Why should we bother with neoliberalism when we have to learn how to teach children?
Peter Moss
UCL Institute of Education University College London
Neoliberalism has a huge impact on our lives…
‘Neoliberalism now configures great swathes of our daily lives and structures our experience of the world – how we understand the way the world works, how we understand ourselves and others, and how we relate to ourselves and others…We are produced by it’ (Stephen Ball)
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…yet many deny or are unaware of it
‘At this late hour, the world is still full of people who believe that neoliberalism doesn’t really exist’ (Philip Mirowski)
‘The reason using the word [neoliberalism] matters is that its political philosophy denies that it is a political philosophy. This contributes to its influence and success – just try to oppose something that you cannot name’ (Anthony Barnett)
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…or see no point in studying it
‘A colleague asked me once, “Why should one teach neoliberalism in an early childhood degree?” My students have asked: “Why should we bother with neoliberalism when we have to learn how to teach children?”’(Cristina Vintimilla)
A new book sets out to answer these questions
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Presentation in 3 parts:
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Part 1
Introduction to neoliberalism
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What is neoliberalism?
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Postwar rise of neoliberalism
1947: meeting of free market economists at Mont Pelerin🡺Mont Pelerin Society🡺network of university departments, foundations, think tanks
1970s: crisis of post-war economic regime; opportunities to experiment, e.g. Chile after the coup
1980s: ‘big time’ comes…Reagan & Thatcher…international organisations…’the neoliberal show has been playing ever since, powerfully framing the economic debate of the past thirty years’ (Kate Raworth)
US and UK as epicentre of global spread
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Associated theories
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Part 2
Impact on ECE
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Impact of NL on compulsory education
‘Global Education Reform Movement’: emerged in1980s and increasingly ‘adopted as an educational reform orthodoxy within many education systems throughout the world’ (Pasi Sahlberg), with 5 main symptoms:
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Impact of NL on early childhood education
Received less attention than compulsory schooling and HE, with a few exceptions…
‘[Neoliberalism has had] a devastating impact on the early childhood sector with its focus on standardisation, push-down curriculum and its positioning of children as investments for future economic productivity’ (Margaret Sims)
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(i) Markets and marketisation
‘Markets are at the heart of neoliberalism. They are where neoliberalism’s virtues – commodification, competition, calculation, choice – are enacted and honed…In neoliberalism’s world-view, introducing and expanding markets is the answer to every social, economic and political problem - including the provision and improvement of early childhood education and care. “Market logic” pervades this sector as much as other sectors of education’ (Chapter 3)
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Markets and marketisation
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e.g. Busy Bees
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‘The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Early Childhood Education & Care (ECEC) Markets’
‘From a market perspective, we have seen new interest from new investors and buyers generated. These new, eager market entrants add further fuel to the long-established blaze of demand from private equity, high-net-worth individuals and philanthropic investors, all of whom face direct competition from a wider range of ECEC trade buyers including independents, regionals, corporate and international ECEC groups – the combination of which has created additional buoyancy in the market’ (Christie & Co.)
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Markets don’t work well
‘Childcare is not a typical good or service. Its inherent nature contains a number of characteristics which create problems in the functioning of the market and means that the market outcomes may not meet parents’ preferences at minimum cost’ (Gillian Paull)
BUT ALSO MARKETISATION AND PRIVATISATION
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(ii) Language and images
NL has a distinctive language – economistic, technical, managerial - that constitutes how we talk and think about early childhood education, e.g.
NL also has distinctive images…
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‘[These images are] normative, representing the identity or subjectivity that neoliberal beliefs ascribe to people, but also to institutions; according to these beliefs, this is who people and what institutions, such as early childhood centres, should be.
They are also productive, in that neoliberalism seeks to produce or create people and institutions in its own image – a process that Foucault terms subjectification, the formation or production of subjectivity through power relations, dominant discourses and regimes of truth’ (Chapter 4).
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NL images include the:
Money central to all images…’economisation’
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(iii) Governance
‘The metier and modalities of neoliberalism, both its modus operandi and modus vivendi, are visibility, accountability, transparency, measurement, calculation, comparison, evaluation, ratings, ranking, indicators, metrics and indices. These now infuse, inform and construct large parts of our social life, and the life of the early years classroom, of the nursery and parenting, producing particular forms of our relation to ourselves and to others’ (Stephen Ball)
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Neoliberal governance in ECE
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Neoliberal governance at work
‘Datafication’🡺’dataveillance’🡺intensified regulation and control
Consequences of Neoliberal governance
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Part 3
What is to be done?
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‘We view neoliberalism as deeply problematic, eminently resistible and eventually replaceable…we think neoliberalism has little or no future and turn to alternatives; for if the neoliberal mantra has been “there are no alternatives”, ours is that “there are alternatives”’ (Chapter One)
NL is very powerful
but not eternal
we have some agency
there is hope!
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NL is…deeply problematic
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NL is…deeply problematic
‘[What we were told by the neo-liberal economists] was at best only partially true and at worst plain wrong…the “truths” pedalled by free-market ideologues are based on lazy assumptions and blinkered visions’ (Ha-Joon Chang)
‘If the 2008 financial crisis failed to make us realise that unfettered markets don’t work, the climate crisis certainly should: neoliberalism will literally bring an end to our civilisation’ (Joseph Stiglitz)
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NL is…eminently resistible
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How resist?
Critical thinking: e.g. questioning assumptions and assertions, putting a ‘stutter’ in dominant discourses
Politics of refusal: through acts of ‘voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility’, we can withhold our consent to the subjectivity that NL seeks from us and work ‘to define ourselves according to our own judgments’ (Stephen Ball)
Minor politics: ‘minor engagements in the everyday’, local activism, e.g. opposing Reception Baseline Assessment
Words and stories: adopting a different vocabulary, listening to different stories about ECE…‘The only thing that can displace a story is a story’ (George Monbiot)
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NL is…eventually replaceable
‘This was perhaps evident after the 2008 financial crisis, but the pandemic has made the evident blindingly obvious. Unable to contribute to the resolution of the crises we are living through or to offer us hope for a better, healthier and more sustainable future, neoliberalism lurches onwards waiting to be finished off if only we have the imagination, creativity and determination to put something better in its place’ (Pandemic Postscript)
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NL is…eventually replaceable
‘Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable’
The challenge today is to work on alternative ideas and alternative policies
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Our diagnosis
‘The system of early childhood education and care in England does not work for children or parents, workers or society…nothing short of transformation is now needed to give young children the all-round upbringing they have a right to and parents the support they need to both work and care’
‘Transformation’ = fundamental change of
system…values…pedagogy
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‘Transforming Early Childhood’
System
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What does a fully integrated system look like?
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A system that is:
An early childhood education system with an ethic of care
‘Transforming Early Childhood’
Values
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‘Transforming Early Childhood’
Pedagogy
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In conclusion
As neoliberalism goes into crisis, there is an opening to think differently…the starting point for radical change
‘As soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult and quite possible’ (Michel Foucault)
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Neoliberalism and early childhood education: markets, imaginaries and governance is published by Routledge
Transforming Early Childhood in England: Towards a democratic education is published by UCL Press
Available free as an open access book at https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/128464