ABSTRACT
This chapter starts from the General Comment No. 7 of the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Rights of the Child statement that ‘the right to education during early childhood [is interpreted] as beginning at birth’ (para. 28). Drawing on the work of Loris Malaguzzi and pedagogical practice in Reggio Emilia’s municipal schools for young children, the chapter interprets this principle while critically examining assumptions underlying the UN Committee’s perspective. But, the author contends, this rights-based view of early childhood education (ECE) is put at risk by neoliberal policy developments, characterised by instrumental rationality and economistic thinking. These developments construct alternative understandings of early childhood services as businesses providing a commodity – ‘childcare’ – for parent-consumers, and as enclosures where human technologies are effectively applied to produce performance in young children embarking on a lifelong process as flexible, compliant, ever-ready learners and workers. These developments are exemplified by a universal entitlement to ECE for 3- and 4-year-olds in England reconceptualised to ‘childcare’ targeted on children whose parents meet certain employment criteria, and by the OECD’s International Early Learning and Child Well-Being Study, interpreted as a tool to manage the effective application of human technologies; England figures again, as one of only three countries participating.
