The present future: Child assessment tools as a passage for inscribing ideas of future into the present

Abstract

In this chapter, we analyse how policies for enhanced documentation become a vibrant part of life in early childhood education and care. Pedagogues, parents, children and various artefacts act as co-creators of policies about child documentation. Exploring documentation as a socially constituted practice involving assessment, we argue that the documentation of child development enacts a passage through which ideas of the child in a future setting is inscribed into the present one. Rather than a mere overlay of schooling, we argue that a broader embracing of the child is at stake. The entanglement of antipathy towards schooling, yet invasion of cultural imaginaries of school, fosters a certain gaze at the child. It is a gaze in which the most dominant objective is the search for signs of the child’s enthusiasm and willingness to act as expected in the future context of school.