ABSTRACT
We have argued that preschools are often conceptualised in overly instrumental ways, as means to produce predetermined and calculable ends through deploying human technologies. Technical practice, finding the most efficient methods to achieve predetermined ends, is the main focus of attention, what might be termed ‘technology as first practice’. But we have already begun to argue that this understanding of the preschool is not self-evident, that there are other possible understandings that we could choose. The questions for us are what these other understandings might be? And why is one particular understanding treated today as if it was true, as, what Foucault termed, a ‘regime of truth’? Before seeking an answer to the first question, in this chapter we consider the second – why is a technico-instrumental construction of the preschool so widely taken for granted?
