There are alternatives!

Contestation and hope in early childhood educat ion

Peter Moss1
Thomas Coram Research Unit
UCL Institute of Education
27-28 Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AA
peter.moss@ioe.ac.uk

1
Peter Moss is an Emeritus Professor of Early Childhood Provision at UCL Institute of Education,
University College London. His interests include early childhood education and care; the workforce in
childrens services; the relationship between care, gender and employment; social pedagogy; and
democracy in childrens services. He is currently finishing work on an edited volume of selected
writings and speeches by Loris Malaguzzi, the first director of the municipal schools in Reggio Emilia.

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Abstract

In a context of expanding early childhood education, this paper begins by adopting a critical
approach, exploring the technologies being applied to young children in a contemporary
society of control, taking the case of England, a country which has seen a marked change in
governments attitude towards early childhood education over the past 20 years, from
indifference to high priority. England also illustrates the relationship between changing state
attitudes to early childhood education and the growing influence of neoliberalism on politics
and economics. The second part of the paper changes tack, from a critique of a powerful
discourse of control to the disruptive potential of a discourse of hope. While recognising that
everything is dangerous, not least education and the institution of the school, and that the
dangers should never be downplayed, there are alternatives, for example a discourse of
education and the school that foregrounds democracy, emancipation and potentiality, a
discourse that many have sought to enact and continue to do so.

Keywords: early childhood education; control; England; democracy; Reggio Emilia

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The widening reach of education
The advent of mass public education in the 19th century greatly enhanced the capacity of
nation states to govern children, using the disciplinary power deployed through universal
schooling to achieve a variety of economic, political, social and cultural goals, impelled by
concerns and discontents generated by migration, urbanisation, imperial rivalry and
economic competition. Nor were schools the only means, with the spread of health and
social services, especially focused on the performance of mothering, providing further
means to govern children. These moves formed an important part of the increasing exercise
of biopower by the nation state, "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for
achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations" (Foucault, 1998, p.
140); techniques that Nikolas Rose has called human technologies, [t]echnologies of
government...imbued with aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing
certain desired effects and averting certain undesired events (Rose, 1999, p.52). In the
case of schooling, an assemblage of human technologies made the schoolroom a powerful
machine as early as the 19 th century.

This was an assemblage of pedagogic knowledges, moralizing aspirations, buildings

of a certain design, classrooms organised to produce certain kinds of visibility,
techniques such as the timetable for organizing bodies in space and in time, regimes
of supervision, little mental exercises in the classroom, playgrounds to allow the
observation and moralization of children in something more approaching their habitat
and much more, assembled and infused with the aim of the government of capacities
and habits (ibid., p.53).

The 20th century has seen the extension and intensification of compulsory and post-
compulsory education, with the time spent in school and the age of school-leaving
increasing. There has also been a spread of formal services for children below compulsory
school age, some under a broad heading of childcare, others education. As the distinction
between care and education for this age group has blurred, to the extent that a single,
integrated birth to primary school system has emerged in some countries, I will use the term
early childhood education to refer to this range of services.

This downward spread of education provision, encompassing the youngest age group of
children, has gathered momentum in the last part of the 20 th century, attracting the attention
and support of international organisations and nation states, political classes and policy
experts. Countries that have previously neglected early childhood education are now putting
money into developing services. Worldwide, between 1999 and 2010, the number of children

3
enrolled in preschool (for children from 3 years of age) rose by 46 per cent to a total of 164
million, albeit there continue to be large differences between attendance in affluent and
poorer countries (UNESCO, 2012, p.50).

This spread has, once again, been driven by growing concerns and discontents, including
governmental alarm at the persistence and increase of various social problems and at the
threat to national survival arising from intensified global competition. As a Minister
responsible for early childhood education in England put the matter in a speech: The 21 st
century will belong to those countries that win the global race for jobs and economic
advantage. In order for every adult to fulfil their potential, they need to be properly equipped
with essential skills from the very beginning of their lives (Truss, 2013). The government
policy paper that accompanied that speech, insists that [m]ore great childcare is vital to
ensuring we can compete in the global race (Department for Education (England), 2013,
p.6). What, in particular, has refocused governmental attention on early childhood education
is a belief, fed by the influence of relatively new disciplines and theories, in particular
neuroscience and human capital, that early intervention, in the very first years of life,
provides an effective and relatively cheap technical fix for both social and economic failings,
often expressed in terms of a high rate of return on social investment in this field (Moss,
2014a). The main condition for such profitability is that interventions apply the correct human
technologies, in a context where biopower is now increasingly deployed in ways that are
more continuous and without limit, a shift described by Gilles Deleuze (1992) as from
societies of discipline to societies of control.

This paper will explore and exemplify some of the technologies being applied to young
children in a contemporary society of control, taking the case of England, a country which
has seen a marked change in governments attitude towards early childhood education over
the past 20 years, from indifference to high priority. England also illustrates the relationship
between changing state attitudes to early childhood education and the growing influence of
neoliberalism on politics and economics, apparent globally since the 1980s, particularly in
the English-speaking world. Neoliberalism brings with it not only new rationales for state
support of early childhood education, but also a seemingly strange mix in how that support is
enacted, increasing both choice and control, a phenomenon I will seek to explain.

In the second part of the paper, I propose to change tack, from critique of a powerful
discourse of control to the disruptive potential of a discourse of hope. Everything is
dangerous, Foucault rightly observed, not least education and the institution of the school.
But while we should never downplay the dangers, I will argue that there are alternatives, a

4
discourse of education and the school that foregrounds democracy, emancipation and
potentiality. While certainly meriting critique and contestation, education and the school can
also, under certain conditions, be sources of hope.

Discourses of control in early childhood education: the case of England

The spread of controlling technologies

[T]he more we seem to know about the complexity of learning, childrens diverse
strategies and multiple theories of knowledge, the more we seek to impose learning
strategies and curriculum goals that reduce the complexities of this learning and
knowing. Policy makers look for general structures and one-dimensional standards
for practices. These are based on contemporary and updated developmentally
appropriate practices . . . In fact, the more complex things become the more we
seem to desire processes of reduction and thus increase control (Lenz Taguchi,
2010, p.14).

I have already quoted an English Minister waxing eloquent about the need for early
education; she, as it happens, was a right-wing politician. But the awakening of government
interest in this subject in England took place with the coming to power in 1997 of a centre-left
New Labour government; today, early childhood has cross-party support, the rationale for
state involvement accepted across the political spectrum. That rationale is in part economic,
a belief that early intervention enables personal and national survival in an increasingly
competitive and global market-place, both through facilitating womens employment, the
childcare element of early childhood education; and as the first stage of a process of
lifelong learning, intended to secure a flexible and compliant workforce responsive to shifting
market demands, the education element. (Deleuze (1992) offers perpetual training -
lifelong learning - as one example of the emerging societies of control.)

But the rationale is in part social. Persuaded by certain American studies, endlessly
recycled in the literature (Penn, 2011, p.39), policy-makers see early childhood education
not only as a means for boosting employment and productivity, but as a fix for stubbornly
persistent dysfunctions. Both rationales, the economic and social, infuse this optimistic
government statement:

Childcare can improve educational outcomes for children. Childcare enables parents,
particularly mothers, to go out to work, or increase their hours in work, thereby lifting
their families out of poverty. It also plays a key role in extending choice for women by

5
 enhancing their ability to compete in the labour market on more equal terms, helping
them to overcome the glass ceiling, and by ensuring that they themselves may not
face poverty in old age.

Childcare can also play an important role in meeting other top level objectives, for
example in improving health, boosting productivity, improving public services, closing
the gender pay gap and reducing crime. The targets to achieve 70 per cent
employment amongst lone parents by 2010 and to eradicate child poverty by 2020
are those that are most obviously related. Childcare is essential for these objectives
to be met (Department for Education and Skills et al., 2002, p.5; emphasis added).

It is not my intention in this article to assess the credibility of these rationales, with their
attendant claims that early childhood education provides a very high rate of economic return
on investment (for such an assessment, see Moss, 2014a). What I want to consider is how
this new-found belief in the value of early childhood education has been enacted in the case
of England under a New Labour government (1997-2010), producing a template that was
largely followed by the subsequent Conservative-dominated coalition government (2010-15)
(for a full analysis of early childhood policy in England between 1997-2013, see Moss,
2014b). Firstly, policies increased the supply of services and levels of attendance: an
entitlement to a period of free early childhood education for 3 and 4-year-olds was
introduced, later extended to 2-year-olds from lower income families; childcare provision was
stimulated, and subsidies provided to lower income families; and new forms of multi-purpose
provision, Childrens Centres, were opened, with particular attention given to delivering a
range of child and family support services in areas with higher levels of poverty.

Supply and use expanded in a system increasingly defined by two features: private provision
and marketisation. The spread of private day nurseries, gathering momentum since the late
1980s, continued unabated post-1997, leaving England with a large for-profit sector. These
providers competed in a childcare market, but marketisation was extended by opening up
early education to any provider, subject to meeting certain conditions; the new entitlement
was delivered not just in schools, but by playgroups, day nurseries and even childminders.
By 2008, a senior civil servant could publicly assert that a diverse market [in early childhood
services is] the only show in town (Archer, 2008).

But quantity was not deemed sufficient. Behind a mantra of improving quality and ensuring
value for money, a range of technologies was deployed intended to ensure certain desired
outcomes were achieved. As a first step, administration and policy-making were unified, to

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increase the capacity of an already highly centralised state to exert control over its new
priority. Previously split between health and education ministries, responsibility for all early
childhood services was now located in the Department for Education, culminating in an
integrated Sure Start, Early Years and Childcare Unit overseeing a budget that rose from
2.1 to 7.8 billion between 1997 and 2010. This was complemented by concentrating
regulation of all early childhood services (as well as all schools) within a single national
inspectorate, the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted),
when previously much inspection work had been undertaken by local authorities.

A national curriculum was introduced, setting out detailed standards and outcomes for early
childhood education. Initially, from 2000, the Foundation Stage covered the two years of
early education (3 and 4 year olds) and the first (reception class) year of primary school. In
2008, this was superseded by the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), incorporating
curriculum and standards for services for children from birth until the end of the first year in
primary school. In two volumes, a statutory framework and practice guidance, the EYFS set
out 69 early learning goals, educational programmes for each of six areas of learning and
development and assessment arrangements. Funding for providing early childhood
education was made conditional on applying this curriculum.

This curriculum was issued by the central administration and its application monitored by the
central inspection regime. Its precise application was further regulated through a national
system of assessment, the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile that rated children in the
final year of the EYFS on 13 scales, each divided into nine points. The EYFS was revised
by the subsequent coalition government (2010-15), with a reduction in the number of Early
Learning Goals from 69 to 17, at the same time as placing more emphasis on literacy and
number and on the role of early childhood education in ensuring school readiness
(Department for Education, 2012). The basic structure of regulation and control has been
fine-tuned, ensuring all children (and their educators) are governed by technologies of
normalisation, which define their experience of early childhood education and initiate them
into perpetual training, in which each stage of education readies children and young
people for the next and, ultimately, for a flexible labour market.

Other complementary technologies play important roles. The technique of observation,

subjecting children constantly to the normalising adult gaze, has a central place in practice,
with government advising that [o]ngoing assessment (also known as formative assessment)
is an integral part of the learning and development process. It involves practitioners
observing children to understand their level of achievement, interests and learning styles,

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and to then shape learning experiences for each child reflecting those observations
(Department for Education, 2014, p.13). What Lingard (2013) terms datafication, governing
through numerical data, is increasingly apparent (Roberts-Holmes, 2014), made more potent
when linked to the introduction, since 2013, of performance-related pay for teachers. Large-
scale, national evaluative studies, positivistic in character, have been funded to add yet
further oversight and to provide evidence on most effective technologies what works. A
drive to improve low levels of qualification in the childcare workforce has adopted a highly
normalising approach, based on demonstrating competence against nationally agreed and
detailed standards, hence ensuring a workforce attuned to the precise application of
technologies. While further technologies are being explored and evaluated, with a growing
interest in identifying and applying evidence-based programmes, with payment by results to
ensure their precise application.

Underpinning and shaping these technologies are concepts, knowledge and norms
generated by a particular discipline, developmental psychology, the study of child
development, whose emergence in the 19th century was prompted by concerns to classify,
measure and regulate (Burman, 1994, p.18). Early childhood education policy, practice and
evaluation are inscribed with the concept of developmental appropriatenesss. But the effect
of developmental psychology runs deeper than the rationale and guidance it provides for
external measures of control. It also governs the soul, as Lynn Fendler describes:

I argue that the interweaving of developmental psychology, efficiency and

behaviourism in educational curriculum becomes a technology of normalisation. I call
this technology developmentality as a way of alluding to Foucaults governmentality,
and focusing on the self-governing effects of developmental discourse in curriculum
debates. Developmentality, like governmentality, describes a current pattern of power
in which the self disciplines the self (2001, p.120).

Through this technology of developmentality, both child and adult come to embody
developmental norms, which have expanded from cognition to affect, temperament, self-
esteem, and love (ibid., p.138), governing or disciplining themselves to become normal,
self-constituted in terms of developmentally prescribed outcomes.

An apparent paradox
What has emerged over the last 20 years in England is a system of early childhood
education that appears, at first sight, paradoxical. On the one hand, provision that
emphasises diversity of providers, competing to win the favour of parent-consumers

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exercising individual choice in a marketplace. On the other hand, a highly regulated system,
exercising strict and centralised control over children and adults alike. Competition and
individual choice crossed with rigidly enforced national standards; diversity of providers
delivering uniformity of outcomes.

This apparent contradiction can be read as a consequence of living in a neoliberal regime.

That regimes belief in the virtue of markets, private provision and individual choice dictates
the form of delivery for early childhood services. But the same regime creates an
increasingly cut-throat global market. To succeed, or at least survive, requires the state
assume an active role in shaping subjects fit for that market, to ensure we can compete in
the global race (Department for Education, 2013, p.6) governing the child through
deploying human technologies.

But neoliberalism shows its hand in other ways. Suspicious or downright hostile towards
government, it can understand and justify public spending on early childhood services only in
highly instrumental and economistic terms: as social investment in human capital. To
ensure supposedly high returns, very precise human technologies need to be applied to
ensure outcomes that must be predefined and predictable or, as one high profile
researcher put the matter to a parliamentary select committee, [v]ery tightly defined
programmes [produce] good results (House of Commons Children, Schools and Families
Committee, 2010). The (female) technicians applying technologies need be neither well
educated nor well paid, but trained just enough to apply evidence-based and tightly
defined programmes. If schools have become what Coffield and Williamson(2011) call exam
factories, early childhood centres are factories for early learning goals and school
readiness.

Last but not least, a neoliberal regime de-politicises. It acts as if there are no alternatives,
either to its own utopian and totalising project of a world constituted by calculative market
relationships or to the conditions needed for its practice, including a particular approach to
education. The ends of education are taken-for-granted, ensuring neoliberal subjects. The
only question is about means, what works?, a question to which experts can supply the one
right answer. Education is thus reduced to a supremely technical practice, requiring no
democratic deliberation about critical or political questions [n]ot mere technical issues to
be solved by experts...[but questions that] always involve decisions which require us to make
choices between conflicting alternatives (Mouffe, 2007) - and policy alternatives. In the
search for ever stronger control, there is no place for contestation, no call for argument
about where to?

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There are alternatives
The progressive education tradition

Unfortunately, educators and citizens alike seem to have no collective memory of the
many successful attempts at building more democratic schools. The history of
progressive school reform documents the fact that thousands of teachers,
administrators, community activists, and others spent their entire professional lives
trying to build more educationally and socially responsive institutions. We have much
to gain by reconnecting with their successes and with how they approached and
overcame difficulties. All progressively inclined educators stand on the shoulders of
these people. (Apple and Beane, 2007, pp.15354)

The new policy priority given to early childhood education in recent years in England has
been accompanied by the dominance of one discourse, a discourse of control that I have
termed elsewhere the story of quality and high returns (Moss, 2014a). The moral of this
story is that high returns on investment require strong control to be exercised through human
technologies quality. Rooted in a strongly positivistic tradition, the story is instrumental,
economistic and technical in tone, allowing no room for the political or ethical. Uninterested
or deaf to other stories, the story of quality and high returns strives to impose what Unger
(2005) calls a dictatorship of no alternative, or what de Sousa Santos terms hegemonic
globalisation, the successful globalisation of a particular local and culturally-specific
discourse to the point that it makes universal truth claims and localises all rival discourses
(2004, p. 149).

To contest and critique such dictatorial tendencies and hegemonic claims is important.
Critical thinking and research are important, to deepen awareness and understanding of
human technologies and their regulatory effects. There is a need, too, for developing critical
practice that can make visible and deconstruct these technologies, practices such as
pedagogical documentation. Pedagogical documentation evolved in the early childhood
education created in the post-war years in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia (of which more
shortly), and has since spread world-wide though not into other fields of education. It
involves making practice visible through many methods of documentation (e.g. note-taking,
video and audio recordings, the display of childrens work), then subjecting that
documentation to dialogue, contestation, reflection and interpretation: collective processes of
meaning-making. Pedagogical documentation has many purposes, including research,

10
professional development, participatory evaluation and challenging dominant discourses. It
can act, therefore, not only as a way of understanding these discourses better, but of helping
loosen the grasp they have over us.

Through documentation we can unmask - identify and visualize - the dominant

discourses and regimes which exercise power on and through us, and by which we
have constructed the child and ourselves as pedagogues. Pedagogical
documentation, therefore, can function as a tool for opening up a critical and
reflective practice challenging dominant discourses and constructing counter-
discourses, through which we can find alternative pedagogies which can both be
morally and ethically satisfying, but also aesthetically pleasing (Steedman, 1991:
61). It can be understood as one of the technologies of the self, whose use makes it
possible to criticize and free ourselves from embodied concepts and produce new
concepts (Dahlberg et al., 2013, p.160-1).

But important as they are, to contest and critique are not enough. We may wish to disrupt
discourses of control, and their capacity to regulate and govern. Yet even assuming
discordant voices were to be heard by the tellers of dominant stories, then what? What is the
next step? To argue for the end of education and schools as too dangerous, as unavoidable
instruments of an authoritarian will to control?

That seems to me both improbable and a counsel of despair, which risks throwing the baby
out with the bathwater. Improbable because there is a deep desire for education world-wide,
both among children and adults. A counsel of despair because education and schools need
not be reduced to institutions for regulating childhoods, to produce subjects fitted to the
needs of a global market capitalism and participants in the global race. They can be
something else; rather than normalisation and control, education and schools can be sites
for democracy, emancipation and potentiality.

This has been the hope and lifetime work of many educators, past and present. One notable
tradition cast in this mold has been progressive education. Whilst it can be argued that
progressivism is largely a product of the late nineteenth century that came to hold sway,
according to which country is considered, during the 40 years between 1930 and 1970, its
roots go back much further to writers like Comenius and Rousseau, and its legacy remains a
significant presence today (Darling and Norbenbo, 2003, p.289). Given the richness and
longevity of its traditions and the range of countries across the world that have embraced its
thinking there is, inevitably and properly, no one account that can claim to be uncontested.

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That being said, Darling and Norbeno offer a useful starting point. They suggest five
recurring themes that characterise progressive approaches to schooling criticism of
traditional education, the nature of knowledge, human nature, democracy and the
development of the whole person. These themes have inspired many past educators, and
continue to do so today, as an example of early childhood education from Italy can readily
demonstrate.

Reggio Emilia

What is so terribly impressive and exceptional about the Reggio experience and the
work of Loris Malaguzzi is the way they have challenged the dominating discourses
of our time, specifically in the field of early childhood pedagogy - a most unique
undertaking for a pedagogical practice! This was achieved by deconstructing the way
in which the field has been socially constituted within a scientific, political and ethical
context and then reconstructing and redefining childrens and teachers subjectivities.
That is, they have tried to understand what kinds of thoughts, conceptions, ideas,
social structures and behavioural patterns have dominated the field and how these
discourses have shaped our conceptions and images of the child and childhood, the
way we interact with children and the kind of environment we create for them
(Dahlberg, 2000, pp.178).

In the current climate, progressivism struggles to survive in compulsory education. One

place where the values it espouses - the ideal of a democratic and emancipatory education
that works to realise the unknowable potentiality of children - are enacted today is the
municipal schools for young children in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia. Reggios schools
and early education are often referred to as the Reggio Emilia Approach, but this is, I
believe, to misunderstand this experience. For what Reggio Emilia has undertaken is a local
cultural project, constructed over time in a particular context by a particular group of
participants, and laying no claim to offer a universal solution to education or schooling. While
some people may believe it offers an exportable template or model, to be replicated
irrespective of time or place, the Reggio project is better understood as a provocation to
others to think about and construct their own local cultural project within their own context;
Reggio is an example of possibility, not a model for replication. .

Starting with the opening of a first school for 3 to 6 year olds in 1963, and now with a
network of over 50 schools for children under and over 3 years, the educational project of

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the comune of Reggio Emilia has been explicitly democratic and emancipatory, expressed in
this statement from the 2009 edition of the municipal Regulations:

Education is the right of all, of all children, and as such is a responsibility of the
community. Education is an opportunity for the growth and emancipation of the
individual and the collective; it is a resource for gaining knowledge and for learning to
live together; it is a meeting place where freedom, democracy and solidarity are
practiced and where the value of peace is promoted. Within the plurality of cultural,
ideological, political, and religious conceptions, education lives by listening, dialogue,
and participation; it is based on mutual respect, valuing the diversity of identities,
competencies, and knowledge held by each individual (Istituzione del Comune di
Reggio Emilia, 2010, p.7).

These broad principles have been enacted in an epistemological approach that views
knowledge as a co-constructive process of meaning making in a pedagogy of listening and
relationships. This involves processes of theory-building in relationship with others and
values the production of new and unexpected thought and emotions of wonder, surprise and
amazement. Learning in this way occurs mainly through project work, which

is constructed through advances, standstills and retreats that take many directions
and often lead to unexpected places. It is a process of constructing, testing and
reconstructing theories [in a group process]...[T]he word project evokes the idea of a
dynamic process, a journey that involves the uncertainty and chance that always
arises in relationships with others. Project work grows in many directions, with no
predefined progression, no outcomes decided before the journey begins (Rinaldi,
2006, pp.131-2).

This pedagogical work is premised on an initial political question: what is our image of the
child? Loris Malaguzzi, the first director of Reggios municipal schools, made the centrality of
this foundational question and Reggio Emilias answer, very clear when he wrote:

of starting from a very open, explicit declaration of our image of the child, where
image is understood as a strong and optimistic interpretation of the child. A child born
with many resources and extraordinary potentials that have never ceased to amaze
us, with an autonomous capacity for constructing thoughts, ideas, questions and
attempts at answers (Reggio Children, 2012, p.109).

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In such statements, by Malaguzzi and Rinaldi, education is understood as a process of
realising childrens potentiality, something that cannot be predicted or managed, something
that is endlessly amazing, since (in the words of the philosopher Spinoza) we never know in
advance what a body can do. Unsurprisingly, Reggio Emilia has little time for the technical,
controlling approach that characterises the dominant discourse in todays early childhood
education, with its fetish for certainty and predetermined outcomes what Malaguzzi termed
prophetic pedagogy, which knows everything beforehand, knows everything that will
happen, knows everything, does not have one uncertainty, is absolutely imperturbable and
which is a complete humiliation for childrens ingenuity and potential.

Reggio Emilias success in sustaining a democratic and emancipatory education in its

municipal schools over 50 years has drawn on a willingness to research and experiment, to
border cross and make connections between different disciplines and theories, and to
embrace complexity and uncertainty. This willingness has enabled them to turn answers to
political questions into innovative and dynamic pedagogical practice. But it has also required
very strong organisation, building systems and structures over time to support the values,
purposes and goals of this local cultural project of childhood. These include the widespread
use of ateliers and atelieristas to support the hundred languages of children; the
deployment of two teachers per group of children; dedicated time for professional
development, to enable dialogue and reflection; a support team of experienced educators,
pedagogistas, each working with a small group of schools; and the widespread use of
pedagogical documentation, already mentioned, with the possibility it provides to discuss
and to dialogue everything with everyone (teachers, auxiliary staff, cooks, families,
administrators, citizens) real, concrete things not just theories and words (Hoyuelos,
2004, p.7).

Reggio Emilia was and is not alone, but part of what has been termed the municipal school
revolution, a 1960s movement when many comuni in Northern and Central Italy pre-empted
State-run services by starting up their own services for young children (Catarsi, 2004, p.8).
Reggio Emilia may have led the way in deciding to start a municipal early childhood
education, but close behind were other towns and cities. Today, though depleted in
numbers, a network of such local experiences continues, with important similarities in
approach as well as some local differences (see, for example, Fortunati and Catarsi, 2012,
for the Tuscan approach to early childhood education).

The pedagogical ideas and ways of working that have evolved in Reggio Emilia have
attracted global interest and emulation. Since the late 1970s, thousands have visited the

14
citys schools from all over the world, while the exhibition The Hundred Languages of
Children has brought Reggios pedagogical work to the attention of a vast new global
audience and helped create an international network of people engaged with the city and its
schools for young children. Evidence, indeed, of a widespread resistance movement to the
dominant discourse in early childhood education, so strongly heard in the case of England,
that controlling story of quality and high returns.

The school

A physical, local school where community members are encouraged to encounter

each other and learn from each other is one of the last public spaces in which we can
begin to build the intergenerational solidarity, respect for diversity and democratic
capability needed to ensure fairness in the context of sociotechnical change....It is
therefore the time both to defend the idea of a school as a public resource and to
radically re-imagine how it might evolve if it is to equip communities to respond to
and shape the socio-technical changes of the next few years (Facer, 2011, pp.28-
29).

Though education and school have been linked in this article, education is not confined to
the school, but can and does occur in many settings, both formal and informal. The school
has no monopoly on education. Concerns about the potential of the school to govern,
discipline and normalise child and teacher alike have also been recognised. This danger is
particularly associated with a common understanding, or image, of the school (whether
compulsory or pre-compulsory) as an enclosure into which children can be gathered so that
human technologies can be applied to them to produce predetermined outcomes: the school
as factory for learning goals or examinations.

Such images of the school should and can be contested, while at the same time offering
alternative, more hopeful images, associated with an understanding of education as
emancipatory and democratic. Carlina Rinaldi (2006), a former director of Reggio schools,
uses a variety of such images: the school as a forum, a place of encounter, a construction
site, a workshop and a permanent laboratory, all implying a place where citizens meet to
create projects. Developing this theme, it has been suggested that early childhood
institutions can be understood as

public forums situated in civil society in which children and adults participate together
in projects of social, cultural political and economic significance.Forums are an

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 important feature of civil society. If civil society is where individuals - children, young
people and adults - can come together to participate and engage in activities or
projects of common interest and collective action, then forums are places where this
coming together, this meeting, occurs (Dahlberg et al., 2013, p.78: original
emphasis).

There has been some discussion about the future need for schools, especially for older
children, with one scenario envisaging the abandonment of schools in favour of a
multitude of learning networksas part of an emerging network society (OECD, 2003). In
a world of distanced and networked learning, the school itself should simply be dissolved
into the learning landscape and replaced by personalized learning environments (Facer,
2011, p.27). But for others, the school envisaged as physical, public space retains a vital
role, because it may be one of the most important institutions we have to help us build a
democratic conversation about the future (ibid., p.28).

Rather than a place for future proofing children, creating flexible souls able to respond
effortlessly to changing market demands, training them up to participate in the global race,
Facer envisages a democratic and emancipatory role for schools of future building, in which
the school acts as a a powerful democratic resource and public space that allows its young
people and communities to contest the visions of the future that they are being presented
with, and to work together through the spaces of traditional and emergent democratic
practice, to fight for viable futures for all (ibid., p.15). This is a school of contestation, of
hope and of unknowable potentiality.

Cautious hope
I have argued that early childhood education today, in England but also increasingly in other
countries under the influence of a neoliberal regime and a resurgent positivistic science, is
subject to ever more powerful human technologies capable of regulating childhoods and
exerting strong control over children and adults alike. The dominant discourse, what I have
called the story of quality and high returns, is instrumental, economistic and technical in
character, focused intently on predictability, certainty and the closure of predetermined goals
achieved. A rhetoric of choice and diversity, in terms of provision of services, is matched by
extreme uniformity and standardisation when it comes to pedagogical goals and outcomes.

But as I have touched on, there are alternatives. Other images, constructions,
understandings of education and school that welcome complexity, diversity and multiplicity,
and are emancipatory and democratic in character and intent. More than this, there are

16
examples, past and present, where such images have been enacted, to a greater or lesser
extent, sometimes for just a few years, in a few instances for decades.

For despite the best efforts of the dictatorship of no alternative, early childhood education
is, in fact, alive with a multitude of narratives, perspectives and debates, including educators
and academics working within postfoundational paradigms; with transgressive theorists such
as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Levinas; and with a range of disciplines including
philosophy, political science, human geography, sociology, science studies and feminist
studies. Evidence of this global resistance movement, contesting the hegemony of the
dominant discourse, can be found, inter alia, in networks (for example, the
Reconceptualising Early Childhood Education movement; and the many national Reggio
Emilia groups); researching and writing (for example, many articles in journals such as
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood and books in the Contesting Early Childhood
series); and the doctoral theses of a younger generation.

Discourses of control can be disrupted, childhoods can be less regulated, there are
alternatives and resistances. Much more remains to be done, not least on identifying and
elaborating conditions that might be needed for transformative change to develop and be
sustainable; for the dominant discourse in early childhood education, as witnessed in
England today, is the product of much effort, time and money expended on creating
conditions for its enactment and the effective control of childhood. But if there is one general
lesson we can draw from the long life of Reggio Emilias local project of innovative
education, it is that conditions for such sustained transformative change can be created. All
in all, then, there is cause for cautious hope and qualified optimism, not complete despair.

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