladder) with increasing autonomy (Dahlberg et al., 2013 (1999): 48).

In this way, Piagetian inspired theories of cognitive development have become prime examples of what is called developmentalism. It has its grounding in the Aristotelian idea (Stables, 2008) that the individual child’s mind/psyche (and body) is in a process of being formed according to its innate potential: in the same way that an acorn flourishes (eudaimonia) when it becomes an oak tree. If this development is regarded as a ‘natural’ process, it is difficult to see the active role children can play in their own development (Peleg, 2013: 528). Multidisciplinary critique of developmentalism can be summarised as follows: it lacks methodological validity (Donaldson, 1978: 23; Sutherland, 1992: 15), is a normative process (Egan, 2002: 79–80) and involves complexity reduction (Dahlberg et al., 2013 (1999): 49; Moss, 2014: 42). Especially relevant for South Africa is the claim that developmentalism prepares children for a capitalist economic workforce (Burman, 1994), has an evolutionary bias and is colonial (Burman, 2008, 2016) The assumption in developmental theories is that the goal of the process is maturity – each stage is followed by one that is ‘better’, more ‘mature’.

Development as racial differentiation

Developmentalism is a recapitulation theory: child’s intellectual development is compared with (‘recapitulates’) the development of the species (with the child as nature, as the origin of the species) from ‘savage’ to ‘civilised’. This process of ‘racial differentiation’ underlies our modern understanding of the child and is influenced by the natural sciences, and in particular physiology and medicine (Oswell, 2013: 24). It is significant that colonialism and cognitive theories of child development emerged at the same time in Northern Europe (Nieuwenhuys, 2013: 5). There is an intricate connection between imperialism and the institutionalisation of childhood (Burman, 2008; Cannella and Viruru, 2004; Nandy, 1987). One view is that enlightenment notions of progress and reason have colonised children by positioning them as in need of recapitulating the development of the species. Like Indigenous peoples, children are seen as simple, non-abstract, immature thinkers who need age-appropriated interventions in order to mature into autonomous fully human rational beings, therefore cannot be granted political agency. Child as not fully formed human but developing is evident in biomedical and bio-psychosocial approaches to ECE (e.g. their focus on age, weight charts, language, gross and fine motor skills; Cregan and Cuthbert, 2014: 10). Children’s development is seen as dependent on others and they are not social persons in their own right (Christensen and Prout, 2002: 480). It is in that sense that developmental theories position child as the property of the adult, ‘the last savage’ (Kromidas, 2014: 429), therefore the terms ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’ take on a double meaning in the context of childhood (Cannella and Viruru, 2004: 87). So, whether childhood is seen as a phase in the life cycle of a human life, or a species, or a nation, chronological improvement to independence, autonomy and rationality is assumed, that is, the logic of colonialism. The concept of progress makes it possible to describe, explain, predict and control the ‘lesser’ human. So, why is this understanding of children’s development problematic for an ECE curriculum in South Africa?

Childhoods in African societies

In African societies, the extended family is a microcosm of the wider society, characterised by communal interdependence (Letseka, 2013). Hierarchies are written into the nature of the universe, with child low in the hierarchy – subservient (obedient and respectful) to adults and ancestors. Child’s place is to serve this extended family, with obedience as a prerequisite and reinforced through physical punishment (Penn, 2005: 110). Girls have even less status and authority than boys and are expected to be more domesticated and more compliant, also sexually (Penn, 2005: 110). There is an important difference though from (deficit) Western notions of childhood. Children are capable of important responsibilities, and like adults, need to contribute to the subsistence of their extended families and wider communities. Depending on gender, even young children are supposed to, for example, look after infants or herd cattle. Childhood is not seen as a phase in a human life, but is instead associated with certain capabilities, that is, the physical activity to perform adult tasks, economic independence and getting married (Twum-Danso, 2005). The hierarchy is less related to age, and more to children’s obligations to support the family in times of need and old age, so in that sense, children always remain children (of their parents). It is not something they grow out of. The kind of hierarchy implied is therefore different from the Western conception of childhood as laid down by the UNCRC.

In the UNCRC (ratified in South Africa in 1995), the basic assumption is that children (‘indoor children’) grow up in a benign environment where the family will look after their development, but child-headed households are not uncommon in Africa (Penn, 2005: 111). Especially in a continent plagued with HIV/AIDS, there is a distorted picture of what childhood is like for many children, obscuring their capacities and the contributions they make in caring for siblings and other family members (Kesby et al., 2006: 186). As Penn (2005) puts it, ‘[c]hildren’s resilience, solidarity, capacity for sharing, their stamina, their sense of time, place and the future, are rarely conceptualized or investigated’ (p. 111).

Development, children’s rights and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child

The UNCRC has also been critiqued for being developmental;¹² the Convention assumes the ‘not-yet-fully-developed responsibility for those under 18’, but with civic and political dimensions now added to the understanding of child and childhood (Cregan and Cuthbert, 2014: 6, 17). Despite its universalist stance, the UNCRC is often praised for helping to enculturate respect for child as competent, elevating child’s status to a liberal rights-bearing individual. The Convention states explicitly that the end goal of childhood is the formation of an adult citizen contributing productively to a Western-style liberal democracy and capable of living individually (Cregan and Cuthbert, 2014: 17). In one sense, the UNCRC positions children as agents with power (e.g. participation rights) and although one could argue that there is an increased equality between the status and authority of parents and children, it tends to be adults who allocate rights to children (Sellers, 2013: 74), who in turn are dependent on others for their execution (Cregan and Cuthbert, 2014: 56).

Relevant for us working and living in Africa is the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC, 1990) – a critical response to the cultural bias of the UNCRC (Cregan and Cuthbert, 2014: 69–70). Article 31 of the Charter has added the responsibilities African children have towards their parents and communities in return of the rights they have been assigned (something the UNCRC does not do). Children’s freedom in Africa is ‘balanced’ by making explicit that children need to respect their ‘parents, superiors and elders at all times and to assist them in case of need’, serve national and international communities and ‘preserve and strengthen African cultural values … in the spirit of tolerance, dialogue and consultation’.¹³ The essentialising framing of the child in the UNCRC is particularly problematic for education in South Africa. As we have seen above, the children’s rights framework supports a neo-liberal Western view of childhood (Burman, 1994). However, although the ACRWC might be valued as a situated response to the imperialist imposition of a Western (indoor) child as the global norm, the possible conservative interpretation of the Charter significantly reduces the political gains made and does not seem to do justice to the capacities and contributions African children make to households and communities.

Children’s development and the capability approaches

Noam Peleg’s suggestion of turning to the CA is based on two major problems with the UNCRC. She makes the case that the UNCRC perpetuates the image of the child as an adult in the making and has failed to respect children’s agency in developing (Peleg, 2013: 527). Although being regarded as ‘competent’, child is still positioned as ‘not fully-human-as-yet’, lacking agency and as vulnerable. She requires adult facilitation, mediation, guidance and so on in order to grow up into a fully functioning adult (Murris, 2016). Drawing on contemporary sociologists of childhood, Peleg argues that children should be studied as active political agents and not by comparing children with adults. Although children are perfectly capable of expressing their own views on the right to their own development, the image of the developing child is still hegemonic in policy-making (Peleg, 2013: 528). Practices on the ground, curricula and policies globally have remained remarkably resilient to the paradigm shift to the sociology of childhood in childhood studies. Awareness of social exclusions is central to CA with their reconceptualisation of ‘development’.

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s (2011) CA are in line with human rights frameworks and aim to conceptualise and theorise key concepts that underpin human rights approaches (Dixon and Nussbaum, 2012; Nussbaum, 2003). Concepts such as ‘active learning’, ‘well-being’ (Clark, 2015), ‘identity and belonging’ (Marovah, 2015) and ‘agency’ (Walker and Unterhalter, 2007) and how these concepts work in the complex South African context are characterised by gender and race inequality (Unterhalter, 2013). It has been argued that the CA are useful for thinking about children’s right to development (Dixon and Nussbaum, 2012; Peleg, 2013), but it is of concern that few CA scholars have occupied themselves with the development of children, an oversight only partly addressed, according to Peleg (2013) by Dixon and Nussbaum (2012). This lack of interest is very much influenced by Sen’s (1992, 1999) belief that children can enjoy their freedoms only once they have become competent adults. Although the proposal is that people should have a stake in the choices other people make on their behalf, according to Sen, children are regarded as mature enough to make decisions themselves as they may lack the capacity to choose and the capacity for self-governance (Peleg, 2013: 533–534). An advocate of the CA herself, Peleg (2013: 540) argues that Sen’s beliefs about children pose a real threat to their right to participation and deprives them of agency and voice. She concludes that a connection between children’s ability to make sense of the world around them on their own terms and the right to express their own ‘submerged points of view’ still needs to be made (Peleg, 2013: 540). However, these epistemic prejudices run deep (Murris, 2013).

Capabilities and functionings, not rights

The CA do not link development with economic growth (unlike the National Curriculum Framework), but understand human development as freedom and human dignity. Sen (2009) argues that the focus is ‘on the freedom that a person actually has to do this or be that – things that he or she may value doing or being’ (p. 232). Freedom, therefore, has to be a real possibility, effective freedom. A person needs to have the ability to act on behalf of what matters and also have the real opportunity to achieve valued functionings chosen from various good possibilities (capability). Concerned with gender/sex equality and social justice, Sen and Nussbaum agree that

growth is a bad indicator of life quality because it fails to tell us how deprived people are doing; women figure in the argument as people who are often unable to enjoy the fruits of a nation’s general prosperity. If we ask what people are actually able to do and to be, we come much closer to understanding the barriers societies have erected against full justice for women. (Nussbaum, 2003: 33)

For Nussbaum (2003, 2011), freedom of choice is at the heart of what it means to be an agent with dignity. Importantly, ends and means merge, that is, part of human development is the freedom to make choices (Nussbaum, 2011: 16). These choices make it possible for humans to live lives that are worth living (Peleg, 2013: 529). Agency is the ability of a person to act on what they value and have reason to value. Capabilities are a person’s real freedom to achieve certain functionings. The former are more general than the latter. So, for example, the capability of being literate is the freedom (or valuable opportunities) to as-a-matter-of fact being able to read a book, a road sign or a picture (functionings). The freedom lies in the possibility (the capabilities), not whether a person chooses to do this or not (functionings). Although they are closely linked to rights, Nussbaum (2003: 37) argues that capabilities have the advantage of giving the language of rights the necessary precision; and, unlike Sen, she offers 10 capabilities that are open for revision and different cultural interpretations. For Nussbaum (2003), in order to be free (pp. 41–42), humans need the following capabilities as fundamental entitlements that need to be protected: 1. Life; 2. Bodily health; 3. Bodily integrity; 4. Senses, Imagination and Thought (freedom of expression); 5. Emotions, 6. Practical reason; 7. Affiliation; 8. Other species (being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants and the world of nature); 9. Play and 10. Control Over One’s Environment. However, crucially for Nussbaum, not all of these capabilities include children’s capabilities. Elsewhere, she compares children’s capabilities with adults who have disabilities. Dixon and Nussbaum (2012: 553; my emphases) write

The account of children’s rights provided by CA, in this context, has important similarities with that provided by Nussbaum in support of the rights of persons with intellectual disabilities. At base, the argument for recognizing both sets of rights rests on a very simple idea about the moral claim of all human beings to be afforded full human dignity, regardless of their capacity for rational or reasoned participation in public or civic life.

The appeal to human dignity hides the adult/child binary implied in offering a set of capabilities that do not include children as fully human, but as ‘intellectually disabled’.

Nussbaum and child as ‘intellectually disabled’

Peleg points out that the idea of child as ‘intellectually disabled’ positions a competent adult as the norm for child development; in other words, CA proponents commit themselves to the ‘becoming-adult view of child’. Childhood as an intellectual disability means that children are not fully formed yet, and this deficit view of the child means that capabilities 4 (freedom of expression) and 6 (practical reason) are not available to them. But Dixon and Nussbaum (2012: 557) stipulate that each and every person is included in the CA and should be treated as an end in themselves, rather than an instrument or tool. They stipulate that all the capabilities on Nussbaum’s list above hold for all children, without exception. In Nussbaum’s capability approach, every person, including every child, is held to possess full and equal unconditional human dignity. But it looks as if this can be an empty gesture when, for example, the related capabilities are not actually present (Dixon and Nussbaum, 2012: 561), and this seems to be the problem with capabilities four and six as they are intricately entangled.

As a true neo-Aristotelian, Nussbaum (2003) has included capability number six, which involves practical reason (phronesis), which she describes as ‘[b]eing able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life’ (p. 41). In order to be able ‘to form a conception of the good’, children need to have the fourth capability, that is, they need to be able

to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason – and to do these things in a ‘truly human’ way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training…Being able to use imagination and thought…[and] one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression (Nussbaum, 2003: 41; my emphasis).

In other words, according to Nussbaum, these capacities to imagine, think and reason need to be developed through formal education and training and informed by freedom of expression. But this already assumes a deficit view of child and ignores what childhoods are like in, for example, Africa. It obscures the capacities children already have and acquire informally through the body and affect when caring for siblings and other family or community members. The intellect and its capacities, assumed by Nussbaum, are that of an indoor Western childhood, and children’s opportunities depend largely on the state, institutions, public policy and other people (Dreze and Sen, 2013: 6). I conclude that it remains unclear how children can be regarded at the same time as social actors in their own right and apparently need to measure up to adult cognitive requirements in order to flourish as they grow older.

So far, the meaning of the concept of (children’s) development has been explored using various theoretical frameworks. Although the CA move beyond the foregrounding of biological and psychosocial child development, they seem to share with the children’s rights framework a ‘becoming-adult view of child’. However, some CA proponents (e.g. Peleg) are arguing for a ‘being view of child’ grounded in the sociology of childhood.

The sociology of childhoods, the ‘being-child view of child’ and the ‘belonging view of child’

The sociology of childhood has influenced the development of the South African National Curriculum Framework. Hasina Ebrahim, the key person involved in its development, as well as its evaluation,¹⁴ draws heavily on the work of sociologist Anthony Giddens (see e.g. Ebrahim, 2011). Ebrahim reminds us that a reconceptualisation of child and childhood should be situated and therefore ‘ground who South African children are, what they should know and be able to do’ (Ebrahim, 2014: 73). Although broadly sympathetic towards her proposal to destabilise Western (equated with ‘Euro-American’) notions of child development and child-centredness, I hesitate when she stipulates that this should be mobilised through an African ‘expanded concept of child development, a “belonging view of child,” … [one that takes] into account settings, child rearing practices, customs, traditions and how they interact with globalised influences …’ (Ebrahim, 2014: 74). If we put this in the context of the ACRWC above with its stipulation that children need to respect their elders and African cultural values need to be preserved and strengthened, the danger is that cultural values are confused with moral values. From the fact that cultures cherish certain values, it does not necessarily follow that they are ethical and worth hanging onto.¹⁵ It might also lead us back to a developmental ‘becoming-adult view of childhood’, because that is still hegemonic.

The sociology of childhoods puts children in the centre as social agents in their own right, without comparing them with adults – ‘the being-child view of child’ (James and Prout, 1990). But Oswell (2013) argues that society is not something distinct from children, something they have to grow into. They always already are part of culture. Spaces for children as separate from spaces for adults are not ‘naturally given’ and already assume space as a container (Euclidean ideas about geometry; Oswell, 2013: 31). Inspired by the linguistic and cultural turn in the history of ideas, sociology of childhoods scholars assume that there is no unmediated access to the ‘real’ child by nature (as-it-is in reality, untouched by cultural inscription) and claim that all knowledge is an historically, linguistically and socioculturally mediated, intersubjective process. Child bodies are understood as sites of experience through which we embody and actively respond to our sociocultural and historical context. For example, the cultural constructions of children’s development have impact on society, including fashion (e.g. sexy clothing for young girls, tattoos), food, sports, music, architecture and school curriculum. Discursive¹⁶ practices have performative agency in producing racialised, gendered, sexualised and ableist identities that, although socially constructed, might have been regarded as ‘natural’ in the conceptual frameworks above. For example, for Judith Butler (1990), gender is a doing that is made manifest only at the point of action and not an essence, or attribute, of individual bodies. Her separation of sex (‘natural’) and gender (‘cultural’) has made room for the previously excluded experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex (LGBTI) children.

In the sociology of childhood, there is no binary between the individual and the social. The social constructs the individual. It has therefore been argued that it is better to refer to ‘childhoods’ (Cannella and Viruru, 2004) rather than ‘childhood’, and, similarly, to not use the plural ‘children’ as it marks depersonalisation and does not do justice to the multiplicity, ambiguity and complexity involved when we think about what a child is or how she develops.

‘Recycling’ individualised agency

David Oswell (2013: 15–16) argues that there are severe problems with the cognitive framing of the images of child as I have discussed above. They ignore the assemblage of agencies and processes that do the work of classifying children. These classifications assume a logic of identification; the category of ‘childhood’ defines a priori a set of people who belong to the category and work like containers, filled by individuals, thereby ‘recycling’ individual agency. This individualised understanding of both structure and agency is central, not only of the psychology of childhood but also for much of the new sociology of childhood (Oswell, 2013: 36). These theories that underpin dominant educational practices locate competencies in the child ontologically (Murris, 2016) and its framing focuses mostly on the cognitive faculties (Oswell, 2013: 14).

Second, language is prioritised over other media to create, communicate and assess knowledge. Since orality was replaced by literacy and the printed word, child has become an outsider to adult culture. Literacy has got between children’s primary experiential relationship with the world (Oswell, 2013: 26). For Oswell, child is a biopolitical category. Since the ‘ontological turn’ or ‘material turn’, new child figurations have emerged as part of a more radical and wider shift in subjectivity, which makes it possible to think radically differently about children’s capabilities and child development. The theoretical frameworks discussed so far share the exclusive focus on development as a concept that only involves the human.

Postdevelopmental child and sympoiesis

Building on the sociology of childhoods, I adopt critical posthumanism as a navigational tool (Braidotti, 2013) and offer a different philosophical framework for thinking about children’s capabilities and child development. Critical posthumanists question human-centred figurations of the subject, and see it as the main reason for present struggles with respect to race, gender, class, environmental problems and the rights of humans and other animals in the controversially termed geological period of the ‘Anthropocene’ in which we now live. Reinforced by Cartesian dualisms and underpinning capitalism, onto-epistemologies that assume that knowledge and intelligence are located only in the human, and one human for that matter, have become wholly naturalised as ‘common sense’ through everyday language (Deleuze and Guattari, 2014 (1987)).

Since this ‘ontological turn’, there has been a radical rethinking of the relationship in between the knowing (human) subject that is active and the body that is passive. Although silent about children as so-called subhumans, the implications of posthumanism for a philosophy of childhood are profound. Child is not an entity bounded by her or his skin and in a particular position in space and time that precedes relations, but child e/merges as a result of these human and more-than-human space–time relations (Murris, 2016, 2018).

Donna Haraway (2016: 176fn13) talks about the difference between regarding humanimals as autopoietic systems (as in the theories of child development above) and sympoietic systems (as in postdevelopmental theories of child development). In the former, humans have ‘self-produced binaries’, they are ‘organizationally closed’, ‘autonomous units’, centrally controlled (e.g. through a human will or intellect), orientated around growth and development with ‘evolution between systems’ and are ‘predictable’. In contrast, sympoietic systems lack boundaries, are ‘complex amorphous entities’, have ‘distributed control’ with an ‘evolution within systems’ and are ‘unpredictable’. Haraway (2016) explains,

Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making-with’. Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiat computer ‘world game’, earthlings are never alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. (p. 58)

The implications are that children’s thinking, like their bodies, are part of the world. Thus, capabilities, competences and so on are also not contained within one human body or mind, because the inner/outer (or mind/body) and nature/social binary this would assume shows a human-centred onto-epistemology – the idea that meaning making is purely a social process and does not involve nonhuman agency. Barad (2007) writes, ‘Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically prior or epistemologically prior … matter and meaning are mutually articulated’ (p. 152). For a posthumanist (and many other knowledge systems other than Western, including young children’s ‘form of life’, see Murris, 2000), human and nonhuman matter always exist in entangled intra-active relations. Intra-action should not be confused with notions such as ‘inter-subjectivity’ or ‘inter-activity’ (as in child-centred pedagogies), which assume pre-social, independently existing human subjects (in relation with one another). For posthumanists, the subject is not an individual with distinct boundaries, but is ‘spread out’, like ‘a flow of energies, constituted in a total inter-dependence with other humans and the matter and physical intensities and forces around us’ (Palmer, 2011: 7). The subject of whatever age comes into existence through the encounter with other material-discursive agencies (Petersen, 2014: 41). It is this move from the discursive to the material-discursive that constitutes a relational posthuman ontology. So what are the implications for children’s capabilities in terms of how child should develop?

Affect and other transcorporeal knowledges, previously excluded from the domain of what counts as knowledge, are now having attention paid to them. Prior to the posthuman ontological turn, language was seen as the prime medium for knowledge construction and thus put up a barrier in terms of judging children’s abilities (see Oswell above). For example, the embodied ‘100 languages’ of children (clay, dance, photography, digital technology, painting, etc.) of the Reggio Emilia approach in ECE have been theorised using posthumanism as a navigational tool (Murris, 2016, 2017; Lenz Taguchi, 2010), thereby recognising the plurality of children’s competencies. If the child is with and part of the world and not separate from it, the challenge is to find other, more tacit ways of experiencing the world that also account for more-than-human experiences.

Such a shift to a relational ontology, akin to some Indigenous knowledge systems and children’s ‘form of life’, requires an un/learning of agency ‘outside the acting, human body’ (Rotas, 2015: 94). This unsettling of agency and capabilities as not something subjects ‘have’, invites us to reconfigure who and what the ‘I’ is, as well as its relationship to ‘the’ world. The implications for the South African National Curriculum Framework – and any curriculum construction for that matter – are that education should concern itself not only with individual humans, whether young or old, but also with the more-than-human.

Several (teacher) educators have interrogated the logic and ethics of human-centeredness and human exceptionalism in education and have given concrete examples of decentring the human by resisting ‘following the child’ only (Blaise et al., 2017; Malone, 2018; Nxumalo, 2016; Taylor, 2013; Taylor and Hughes, 2016). The notions of ‘more-than-human development’ and reconfiguration of child as inhuman be(com)ing (Murris, 2016) moves theory and practice from a focus on assessing the capabilities of individual children in sociocultural contexts to the tracing of material and discursive entanglements (Barad, 2018) that render children capable. Like other human and nonhuman bodies, children are ‘rendered capable by and with both things and living beings’ (Haraway, 2016: 16). The details of these material-discursive entanglements matter, and tracing them ‘link actual beings to actual response-abilities’ (Haraway, 2016: 29).

A proposal for a 4th theme in the National Curriculum Framework

This onto-epistemic shift leads to the conclusion that the National Curriculum Framework requires a fourth theme (with guiding principles), which would express a multispecies relationality and an ethics of care for other humans as well as the nonhuman. By reconfiguring child as part of a sympoietic system, more equitable relationships between humans (of, for example, different ages) and between the human and more-than-human are sedimented into the world (Barad, 2007). In the troublesome child-centred language of the National Curriculum Framework, it could be something like this:

I care for myself, other humans, nonhuman animals and the environment

I see myself as part of a more-than-human world with responsibilities for bodies other than my own.

I empathise with other humans and living organisms.

I sympathise with others who suffer, including nonhuman species of all sizes.

My engagement with different views of child subjectivity through the concepts of development and the becoming/being/belonging view of child has led to practical recommendations for early-childhood curriculum developers and policy makers to consider. My proposal to the South African government is to include a fourth theme (with guiding principles) in the National Curriculum Framework that includes a trans-species ethics of care that also embraces matter, which would complement the human centeredness of the other themes, but which also goes beyond it. In personal communication, Ebrahim explained that the curriculum has deliberately left out the ethical dimensions of education, but that is impossible. Knowing is a practice, hence ethics is always already threaded through the fabric of the world. Although specific to the South African curriculum context, my analysis clearly has wider significance. I focused on the two questions: How is child positioned in this document? What kind of identity, agency and notion of development is assumed? Through an exploration of psycho-social developmental theories, CA and the sociology of childhoods, humanist notions of identity, agency and development were queered. Childhood discourses that position children as less-than-fully human (the ‘becoming-adult view of child’) requires a creative effort to resist Western individualism (and the metaphysics that grounds it philosophically) and to think differently about differences (ontology) and concept knowledge (epistemology) as not just language-based. Troubling the way development is commonly understood as ‘becoming-adult’ as the unquestioned neo-liberal Western ideal opens up possibilities for a postdevelopmental figuration of child, transindividual agency and a meaning of belonging that includes the more-than-human. This ontological shift is urgently needed for living well together on a damaged planet (Haraway, 2016) and for a ‘justice-to-come’ (Barad, 2012: 81) that includes our youngest citizens.

Footnotes

Appendix

Funding

This work is based on research supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant no. 98992).

ORCID iD

Karin Murris

Notes

Author biography

Karin Murris is a Professor of Pedagogy and Philosophy at the School of Education, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

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Children’s development,capability approaches and postdevelopmental child: The birth to four curriculum in South Africa

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The new South African curriculum 0–4 as context

Development as ‘becoming-adult view of child’

The origin of the psycho-social orientation to development

Development as racial differentiation

Childhoods in African societies

Development, children’s rights and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child

Children’s development and the capability approaches

Capabilities and functionings, not rights

Nussbaum and child as ‘intellectually disabled’

The sociology of childhoods, the ‘being-child view of child’ and the ‘belonging view of child’

‘Recycling’ individualised agency

Postdevelopmental child and sympoiesis

A proposal for a 4th theme in the National Curriculum Framework

Footnotes

Appendix

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References