From anger to dreaming to real utopias: Re-thinking,re-conceptualising and re-forming (early childhood) education in the conditions of the times

Abstract

Starting and finishing with the words of Sally Lubeck, one of the founders of RECE, this article locates early childhood education, all education, in conditions of polycrisis, conditions that are extremely dangerous but offer a glimmer of hope by making transformative change more possible. The article argues that such change calls for re-thinking, re-conceptualising and re-forming (early childhood) education; and, with a focus on the systemic crisis of neoliberalism, explores what this might mean, starting from a re-politicisation of early childhood education, all education, leading to political questions and political choices.

Anger and the polycrisis

‘To reconceptualize is to be angry and to dream’, wrote Sally Lubeck. We agree. In this article we argue the need to dream about a transformed early childhood education, which is also to dream about the transformation of all education. But, transformation should not stop with dreaming. We need to go one step further, from dreaming to actuating our dreams – from re-thinking and re-conceptualising to re-forming, from utopias to real utopias.

First, though, the anger that drives the desire for transformative change. Loris Malaguzzi called for pedagogy to be ‘dynamic, not mummified’; it must be ‘remade, reconstructed and updated based on the new conditions of the times’ (Malaguzzi, cited in Cagliari et al., 2016: 143). What are the ‘new conditions of the times’?

First and foremost, conditions of crisis. Of course, it can be said that the conditions of the times are ever thus; there are always crises. That is true. But today we are in exceptional times: humankind is confronted by a combination of crises of unparalleled magnitude, complexity and danger, making for what Tooze (2022) calls ‘the world of the polycrisis’, in which ‘the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts’. A polycrisis that is overwhelming, and also potentially lethal since the ‘qualitatively new situation we have brought upon ourselves as a species, [is] the potential to self destruct’ (Aldrich, 2010: 2). In January 2024, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists decided to keep the hands on its Doomsday Clock for the second year running at the closest it has ever been to midnight, 90 seconds, ‘reflecting the continued state of unprecedented danger the world faces’.

What are the crises that create today’s polycrisis, this overarching condition of our times? The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists points to

the Russia-Ukraine war and deterioration of nuclear arms reduction agreements; the Climate Crisis and 2023’s official designation as the hottest year on record; the increased sophistication of genetic engineering technologies; and the dramatic advance of generative AI which could magnify disinformation and corrupt the global information environment making it harder to solve the larger existential challenges (Starkey, 2024).

To which we might add a host of other, inter-connected environmental crises (e.g. loss of biodiversity, depletion of essential resources and pollution of earth, sea and sky, the severe consequences of which we see around us every day); the risk of new pandemics; and what has been referred to as the ‘crisis of care’, described by Fraser (2016) as ‘the pressures from several directions that are currently squeezing a key set of social capacities: the capacities available for birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family members, maintaining households and broader communities, and sustaining connections more generally’.

Faced by this ‘polycrisis’, anger flares because (in the words of the ‘invitation to contributors’ of this special issue) of ‘the apparent inability of the educational establishment to address the perfect storm of existential crises humanity has inflicted on itself’. This inability, not just ‘apparent’ but actual in our view, is bound up with a further crisis, the ‘systemic crisis of neoliberalism’ (O’Connor, 2024: 90), the politico-economic order that has striven for global hegemony since the 1980s.

This order, variously described as a thought collective, a political movement and the dominant ideology of our times, has had profound effects on our economies and means of wealth accumulation (Krein, 2023). But its impact has been far wider. Neoliberalism has sought to economise and commodify every aspect of life, converting non-economic domains, activities and subjects, across all spheres of life, into economic ones (Brown, 2016). Economisation and commodification are enacted through marketisation; neoliberalism has been described as ‘a set of beliefs and policy recommendations that emphasize the use of market mechanisms to solve most of society’s problems and needs . . . [it is] the marketization of almost everything’ (Edwards, 2023: 14). Through marketisation and its values of competition, individual choice and constant calculation, neoliberalism has created a new subject – the market actor, the flexible worker, the autonomous and self-reliant homo economicus. The result overall has been, in the assessment of Ball (2020), that neoliberalism ‘now configures great swathes of our daily lives and structures our experience of the world – how we understand the way the world works, how we understand ourselves and others, and how we relate to ourselves and others . . . We are produced by it’ (p. xv).

The crisis of neoliberalism is twofold. First, neoliberalism has left in its wake a trail of destruction, inflicting ‘devastating harms on both human society and the living planet, harms from which we’re at risk of never recovering’ (Monbiot and Hutchison, 2024: 5), and which have ‘taken us to the brink of ecological, social and financial collapse’ (Raworth, 2017: 70). Rising inequality is a global phenomenon. Insecurity, precarity and instability are pervasive, as social protections have weakened leaving people exposed to the vagaries of spreading marketisation. Rising anger, alienation and distrust have found expression in a surge of populist and nativist politics. Democracy, solidarity and cooperation have been undermined, welfare states weakened, and the public domain diminished; while primacy has been given to the technical and managerial at the expense of the political and ethical. Last but not least, the environmental crisis has been deepened through neoliberalism’s rapacious search for profit and unrestrained incitement to consume.

Second, the crisis is intensified by neoliberalism’s decline as a dominant ideology and political order. It has lost its credibility and legitimacy: ‘it has failed in its own terms and is no longer viable’ (Krein, 2023). It has become increasingly clear, writes economist Raworth (2017), ‘that the neoliberal economic plot has whipped us into a perfect storm of extreme inequality, climate change and financial crash’ (p. 63). To which we could add the COVID pandemic, which intensified a ‘conviction that government was the only institution with the wherewithal to address severe economic and social hardship’ (Gerstle, 2023: 279–280): COVID put final pay to the idea that markets can resolve most social problems (Hipkin, 2020). Beckert (2020: 322) delivers the verdict succinctly: ‘[n]eoliberalism’s promises did not survive the test of the real world. Today, they are largely exhausted’.

The problem is not the decline and fall of the neoliberal order, but the absence of a clear and better successor. Such a succession is neither imminent nor certain. Neoliberalism is not finished with yet; in his book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Gerstle (2023) concludes that ‘the neoliberal order itself is broken’, but warns that ‘[a]s with all fallen political orders, there will be structures – ideological and institutional – that survive and prolong the life of neoliberalism in some form’ (pp. 295, 297). Moreover, as Beckert (2020) warns, though the neoliberal era may be passing, ‘there are currently no politically strong narratives that would point to alternatives to the neoliberal logic of competition, markets and coercion in ways that are firmly guided by the principles of social justice and a democratic polity’ (pp. 322, 327). We find ourselves, therefore, in a disturbing situation described by Gramsci (1971: 276), at another time of profound crises nearly a century ago: ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.

We need to understand, though not excuse, the role that neoliberalism has played in the educational establishment’s failure to address the polycrisis, to make education relevant to the ‘new conditions of the times’. For the ‘educational establishment’ has been captured by this ideology and its accompanying narrative, and in particular by what Sahlberg (2012a, 2012b) has termed the Global Education Reform movement – GERM for short. GERM, the educational wing of the neoliberal movement, emerged in the 1980s to be increasingly ‘adopted as an educational reform orthodoxy within many education systems throughout the world’. GERM, Sahlberg argues, has five main symptoms: emphasis on a few core subjects, with a consequent narrowing of education; standardisation, with the setting of performance standards for pupils, schools and countries; test-based accountability, to measure performance; market logic, imbued with competition and individualisation; and corporate and business management models introduced to all sectors of education.

Consequently, early childhood education, indeed all education, has been dominated for a generation or more by a neoliberal narrative that is instrumental, managerial and economistic, reducing its purposes to the production of human capital and the management of social problems, with an emphasis on the identification and application of effective ‘human technologies’. Such framing of education has been not only narrow, reductive and naïve – but quite unsuited to addressing ‘the perfect storm of existential crises humanity has inflicted on itself’. Even the shock waves caused by Covid have failed, so far, to have much effect on this extreme economisation and technologising of education. Collet-Sabé and Ball (2023: 896) conclude that post-pandemic ‘[t]he economic relations and “benefits” of schooling are reasserted. Education has been relaunched as before with little thought as to how it currently contributes to our extinction or how it might possibly contribute to our continuation.’

From anger to dreaming

Education’s post-pandemic stasis is salutary: in the face of a declining but still powerful neoliberalism, with an educational establishment still in thrall, the polycrisis is no guarantee of transformative change. But it does make change more possible. For as the economist Friedman (1962/1982) observed, ‘only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change’. When that crisis occurs, he went on, ‘the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around’; it is imperative, therefore, ‘to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable’ (p. ix).

The polycrisis, far more than just a crisis, is incredibly dangerous, but does present an opportunity for real change, for it not only enables but necessitates dreaming: dreaming as re-thinking that contests the dominant narratives of the failing neoliberal order and confronts the manifold crises facing humankind; and dreaming as re-conceptualising, the creation based on re-thinking of new narratives that differ from the ones previously held. And from re-thinking and re-conceptualising comes a great need, a great desire for change for ‘[a]s soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult and quite possible’ (Foucault, 1988: 155). Dreaming, therefore, provides ‘the ideas lying around’ from which new narratives can be forged, new narratives to be kept ‘alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable’.

Dreaming is vital, new ideas and narratives are essential: but they are not enough. They must be worked into proposals for action, those ‘alternatives to existing policies’ that turn dreams from utopias into what the American sociologist Wright (2007) called ‘real utopias’. These are proposals for what could be that are not only desirable, but also viable and achievable.

Desirability is about laying out principles and goals, ‘the emphasis being on the enunciation of abstract principles rather than actual institutional designs’ (Wright, 2007: 27). Viability is about designing new policies and institutions based on such desirable principles, ‘a response to the perpetual objection to radical egalitarian proposals “it sounds good on paper, but it will never work”’; examples of viability include ‘systematic theoretical models of how particular social structures and institutions would work, and empirical studies of cases, both historical and contemporary, where at least some aspects of the proposal have been tried’ (Wright, 2007). Achievability is about strategies for transformation: ‘It asks of proposals for social change that have passed the test of desirability and viability, what it would take to actually implement them’ (Wright, 2007: 27).

Wright (2006) argues that these three criteria are ‘nested in a kind of hierarchy: Not all desirable alternatives are viable, and not all viable alternatives are achievable’ (p. 96). The aim, and hope, is to find positive answers to three questions: what do we want? Is it possible? How do we achieve it?

Milton Friedman, one of the godfathers of neoliberalism, wrote the words with which we started this section in the 1960s when it was a marginalised creed. Yet Friedman (and others) followed his own advice, and were ready to take advantage when the preceding dominant political order – Keynesian social democracy – declined in the 1970s. They could be called dreamers, but dreamers who put in a lot of hard work not only re-thinking and re-conceptualising the political and economic order, but how that re-conceptualised order might be implemented: re-thinking, re-conceptualising and re-forming work that addressed desirability, viability and achievability. We can learn from their example.

A final reflection on moving from dreaming to doing, from re-thinking through re-conceptualising to re-forming. The dreaming and the doing needs to be commensurate to the scale, complexity and entanglement of the many crises that form the polycrisis. Re-thinking and re-conceptualising early childhood education, all education, cannot be done in isolation; it must be done in dialogue with other education sectors, and the education field needs to be in dialogue with many other fields, for example those working on issues of environmental, social and economic sustainability and democratic renewal. Reconceptualists of the world unite!

What do we need to re-think, re-conceptualise and re-form?

Now, if ever, is the time for dreamers – and re-formers, working to address the perfect storm of existential crises humanity has inflicted on itself. We want in this section to put forward an agenda for re-thinking, re-conceptualising and re-forming early childhood education, all education, in conditions of polycrisis, an agenda we acknowledge to be partial, provisional and sketchily drawn, with its focus on the crisis of neoliberalism, very much a starting point to be built on. We might call the project from dreaming to real utopias – fuelled by anger!

We also acknowledge that in doing so we are not starting from scratch. So much work has already been done, not least by RECE, but also in other parts of the movement that has resisted the dominant neoliberal narrative over recent decades, whether in teaching, research, publications or networking. This work has been marginalised or simply ignored by an educational establishment seduced by the neoliberal narrative. But with the gathering crises, and the discrediting of the neoliberal narrative, its time has come.

First up on the agenda is to re-politicise early childhood education, all education, reversing the de-politicisation that is neoliberalism’s signature feature: as Davies (2017) observes, neoliberalism is ‘a devotedly anti-political project . . . I define neoliberalism as the “disenchantment of politics by economics”’. Under neo-liberalism the ends are assumed (‘there is no alternative’); only the means (‘what works?’) contested. To re-politicise early childhood education, all education, means making politics first practice, starting with the ends and other fundamentals, creating a politics of early childhood education, a re-enchantment with politics involving political questions with alternative (and often conflicting) answers, and therefore political choices to be made. Technical practice, the means, has a place – but it comes after, rather than replacing, politics.

The restoration of politics to early childhood education, all education, needs to be a democratic politics of early childhood education, part of a wider and pervasive democratic culture that

values equality and cooperation, sustainability and complexity, diversity and uncertainty, participation and collective choice; it judges success in terms of creativity and new thought, individual benefit and public good; and it strives to produce a subject who combines homo politicus with homo carens, a political being who lives with relationships of care (Sousa and Moss, 2023: 7).

Through the recognition that education is not neutral, democratic culture becomes a way to subvert the stifling conformity in educational processes, politics and pedagogies, the consequence of GERM. It enables a shift from discourses of domination and subjugation to the adoption of discourses of difference and languages of possibility, reclaiming suppressed voices. Democratic culture can be achieved through collegiality, critical thinking and creative power, through dialogic action and active participation in the transformation of individual and common worlds. Its development means recognising and letting go of/resisting the manipulation of the present systems of conformity. It means finding in collegiality a way to liberate one another from instrumental objectives, which instead of addressing, contribute to exacerbating the polycrisis.

But finding, enacting and maintaining practices that deconstruct and reclaim new ways of knowing and that challenge the conditions through which education is experienced and lived is not easy and requires some level of perceived ‘radicalism’, which ‘offers educators a critical approach to pedagogy forged in the discourse of difference and voice’ (Giroux, 2005: 144). Radical educators, critical thinkers, dreamers, understand boundaries that are made and remade by each successive generation and defend a politics and a praxis (Freire, 1970) of (early childhood) education that is critical, democratic, participative, non-hierarchical, that listens to the voices of children, educators and communities, that is focused in cooperative learning, and that demolishes patterns of domination and submission (Hill, 2014).

Anzaldúa (1987) used the discourse of difference in opposition to hegemonic codes of culture, subjectivity and history to advocate for temporal, spatial, spiritual and intellectual opportunities for change and activism. In this resistance to overcome ‘traditions of silence’, democratic culture can be further defined as a praxis that requires informed committed action, where boundaries between different fields become more permeable and begin to dissolve: ‘education is thus constantly remade in the praxis’ (Freire, 1970: 65). Not simply in terms of joining action with reflection but in committing to types of pedagogical transformation that are forged in critical engagement and possibilities. Possibilities which to move from utopias to real-utopias need to acknowledge that praxis can be risky, demands careful realistic analysis to respect human wellbeing and common good, is structured within the principles of justice and equity, and not only involves politics as first practice, but also the practical applications of democratic culture. With its transformational character, praxis in a democratic culture provides a context for actualising educational and social projects where questions of pedagogy and politics can meet. It can establish the conditions to problematise the logic of educational and social institutions and the political choices which enable or hinder emancipatory action.

We turn now to consider some of the political questions that might be asked in the process of re-thinking, re-conceptualising and re-forming early childhood education under conditions of the polycrisis.

What are the purposes of (early childhood) education?

As already noted, under neoliberalism and GERM, education has increasingly assumed an economic purpose, increasing economic competitiveness by accumulating docile, flexible human capital; it has become ‘education-in-its narrowest-sense’. A post-neoliberal world provides opportunities to re-think the purposes of education, and indeed its meaning, in richer and emancipatory terms, recovering and building on concepts concerned with the holistic growth of the individual and self-formation, such as ‘education-in-its-broadest sense’ and bildung. This long-established German term conveys a conception of a human being as an entity that builds or creates herself or himself and in a way that is not pre-ordained, a process of self-development or self-formation, ‘an active undertaking, which implies an increase in the individual’s possibilities for freedom’ (Dahlberg, 2013: 83). Bildung is concerned with all aspects of the individual: ‘humans are viewed as bio-psycho-social-spiritual organisms . . . [and] the bio-psycho-social-spiritual process [lies] at the heart of Bildung’ (Rowson, 2019: 6, 12). Bildung, with its emancipatory ambitions, has much in common with an education that Collet-Sabé and Ball (2024: 11) describe as ‘refusing what we are in terms of individualised, state-shaped and consumer subjects, and instead “promot[ing] new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries” (Foucault, 1983: 220)’.

Bildung is not an exercise in individualism, but concerned with how people participate in society: it is ‘the way that the individual matures and takes upon him or herself ever bigger personal responsibility towards family, friends, fellow citizens, society, humanity, our globe, and the global heritage of our species, while enjoying ever bigger personal, moral and existential freedoms’ (Andersen and Bjorkman, 2017). Bildung, therefore, understands education’s end as always being ethical, to enable the self to be seen as not just an end-in-itself, to be not for itself solely but for others. As such, the purposes of education can be about contributing (as already argued) to creating and maintaining a democratic culture, as well as to a more caring society, discussed further below, and to the vital goals of sustainability – environmental, social and economic.

But there are other equally rich concepts that provide a theoretical and practical framing to think about the purposes and meaning of education in a democratic culture, and that align with or complement Bildung. For instance, the South African cultural concept of Ubuntu (humanness), refers to a collective identity

where the individual is not separate from, but rather, embedded in, the community into which one is born. This theoretical position – Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (A person is a person through his or her relationship to others: isiXhosa proverb) serves as a thoughtful starting point . . . to conceptualise anew a critical democratic citizenship education informed by cultural values and cultural hybridity (Kubow, 2018: 349).

In Kubow’s work, ubuntu aligns with our vision of democratic culture, intersecting compassion, collectivism and communalism as part of a constant process of becoming. Kubow uses Desmond Tutu’s words to explain ubuntu as a way to nurture democratic behaviour through social belonging and connection:

It is not, ‘I think therefore I am’. It says rather: ‘I am human because I belong. I participate, I share’. A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed is treated as if they were less than who they are (cited in Kubow, 2018: 353).

Ideas such as these seem antithetical to the individualised competitive neoliberal project, and traverse Paulo Freire’s contention of human unfinishedness and Gloria Anzaldúa’s premise that ‘to be human is to be in a relationship; to be human is to relate to other people, to be interdependent with other people’ (Evans, 2000: 195).

This leads us to two other non-western constructs that can contribute to rethinking, reconceptualising and reforming the purposes and meaning of education. Freire’s concept of Conscientização (conscientisation) is the process of developing critical awareness through reflection and action. Uncovering real problems entails an awareness of our own taken-for-granted assumptions and the dominant discourses which can inform them. This awareness is developed through critical reflection which, paired with action, becomes fundamental as the process of changing reality. In a democratic culture of education, this means critically and creatively finding ways to challenge control and cultivate forms of participation in the political and pedagogical life of educational institutions.

Anzaldúa (1987) notes that developing consciousness is instrumental to bringing about any kind of change:

At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once, and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react (pp. 100–101).

The second non-western construct is Conocimiento (knowledge), a theory of how reality and identity are constructed in space and time involving processes of self-awareness and self-reflection as forms of spiritual activism (Hernández-Ávila and Anzaldúa, 2000). In the context of a democratic culture of education, and being a theory of consciousness that encompasses all dimensions of life, Conocimiento can serve as a consciousness-raising tool to support an understanding of how realities can be constructed and manipulated by those in power; and once that awareness is developed, to enact visions of change and to engage in dialogue with different fields of knowledge (Anzaldúa, 2002).

Constructs such as Bildung, Ubuntu, Conscientização and Conocimiento can support us in developing alternative understandings of education and what it is for, understandings that remind us that the purpose of education need not be preparation for a predetermined future but emancipation for creating a good life and participating in a good society.

What is your image . . .?

The bedrock of re-forming education, and a vitally important task for dreaming, is to re-think and re-conceptualise our images, our social constructions, of the child, the parent, the educator and the educational institution, contesting neoliberalism’s narrow, simplified and economised images with alternatives that are broader and richer. Here we focus on one of these images: the educational institution, the pre(school).

The neoliberal image of these institutions is a business selling a commodity of ‘childcare’ to parent-consumers in a competitive market place; and as a factory or processing plant using effective human technologies to produce predefined, standardised and calculable education outcomes. An alternative is the (pre)school as a public good, a public resource and a public space, in an open relationship with its local community and all citizens living there, and capable of serving a diverse range of projects. Loris Malaguzzi, for example, saw the municipal schools for young children in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia not only as places for education, but as ‘living centres of open and democratic culture’, as ‘creating culture’ in the wider community, and as ‘participating in building an educating society’ (Malaguzzi, cited in Cagliari et al., 2016: 180, 227).

For Keri Facer, the (pre)school can be seen as a public resource whose projects may help reverse the worse effects of neoliberalism on wider society.

[The school] as a physical space and a local organization . . . may be one of the most important institutions we have to help us build a democratic conversation about the future. 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 (Facer, 2011: 28).

Facer (2019) has further argued that schools have ‘a critical role to play in mitigation of and adaptation to climate change’ (p. 207). Taken overall, therefore, (pre)schools can be agents for building environmental and social sustainability.

Others, however, have a very different image of the (pre)school, viewing it as an intolerable and irredeemable institution. This critique has been put forward in a series of articles by Stephen Ball and Jordi Collet-Sabé, driven by the urgency of the climate crisis. The modern school, they argue, is ‘a technology for population management’ (Collet-Sabé and Ball, 2024: 4), that produces subjects who view ‘their’ world as ‘one of growth and progress, and see happiness as founded on material acquisition, mobility, consumption and waste . . . quintessentially “modern” subjects, neoliberal, self-interested subjects.’ The (pre)school, they continue, is ‘a factory of learning, a modernist institution of government, set within the ontology of environmental exploitation . . . [It] is a block, an obstacle, an inhibition to freedom, to “learning”, to the move to a different sort of sustainable society. We take the school to be . . . irreparable’ (Collet-Sabé and Ball, 2023: 897).

For them, there is an ‘urgent need to think education without the school, to dispense with the institutional form and its baggage and to start somewhere else’ (Collet-Sabé and Ball, 2023). In place of school, which is not, they rightly remind us, synonymous with education, Collet-Sabé and Ball (2024) look to

open and ‘unplanned’ commoning activities [taking] place within the social infrastructures of cities, towns, villages, and rural areas in locations like libraries; museums; health centres; religious places; parks, gardens, and forests; bakeries; civic associations; cooperatives; third spaces; squares; sports centres; artistic, music, drama centres; etc. (p. 8).

We acknowledge the risks posed by educational institutions. Institutional reification of any kind can become problematic ‘as do the patterns of thought that support this lack of institutional change’ (Apple, 2013: 48); and schools historically have not been known for their capacity to critically reflect upon their purposes and social and cultural responsibilities. Yet despite the cogency of this critique, we hold on to a more hopeful image. Critiques of institutionalised forms of education have existed for a long time, not least from proponents of democratic education, such as Dewey, Freinet and Malaguzzi. However, these educationalists did not reject the (pre)school, but thought it could be reclaimed for democratic culture. For example, the school envisioned by Freinet, in his modern school movement, was a place of social and communitarian activity and not restrained by narrow ideas of education or pedagogy. Our hopeful image of the (pre)school sees it as part of the ‘social infrastructures’, working not only with other (pre)schools but with all other constituents.

What pedagogy?

Neoliberalism, with its concern for predetermined and standardiszed outcomes efficiently delivered and assessed through testing regimes, has favoured what Orr (1996) calls ‘a culture of fast knowledge’ and what Loris Malaguzzi (cited in Cagliari et al., 2016: 421–422) termed ‘prophetic pedagogy’. This is a pedagogy that ‘knows everything that will happen . . . [and] has no uncertainty’, a pedagogy in which the unexpected, wonder and surprise have no place and that stifles the ‘hundred languages of childhood’; it is, Malaguzzi contends, a pedagogy that humiliates teachers and children alike. In post-neoliberal times, seeking thoughtful responses to the existential crises we face, we need to turn towards ‘slow knowledge’. And with a different approach to knowledge comes a different approach to pedagogy, favouring reflection, responsibility, imagination, creativity, experimentation and the unexpected – slow pedagogies to build slow knowledge.

One example is Reggio Emilia’s ‘pedagogy of relationships and listening’, based on the idea of knowledge as ‘a process of construction by the individual in relation with others, a true act of co-construction’ (Rinaldi, 2021). This is a pedagogy comfortable with uncertainty and foregoing predetermined outcomes, that seeks the unpredicted and the new, and that values wonder and surprise. A more recent proposal comes from Clark (2022: 49), who contrasts a view of knowledge as ‘concerned with facts, universal, easily packaged and delivered and measured’ with an alternative view of knowledge in which ‘complexity and interconnectedness are valued, where there is time for the unexpected and local knowledge is respected’. She offers a complementary concept of slow pedagogy which:

• is about ‘being with’ – attentive to the rhythm of the children, and adults and materials

• can involve rapid, intense moments as well as a slowing down of pace

• makes time for listening and collaboration

• celebrates the group as well as the individual

• values play and the present moment

• can take the long way, cultivating over time

• values the difficult to measure

• seeks to enable deep discovery and relationships.

The implication here is that pedagogy, like education, is not neutral but political. It enacts values and practices that align with political choices about education. As Rinaldi (2006) puts it, ‘pedagogy implies choices, and choosing . . . [it] means having the courage of our doubts, of our uncertainties, it means participating in something for which we take responsibility’ (p. 8).

Enacting such democratic pedagogies, if that is our choice, can be challenging and for it to become a real utopia, theoretical discourse (what is said) needs to be aligned with pedagogical action (what is done) (Freire, 1970). Or as Giroux (2005) comments, ‘it’s conceivable to be theoretically correct and pedagogically wrong’ (p. 131) by regurgitating forms of knowledge and values that recognise difference, but then failing to take them within pedagogical actions and beyond. Considering that dominant discourses are often against democratic forms of education, alternative pedagogies that value difference tend to be marginalised.

Choosing ‘what pedagogy’ means going beyond the mapping of how ideologies are inscribed in the various activities that are institutionally encouraged or restrained. It entails an attention to the lived experiences of children, educators and communities – a praxis – that is prepared to continuously and progressively rethink, reconceptualise and reform curriculum, forms of school organisation and educator-child-family-community relations. In other words, critical forms of pedagogy in democratic cultures demand fundamental considerations from critical educators to create shifts in consciousness and opportunities for change by listening to the voices, dreams, desires and subjectivities of those inhabiting educational spaces.

What place for care in (early childhood) education?

Under neoliberalism, ‘care’ for young children has been instrumentalised, targeted and renamed ‘childcare’, reduced to a commodity needed by certain parents to enable them to participate in employment and delivered in socially segregated ‘childcare’ provision. Especially in the countries of the Anglosphere, this ‘childcare’ provision has increasingly attracted the attention of profit-making businesses with financial backers who treat early childhood institutions as just another class of asset. While ‘education’ has been added to the remit of such provision, ‘childcare’ remains the main rationale and offer. The result has been a narrow and reductive understanding of ‘care’ (i.e. keeping some children safe and secure to enable some parents to work) accompanied by a narrow and reductive policy preoccupation with ‘childcare’, dominating the language of politicians, policy-makers and parents, with ‘education’ appearing, if at all, as an afterthought. To complete the picture, the ‘childcare’ workforce is often under-qualified (compared to school teachers) and usually poorly paid.

We reject this way of thinking about care, and of its relationship to education, as something parallel and separate as in ‘early childhood education and care’. We re-conceptualise ‘care’ as an ethical relationship, a political choice in response to the political question ‘what ethics for (early childhood) education?’. This ‘ethics of care’, the subject of much feminist scholarship, involves both particular acts of caring and a general habit of mind that should inform all aspects of life and which includes attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness (Fisher and Tronto, 1990; Tronto, 1993). Education as a relational practice concerned with the whole child and her well-being should, in our thinking, be inscribed with this ethics of care – for by this reckoning, education without care is inconceivable and care is important for all children (and all adults). Indeed, an ethics of care applies not just to care of others, but to care of the self and care of the environment – so relating to the purposes of education, with education having the potential to foster such a wide-ranging ethics of care, one important way of building a sustainable society.

Developing these connections between care and other purposes of education, Tronto (2013) has argued for the centrality of care and caring to a democratic culture, calling for a ‘caring democracy’ in which ‘caring practices can be carried out in a democratic way’ and ‘caring [can] become a central value for democracies’ (p. 29). These concepts, inscribed as they are with ideas of inter-dependency and mutuality, directly challenge the autonomous and self-reliant image of the neo-liberal subject, as well as the continuing assumption that unpaid and paid caring work (including the teaching of younger children) is primarily women’s work. Such thinking, too, further relates to the purposes of education and the future of the school, defining both as contributing to building a more caring democracy and society.

Re-conceptualising ‘care’ and its relationship to ‘education’ in this way shapes the re-forming of education in general, and the early childhood sector in particular. There is no longer any need for separate ‘childcare’ services, though education services should recognise the needs of employed parents through, for example, their opening hours. By ditching the idea and provision of separate ‘childcare’ services, we can ditch too the commodification of care, and its consequent offer for sale on the market: no more ‘childcare’ as a private commodity and benefit for some, but instead an ethics of care for all children (and adults) in all educational institutions operating as public spaces and public goods. Farewell to ‘childcare’ services also means farewell to the split between ‘childcare’ services and ‘school-based or kindergarten’ services, still found in most early childhood systems; to be replaced with a fully integrated and public system of early childhood education, inscribed with an ethics of care – not an easy process, but necessary and achievable (Moss and Mitchell, 2024).

Last words

We end as we began with the words of Sally Lubeck: ‘[to] talk about the good life we must talk about the good society, and to talk about the good society, we must talk about the kind of education that will bring that society about and maintain it’. The good life and the good society pose supremely political questions. Some may feel that the polycrisis is so advanced and so terminal that these questions are redundant; humankind has, quite simply, left it too late. We understand, but demur. We must take the window of opportunity furnished by neoliberalism’s failure and the mounting crises to assert there are alternatives, to explore what those might be and to talk about the kind of education that will help bring transformation about. Re-think, re-conceptualise, re-form – these should be our watch words.