ABSTRACT
The language is neither accidental nor surprising. For the increasing priority given to early childhood services in recent years is driven, at least in the Anglo-American world, by economic concerns and the consequences of economic change and located within a context where market forces and relationships are prioritized. An increasingly rampant, unconstrained and global Anglo-American capitalism, a
neoliberal project of worldwide economic deregulation and free markets (Grey, 1998), combining with rapid technological change, has brought in its trail increased inequalities, insecurities, exclusions and dislocations, while at the same time undermining the post-war welfare state with its principles of solidarity, shared risk and redistribution. Nation states, increasingly powerless to control free-booting capital, instead increasingly seek to lure it to their shores through the offer of productive, educated and compliant labour forces, consisting of women and men in their ‘prime working years’ (i.e. 25-50) (for a discussion of the compression of employment onto this age group and, more generally, parental employment trends, see Brannen et al., 1997; Deven et al., 1998). Early childhood services are now seen as one way to ensure the availability of such labour forces, both here and now and in the future. In the words of a recent American report, which resonates in the United Kingdom also,
But the role of early childhood services is not just understood in directly economic terms. They have a social task to perform too, as part of a larger project which seeks more effective methods of social control to limit the damage caused by deregulated free market capitalism. In sum, as ‘money scours the world for the highest return (generating) colossal insecurity, the role of government is to maintain order in their territories and package their populations into skilled docile workforces with the correct attitudes in the hope that international finance may offer jobs through inward investment’ (Atkinson and Elliott, 1998). In this context, not only are services increasingly understood in economic and market terms, but the people working in them are understood as low skilled technicians, whose job it is to act as neutral transmitters (reproducers) of required and predetermined knowledge and values to children and of simplified versions of their technology to parents.
