ABSTRACT
Paulo Freire stresses that it is critical for revolutionary leaders to fully trust the oppressed. Quebec’s preschool education and vulnerability discourse positions low-income parents as incompetent, and children as objects to be formatted to meet ‘objective’ ‘scientific’ criteria. The positioning of early childhood education and care as compensation for inadequate parental care is a global phenomenon. Childcare as conceived of by the business case is designed merely for children, and even then it is only designed to be implemented in the most minimal dose, most often as part-day preschool. The net effect is that children’s needs are put ahead of mothers’ needs, a sadly familiar hierarchy. Stubbornly persistent unequal social, political, and economic relations of gender, class, and race are erased in favor of the catch-all category of the investable child, whose family, it would seem, has no needs—nor potential—of its own.
