ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters have focused primarily on various understandings of young children and early childhood institutions in the Minority World. The influence of that minority is, however, felt around the globe. In particular, we have argued, United States thinking and practice, which is dominated by a particular discipline (developmental psychology) and is located firmly within the project of modernity, is assuming hegemonic proportions on an increasingly global scale, with the increasing likelihood of ‘complex globalizations of once localized, western constructions of children’ (Stephens, 1995:8), rationalized through the discipline of developmental psychology which offers a ‘Western construction [of childhood] that is now being incorporated, as though it was universal, into aid and development policies’ (Burman, 1994:183). It is ironic that a country that professes grave concerns about the ‘toxicity’ of its social environments and the well-being
of many of its children and families (Garbarino, 1996), as well as about the quality of its early childhood services (Kagan et al., 1996) is looked to as a source of knowledge and guidance about children and services. In such cases, however, hegemonic relationships do not depend on the application of military force or other means of coercion, but rather the influence of economic, cultural and scientific power which combine to produce dominant discourses which dictate that only certain things can be said or thought, as well as matching technologies of normalization-such as measures of quality. The imperium of the United States is the latest phase of Minority World dominance in relationships with the Majority World, which started several hundred years ago with European expansion and colonialism. This dominance has been sustained by modernist ideas of linear progress and development, certainty and objectivity, universality and totalization, and the reduction of diversity and complexity. Modernity, therefore, has provided a rationale for colonization and hegemony, its structures of knowledge being implicated in forms of oppression (Young, 1990). Modernity has proved equal to this heavy responsibility, being possessed of great self-confidence:
The positive self-image modern western culture has given to itself, a picture born of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, is of a civilization founded on scientific knowledge of the world and rational knowledge of value, which places the highest premium on individual human life and freedom, and believes that such freedom and rationality will lead to social progress through virtuous, self-controlled work, creating a better material, political and intellectual life for all. (Cahoone, 1996:12)
Invigorated by such an image, the Minority World has had little compunction in proselytizing such virtues, often with considerable success. The words, thoughts and activities of the colonizers have, in many cases, been absorbed into the life-ways of the colonized, creating a fusion (and in many cases a confusion) of identities. But there has also been a reaction, a growing critique of the project of modernity. Within both the Minority and Majority Worlds the ‘positive self-image’ noted above is challenged by those who ‘see modernity instead as a movement of ethnic and class domination, European imperialism, anthropocentrism, the destruction of nature, the dissolution of community and traditions, the rise of alienation, and the death of individuality in bureaucracy’ (Cahoone, 1996:12).
