Time for more storytelling

We believe that the roots of [the converging crises of our times] lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. … We will reassert the role of story-telling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality. (Dark Mountain Project, 2009)

Early childhood education resounds to a rich polyphony of voices, creating many different stories out of a diversity of paradigms, theories and contexts. EECERA has, for many years, provided spaces where these stories can be told, both through its annual conference and its journal. This issue of the journal provides yet another example of this richness, with articles from eight countries on a range of subjects (from maths teaching to multiplicity and complexity to transition to preschool).

Yet turn to policy proposals and pronouncements, and the sound changes – at least in the English-speaking world and among international organisations that think and work in English. The richness of polyphony and the diversity of stories is replaced by the monotonous and repetitive recital of one dominant story, what in a new book I have called the Story of Quality and High Returns (SQHR) (Moss, 2014). Here is just one recent example of this story, taken from my growing collection, retold in this case by President Obama's White House in 2013:

The beginning years of a child's life are critical for building the early foundation needed for success later in school and in life. Leading economists agree that high-quality early learning programs can help level the playing field for children from lower-income families on vocabulary, social and emotional development, while helping students to stay on track and stay engaged in the early elementary grades. Children who attend these programs are more likely to do well in school, find good jobs, and succeed in their careers than those who don't. And research has shown that taxpayers receive a high average return on investments in high-quality early childhood education, with savings in areas like improved educational outcomes, increased labor productivity, and a reduction in crime. (White House, 2013)

The story, in a nutshell, goes like this. Find, invest in and apply the correct human technologies – aka ‘quality’ – during early childhood and you will get high long-term returns on investment including improved education, employment and earnings and reduced social problems. Unequal opportunities will be equalised, uneven playing fields levelled, unfair advantage dispelled. A simple equation beckons and beguiles: ‘early intervention’ + ‘quality’ = increased ‘human capital’ + national success (or at least survival) in a cut-throat global economy – or, as the English government puts it, ‘[m]ore great childcare is vital to ensuring we can compete in the global race’ (Department for Education [England], 2013, 6). Invest early and invest smartly and we will all live happily ever after in a world of more of the same – only more so.

Familiar as it is, I find this story both unsatisfying and troubling. I am left deeply unsatisfied by the story itself and the way it is told: by its lack of curiosity, imagination and originality; by its unquestioning recycling and generalisation of temporally and spatially specific research; by its instrumental rationality and reductionist logic that eschews complexity and context; and by the banality and dullness of its language. Told repeatedly, the SQHR has drained education of its potential to amaze and surprise, to invoke wonder and passion, to emancipate and experiment, leaving instead a lifeless husk of facile repetition and clichéd vocabulary: ‘evidence-based’ … ‘programmes’ … ‘quality’ … ‘investment’ … ‘outcomes’ … ‘effects’ … ‘returns’ … ‘assessment scales’ … ‘human capital’. Not to put too fine a point on it, the story deadens the spirit, reducing the potentially exciting and vibrant subject of early childhood education to ‘one-dimensional linear reductive thinking that excludes and closes off all other ways of thinking and doing’ (Lenz Taguchi, 2010, 17: emphasis in original).

I am troubled, too. The SQHR seeks to drown out other stories. It forgets it is a story, just one of many ways of making sense of the world, just one weaving of reality, just one of many narratives that can be told. Instead, it projects itself as a factual documentary that gives a true account of how the world really is. It strives to become, to use a Foucauldian term, a ‘dominant discourse’, seeking to apply a decisive influence on a particular subject, in this case early childhood education. It does so by projecting and imposing a ‘regime of truth’ that exercises power over our thoughts and actions, directing or governing what we see as the ‘truth’ and how we construct the world: it makes ‘assumptions and values invisible, turn[s] subjective perspectives and understandings into apparently objective truths, and determine[s] that some things are self-evident and realistic while others are dubious and impractical’ (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005, 17). Such dominant discourses exclude other ways of understanding and interpreting the world, marginalising other stories that could be told.

I am troubled, therefore, by the way this SQHR marginalises other storytelling about early childhood education, striving to impose a ‘dictatorship of no alternatives’ (Unger, 2005, 1) on early childhood education. But I am troubled in other ways. The story seems to me incredible. It makes claims, often reduced to crude economics – many dollars back for every $1 invested or, to quote the title of a UK government report ‘smart investment, massive savings’ (Allen, 2011) – that are not only based on shaky foundations, but lack credibility.

To take one example. After decades of telling this story in the US, with endless early interventions programmes and a multitude of research studies, the level of child poverty has changed not at all since President Lyndon Johnson first introduced Head Start back in 1964. The US continues to perform lamentably on almost any international comparison of child or family well-being you care to mention – and this despite being, on paper, one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Whatever small impact early intervention may have had has been overwhelmed by the growing political power of the rich and powerful and by the growing inequality in American society, a condition that Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have so cogently argued ‘seems to make countries socially dysfunctional across a wide range of outcomes’ (2009, 174) – evidence which is seemingly ignored by those who advocate the technical fix of ‘evidence-based’ early interventions as the answer to social dysfunctionality.

Naomi Eisenstadt (2011) comes to a similar conclusion about the likely impact of early intervention in her reflection on what she learnt from leading the English government's ambitious Sure Start programme for its first seven years.

I believe that without significant redistribution of wealth across social classes, where you are born and who your parents are will remain a significant determinant of life chances. … The expectation that early years services, however wonderful, could affect overall inequality was unrealistic. This shift will come from wider social reforms. (160–161)

Stifling diversity and incredulity are not my only problems with the SQHR. I fear its consequences, arising from the will to control and govern children and adults alike that is inscribed in the story – for if you want the promised ‘massive’ returns, so the story goes, you must identify and strictly apply prescriptive programmes intended to achieve prescriptive outcomes. Last but not least, I don't like the politics that pervade the story, with its presumption that the future must be more of the same; its adoption of a paradigm of regulatory modernity; and its image of the child as a unit of human capital, of the educator as a technician and of the early childhood centre as a factory or processing plant – for the effective and efficient production of predetermined outcomes through the effective deployment of human technologies.

But there is one further reason for levelling this accusation of bad politics. Putting too much faith in early childhood education as a ‘technical fix’, or ‘magic potion’, is not only misleading; it is dangerous too. Social, economic and political discontents are transformed into technical problems with technical solutions. By pretending there is an easy solution to many of the profound troubles that confront our societies, and by implying that the cause of these troubles lies in individual failings that can be rectified by ‘early interventions’ and ‘tightly defined programmes’, the SQHR distracts attention from structural inequalities and lets injustice off the hook. After all, if the poor have their Head Start or their Sure Start and still do not do well, then they have only themselves to blame. It is a story of and for the status quo.

Why do we hear this story so much today? Why are our rulers so besotted by a story so instrumental, so economistic, so regulatory in tone and content? One part of the answer must lie in the rampant global spread of neoliberalism. For the SQHR is perfectly suited to a neoliberal regime, with its triumph of the economic over the political and social, its desire to reduce the world to relationships of calculation and contract, its belief in technical and managerial solutions to every issue, and its need to find answers to the social chaos it causes that do not put at risk the inequalities on which it thrives. The aim is to produce subjects, children and adults alike, fit for purpose in a competitive and globalised market economy, subjects who are flexible and compliant, autonomous and self-interested, efficient at meeting targets and driven by the need to be productive. Fit, indeed, for the ‘global race’.

Some readers by this stage may doubt my support for early childhood education. So let me be quite clear. My criticism is not of early childhood education, but of a particularly impoverished and unappealing story and the dominance it has achieved. My support, indeed my enthusiasm, for early childhood education remains undimmed over 40 years, indeed today it is greater than ever.

This enthusiasm comes from a story that I find satisfying and appealing, what I term in my new book The Story of Democracy, Experimentation and Potentiality: a story about early childhood education built upon and inscribed with two fundamental values – democracy and experimentation – and a belief in the endless and unknowable possibilities of people and the institutions they create, a belief expressed by Baruch Spinoza when he said ‘[w]e never know in advance what a body can do’; or by John Dewey when he insists that human experience ‘can have no end until experience itself comes to an end’. This is a story that attaches the utmost importance to early childhood education, but for quite different reasons than the SQHR. My story contests that story and its dictatorial claims, insisting there are alternatives, with different rationales and rationalities – and that all should be heard and debated.

For just as my aim is not to undermine the case for early childhood education, neither is it to impose a new censorship, to replace one dictatorship of no alternative with another. There are many stories to be told about early childhood education, and about education more generally. Others may certainly choose the story of quality and high returns – if they find that story to their liking, if it makes meaning for them of the world and if they acknowledge and welcome the presence of other stories and have, at the very least, taken the trouble to listen to some of them. You may not agree with other stories: but you should be aware they exist, know what some of them say, and only then decide which story you like best and wish to tell.