Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education

A story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality

Peter Moss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317700869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Early childhood education and care is a major policy issue for national governments and international organisations. This book contests two stories, both infused by neoliberal thinking, that dominate early childhood policy making today - 'the story of quality and high returns' and 'the story of markets', stories that promise high returns on investment if only the right technologies are applied to children and the perfection of a system based on competition and individual choice.

But there are alternative stories and this book tells one: a 'story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality' in which early childhood centres are public spaces and public resources, places where democracy and experimentation are fundamental values, community workshops for realising the potentiality of citizens. This story calls for transformative change but offers a real utopia, both viable and achievable. The book discusses some of the conditions needed for the story's enactment and shows what it means in practice in a chapter about project work contributed by a Swedish preschool teacher.

Critical but hopeful, this book is an important contribution to resisting the dictatorship of no alternative and renewing a democratic politics of early childhood education. It is essential reading for students and teachers, researchers and other academics, and for all other concerned citizens.

Chapter 1

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Telling stories, transformative change and real utopias

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We believe that the roots of [the converging crises of our times] lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves… We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.

(Dark Mountain Project, 2009a)

The Dark Mountain Project is a network of writers, artists and thinkers ‘who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself… [as the world enters] an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unraveling’. These once potent but now unbelievable stories, they contend:

tell us that humanity is separate from all other life and destined to control it; that the ecological and economic crises we face are mere technical glitches; that anything which cannot be measured cannot matter. But these stories are losing their power. We see them falling apart before our eyes.

(Dark Mountain Project, 2009b)

Like the Dark Mountain Project, I believe the stories we tell ourselves are important. It is through stories – with their images and assumptions, their hopes and fears – that ‘we weave reality’, giving meaning to the world, making sense of our experiences. Stories are highly productive in other ways, too. Not only do they shape what we think of as problems, but also how we respond to these problems, including the policies, the provisions, the practices we adopt and work with; ‘they determine our direction and destination’.

This book appears in a series that recognises the importance of storytelling for an approach to early childhood education that adopts a critical stance and values plurality; Contesting Early Childhood ‘questions the current dominant discourses in early childhood, and offers alternative narratives of an area that is now made up of a multitude of perspectives and debates’. In such a spirit, this book is about the stories – both dominant and alternative – that we do tell or that we could tell about ‘early childhood education’, by which I mean those formal services whose stated intention is care and/or learning for children under compulsory school age, both under and over 3 years of age. These services, in the English-speaking world, go under many different names – nurseries, crèches, kindergartens, long-day care centres, nursery schools and classes, children’s centres, playgroups, preschools, and more besides – and in other languages have many, many other names. Early childhood education so defined encompasses much variation, not only in names used but also in how services define themselves and their purposes. It includes services that adopt a narrowly educational remit and those described, equally narrowly, as ‘childcare services’, as well as those that openly acknowledge combining education and care or, indeed, consider education and care to be inseparable.

I also recognise that these services have the potentiality for doing much more besides education and care. They are capable of many other projects and purposes, an important point to which I will return. So in choosing the term ‘early childhood education’, I realise its meaning is contestable; and that later on in this book I must examine further my own understanding of ‘education’, an understanding that embraces a holistic and inclusive concept – ‘educationin-its-broadest sense’.

But the book is not just about early childhood education. For early childhood education cannot, any more than any other sector of education, be abstracted and isolated from the world: it is a child of its times and was ever so. Stories about early childhood education are necessarily framed and shaped by other and more epic stories, meta-narratives about the political economy, the social condition, the environment – in short, stories about the state we are in. Like the Dark Mountain Project, I believe the world has entered into ‘an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unraveling’: a story about early childhood education that has nothing to say about this, a story that takes more of the same for granted, a story that blithely speaks of investing in the future or preparing children to succeed in the global race without interrogating what that future might be or the sustainability of that global race, that story just will not do. Like the Dark Mountain Project, also, I reject stories, whether about the environment or early childhood education, that are about control, calculation and technical practice; they are ‘losing their power’ and ‘falling apart before our eyes’. And like the Dark Mountain Project, I believe ‘[n]ew stories are needed for darker, more uncertain times’.

This book is a contribution to telling new stories about early childhood education, those alternative narratives that this series celebrates. But though the times are dark and uncertain, and the new stories need be under no illusions, neither need they be stories of unmitigated doom and gloom. They can offer hope that another world is possible, a world that is more equal, democratic and sustainable, a world where surprise and wonder, diversity and complexity find their rightful place in early childhood education, indeed all education. They can offer faith in people, of all ages, and their potentialities. They can offer us cause to believe in the world again.

From the start I must admit a certain ambivalence towards my subject. I am a long-term enthusiast for early childhood education, who finds that today it has gained a high profile among the movers and shakers of contemporary life. It is, seemingly, the favourite, must-have policy of every think tank, every national government and every international organisation! Yet rather than feeling unalloyed pleasure at this turn of events, I am left with a feeling of deep unease. Like all education, early childhood education should and can be an important public service and public resource for children and their families, for communities and for wider society; it has great potential for emancipation, for bringing something new to life, for fostering important values such as equality, democracy and sustainability. But the spirit of Michel Foucault (1926–1984) whispers in my ears, ‘everything is dangerous’ (1983, p. 232). So I recognise that early childhood education, like all education, has another potential: for governing children and adults alike, for reproducing the already known, for inculcating belief in necessity and essentialism, and for fostering the values of and the subjectivity required by a rapacious, technocratic and harmful economic regime.

Early childhood education, like all education, is at issue. It is not self-evidently a good thing, but an institution and practice to be critiqued and contested. Which leads back to stories, since that is one way in which the contest can take place: contrasting stories confronting each other, offering listeners conflicting alternatives.

I will start by telling a story about early childhood education that is today much heard around the world, what I will call ‘the story of quality and high returns’. It is a story of control and calculation, technology and measurement that, in a nutshell, goes like this. Find, invest in and apply the correct human technologies – aka ‘quality’ – during early childhood and you will get high returns on investment including improved education, employment and earnings and reduced social problems. A simple equation beckons and beguiles: ‘early intervention’ + ‘quality’ = increased ‘human capital’ + national success (or at least survival) in a cut-throat global economy. Invest early and invest smartly and we will all live happily ever after in a world of more of the same – only more so. Reassured by this story of early childhood education as a technical solution to some of our most immediate problems and anxieties, it is tempting to sign up to it rather than ask difficult questions about what sort of world we want or embark on the hard, messy and political task of clearing the deepening slough of inequality and injustice that breeds so many of the social problems that early childhood education is supposed to solve.

Familiar as it is, I find the story of quality and high returns both troubling and unsatisfying. It seems to have forgotten it is a story, one way of making sense of the world, one of many narratives that can be told. Instead, it projects itself as a factual documentary that gives a true account of how the world really is. It strives to become, to use a Foucauldian term, a ‘dominant discourse’, seeking to apply a decisive influence on a particular subject, in this case early childhood education. It does so by projecting and imposing a ‘regime of truth’ that exercises power over our thoughts and actions, directing or governing what we see as the ‘truth’ and how we construct the world: it makes ‘assumptions and values invisible, turn[s] subjective perspectives and understandings into apparently objective truths, and determine[s] that some things are self-evident and realistic while others are dubious and impractical’ (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005, p. 17). Such dominant discourses provide the mechanism for rendering reality amenable to certain kinds of actions (Miller and Rose, 1993) – and by so doing, they also exclude other ways of understanding and interpreting the world, marginalising other stories that could be told.

From local beginnings, emerging from a particular spatial and temporal context, to be precise from the English-speaking world in the 1980s, the story of quality and high returns has been borne far and wide by the economic zeitgeist, positivistic science¹ and the English language. It has crossed borders and gained international credibility in a process of 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’ (Santos, 2004, p. 149). A local story has gone viral, become an international best seller. Now all sorts of people, from politicians to practitioners, academics to media commentators, talk the same talk around the world, telling themselves and others the same story over and over and over again.

So this discourse, this story of quality and high returns, has abandoned its local roots, forgotten it is just another local tale, claiming instead to tell a universal truth as if its way of talking about things is natural, neutral and necessary. In so doing, the story drowns out other stories about early childhood education, alternative ways of making meaning of the world, rendering them unimaginable and unspeakable, limiting what it is possible to think. Whether in high profile research reviews, official reports or conference presentations, certain privileged voices are heard time and again re-iterating the story, while other voices telling other stories are heard not at all or only faintly. This much-told story has made some things familiar and others strange, whilst stifling critical thinking and questioning by its pretensions to being self-evident, proven and undeniable.

I am troubled, therefore, by the way this story, of quality and high returns, marginalises other story-telling about early childhood education, striving to impose DONA – a ‘dictatorship of no alternatives’ (Unger, 2005a, p. 1) – on early childhood education. (DONA is the first cousin of TINA – ‘there is no alternative’ – much beloved of Margaret Thatcher and other politicians when seeking to impose their views, rubbish those of others and head off democratic debate.) But I am troubled in other ways. The story seems to me incredible: which would not matter since magic realism has its place in story-telling, only the story tellers insist they tell objective truth, that they really do have the one right answer, and others act on this claim. Nor do I like the politics that pervades the story, expressed in the answers it assumes or espouses to the political questions that define education. Last but not least, I fear its consequences, arising from the will to control and govern children and adults alike that is inscribed in the story.

But I am not only troubled. I am left deeply unsatisfied by the story itself and the way it is told: by its lack of curiosity, imagination and originality; by its instrumental rationality and reductionist logic that eschews complexity and context; and by the banality and dullness of its language. Told repeatedly, the story of quality and high returns has drained education of its potential to amaze and surprise, to invoke wonder and passion, to emancipate and experiment, leaving instead a lifeless husk of facile repetition and clichéd vocabulary: ‘evidence-based’… ‘programmes’… ‘quality’…‘investment’… ‘outcomes’ … ‘returns’… ‘assessment scales’… ‘human capital’. This is a story told in the desiccated language of the managerial memo, the technical manual and the financial balance sheet. Not to put too fine a point on it, the story of quality and high returns dulls and deadens the spirit, reducing the potentially exciting and vibrant subject of early childhood education to ‘a one-dimensional linear reductive thinking that excludes and closes off all other ways of thinking and doing’ (Lenz Taguchi, 2010a, p. 17; original emphasis).

I go into this story, and my problems with it, in more detail in the next chapter. I also introduce there another story that is spreading in early childhood education, and that likewise troubles me deeply: the story of markets. This is a story about commodification, competition and (individual) choice, and (like the story of quality and high returns) the reduction of early childhood education to a set of economic relationships and quantitative variables. In Chapter 3, I put forward one reason why these two stories have such a powerful hold today, demonstrating how both stories relate to a much larger story about competition and choice, calculation and contracts: the meta-narrative of neoliberalism. It is this story, I will contend, that has provided a favourable context for the spread in early childhood education of the stories of quality and high returns and of markets, whilst cautioning against adopting too simplistic a view of neoliberalism and too reductive a notion of causation.

In Chapter 4 I will tell an other – not the other – story about early childhood education, what I call the story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality, an education built upon and inscribed with two fundamental values – democracy and experimentation – and a belief in the endless and unknowable potentialities of people and the institutions they create. This is a story that I like, that I find attractive and satisfying. It is a story that attaches the utmost importance to early childhood education, but for reasons quite different from the story of quality and high returns. Nor does it have any sympathy with the story of markets, and its fetish of commodification, competition and choice. My story contests these stories and resists DONA, insisting there are alternatives, with different rationales and rationalities – and that all should be heard and debated.

For just as my aim is not to undermine the case for early childhood education, neither is it to impose a new censorship, to replace one DONA with another. There are many stories to be told about early childhood education, and about education more generally, and others may certainly choose the story of quality and high returns, the story of markets, or any other story – if they find that story to their liking, if it makes meaning for them of the world and if they acknowledge and welcome the presence of other stories and have, at the very least, taken the trouble to listen to some of them. You may not agree with other stories: but you should be aware they exist and know what some of them say, and only then decide which story you like and wish to tell.

I not only tell the story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality in Chapter 4, but explore its origins. Where has this story come from? The origins are to be found in answers, my answers, to political questions, treating early childhood education (like all education) as first and foremost a political practice involving choices that need to be made between conflicting alternatives. Democracy and experimentation are part of the answer I offer to one of these questions: what are the fundamental values of education? Given the particularly important part they have in my story, Chapter 5 is devoted to considering these values in greater detail, as well as the relationship between them. While Chapter 6 gives an example of the story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality being enacted in practice in the Crow Project, an account of a year’s work in a Swedish prescho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Telling stories, transformative change and real utopias
• 2 Two early childhood education stories: quality and high returns and markets
• 3 The story of neoliberalism: a grand narrative of our time
• 4 Transformative change: the story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality
• 5 Democracy, experimentation and democratic experimentalism
• 6 The Crow Project: a local enactment of the story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality
• 7 What conditions to enact the story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality?
• 8 Real utopia – or pie in the sky?
• References
• Index