The child, the teacher and the school (education)

What is the identity of the preschool? How do we understand knowledge? Who is the child? The great importance attached to this last question, sometimes put as 'What is our image of the child?', reflects an awareness of the many answers that are possible and how the answer chosen is very productive, for better or worse: 

Many different images could be possible: highlighting what the child is and has, can be and can do, or on the contrary emphasizing what the child is not and does not have, what he or she cannot be or do. The image of the child is above all a cultural (and therefore social and political) convention that makes it possible to recognize (or not) certain qualities and potentials in children... What we believe about children thus becomes a determining factor in defining their social and ethical identity, their rights and the educational contexts offered them (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005, p.137).

Educators have to negotiate with children, develop their capacity to listen rather than transmit programmes. We see the context [of the preschool] as a meeting point, of children and adults, which offers more possibilities than we could think about at the beginning... We desire to discover the constructive potentials in the children, to give children the freedom to find out and transform the world. What is important is possibilities, not targets... Our education is 'targeted' to develop children's consciousness that not one single world exists. Pedagogy is the cultivation of many worlds, the opposite of Candide. We must not do our utmost to justify the existing world, [but support] the creative potential of individuals towards the dimension of diversity (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005, p.135). 

This book arises out a lifetime's preoccupation with quest, with pursuit... the quest has been deeply personal... it has been in some sense deeply public as well: that of a person struggling to connect the understanding of education,... to the making and remaking of a public space, a space of dialogue and possibility... The aim is to find (or create) an authentic public space... Such a space requires the provision opportunities for the articulation of multiple perspectives in multiple idioms, of which something common can be brought into being. It requires, as well, a consciousness of the normative as well as the possible: of what ought to be, from a moral and ethical point of view, and what is in the making, what might be in an always open world... My hope is to remind people of what it means to be alone among others; to achieve freedom in dialogue with others for the sake of personal fulfillment and the emergence of a democracy dedicated to life and decency (Greene, 1998, p. 175). 

It is not too much to say that neoliberal goals are embedded in a culture's way of thinking. It not only governs and controls our thinking and action but also raise question on what it means to educate others, or to be educated, well in the neoliberal society.



Reference

Dahlberg, G. & Moss, P. (2005). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer.

Pinar, W. (1998). The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene: I Am...Not Yet. Bristol, PA: Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc. 

Photographs by Esther Han