There are alternatives! Contestation and hope in early childhood education

Abstract

In a context of expanding early childhood education, this article 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 government’s 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 article 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.