Excerpt
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There’s a lot of talk in early childhood education and care (ECEC) today about ‘outcomes’ and ‘quality’, ‘testing’ and ‘assessment’, ‘interventions’ and ‘programmes’, ‘evidence-based’ and ‘best practice’, ‘investment’ and ‘human capital’, ‘preparation’ and ‘readyness’, ‘markets and marketing’. But why do we talk like this about ECEC, in such technical, instrumental and economistic terms? Why have we come to accept such language so unquestioningly as the normal and obvious way to discuss the education of young children? What are the consequences of this language and the thinking behind it? What is going on? Our attempt to answer these questions is the subject of this book. In a nutshell, we contend that, like so much else in our lives, ECEC has over the last 40 or so years been drawn into the gravitational field of a powerful force, a political ideology that has become increasingly influential across the world since the 1980s: the ideology of neoliberalism. The way we talk so often today about young children and services for them is the language of neoliberalism. This book is an exploration of how neoliberalism, with its distinctive worldview and signature, has not only ‘sunk its roots deep into everyday life’ (Mirowski, 2013a, p. 28) but also into ECEC; of how it has come to influence the ways in which we think about, talk about and do ECEC with, in Margaret Sims’s words, ‘a devastating impact on the early childhood sector with its focus on standardisation, push-down curriculum and its positioning of children as investments for future economic productivity’ (Sims, 2017, p. 1).
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