The Global Construction of Early Childhood in Education Reform Discourse, 1960-2019

• In Event: Global Education Reforms: Discursive Trends and Policy Impact, 1960-2020

Proposal

Globally, early childhood education has expanded significantly in recent decades. Pre-primary enrollment rate has grown from just 16 percent in 1970 to more than 60 percent in 2020. An increasing number of countries have moved towards making pre-primary education free and compulsory. A recent report published by UNESCO calls for better protection of the right to early childhood education in international and national legal frameworks (Bianchi et al., 2022). These efforts to formalize learning at the youngest stages in human lives construct our ideas about what “childhood” should look like, as well as how education in the earliest years should be distinguished from other levels of education. Building on previous work highlighting the social construction of “childhood” as an ideology (Boli-Bennett & Meyer, 1978; Zelizer, 1985), I analyze the trends in education reforms addressing early childhood and specifically what broad rationales are associated with these childhood-focused reforms. Using the World Education Reform Database, a collection of national education reforms from more than 180 countries and territories (ranging years from 1960 to 2019), I look at two dominant rationales often used in reforms: education as a human right and education as building human capital. These two rationales both legitimize education as an important value that governments should invest in but may also have different implications for the kinds of educational changes generated from them. Preliminary findings suggest that a growing proportion of education reforms discuss early childhood over time, whereas other education levels (primary, secondary, and tertiary) remain relatively static. Several country-level factors may explain why reforms increasingly address early childhood: women’s status in society (including their participation in the labor force), pre-primary enrollment rates, population size, and countries’ level of economic development. Reforms that mention early childhood are also more likely to discuss them using human rights discourse but not necessarily human capital. This contrasts with higher education reforms, which are more likely to be discussed with human capital-associated rationales but not human rights. I propose to conduct quantitative analyses to examine these various factors and the trends associated with human rights and human capital discourse. As a result of such analyses, the paper hopes to better understand how “childhood” as an ideology has been globally constructed, generating further ideas and discourse around what education in the early years should entail.

Author

• Minju Choi, Stanford Graduate School of Education