Neoliberalism,neoconservativism,and globalisation: The OECD and new images of what is ‘best’ in early childhood education

Introduction

The general creep of globalising, neoconservative and neoliberal discourses into education is being positioned as the language of ‘common sense’ in contemporary times (Apple, 2004). Apple (2001) asserts that

We are living in a period of crisis…We are told by neo-liberals that only by turning our schools, teachers, and children over to the competitive market will we find a solution. We are told by neo-conservatives that the only way out is to return to ‘real knowledge’. Popular knowledge, knowledge that is connected to and organised around the lives of the most disadvantaged members of our communities, is not legitimate. (p. 409)

As articulated by Apple (2001) above, there are moments when a society is encouraged to promote one form of education over another. When particular discourses and their attendant stories become dominant, one must ask, adopting a Foucauldian gaze: where does the power lie and whom does the discourse serve (Foucault, 1980b)? Foucault sought to interrupt normative discourses and refute the notion of a singular ‘truth’ (Foucault and Miskowiec, 1986). He argued that instead of a contiguous actuality which must be obeyed, ‘truth’ is the product of discursive language and practice that normalises behaviours so that the individual conforms without even realising the ways in which s/he is being subjugated. The present efforts to determine a ‘best’ form of early childhood education, a singular truth that is offered as both objective and universal, through the assessment strategy known as the International Early Learning and Child Well-Being Study (hereafter known as the IELS) raise profound questions about how power and knowledge are intertwined, who is benefitting from the path which is being chosen, and how the discourse of which IELS is part may lead to a form of self-governing (by children, educators, parents and others).

Education is a domain in which a diverse range of individuals participate and multiple ways of being converge. Back in 1999, Dahlberg, Moss and Pence (1999) identified a dominant ‘language of early childhood’ which echoes the intentions of the IELS, promoting school performance, desirable outcomes, cost-effectiveness and ‘most pervasive of all, the language of quality’ (p. 1). Despite the work of Dahlberg, Moss and Pence (1999) provoking many scholars to rethink and reimagine understandings of quality, this dominant language of early childhood is still promulgated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), stimulating neoliberal, neoconservative and globalising discourses through its promotion of language, gazes and technologies. Discourses serve to normalise theories, and thus impact upon people’s behaviours; discourses reinforce cultural dogmas surrounding conceptual ideals (Foucault, 1971). It is therefore of concern that the language of ‘common sense’ and what’s best, and the way education is viewed in terms of economic rationality and ‘investment’ (Delaune, 2017) dominate within the IELS. Alternative discourses and the people who sustain them are marginalised, and diversity and multiple perspectives ignored.

This article starts with a brief outline and analysis of the IELS in order to illustrate the tensions between the study, the decontextualisation of the child, the educational ‘values’ of the OECD, and how these infer and ascribe a vision of what is ‘best’ in early childhood education. Following this section, a more specific analysis of the underlying neoliberal, neoconservative and globalising discourses informing the IELS, and the ways in which the OECD epitomises the power/knowledge dynamic will be articulated. Finally, concluding statements will be made that will highlight concerns about the future of democracy when this path of education expressed in the dominant discourses is undertaken, but also offer Foucault’s understanding of the notion of resistance and subsequently hope, concluding that those who struggle can optimise the productive nature of power and generate change.

Educational ‘values’, decontextualisation and ‘what’s best’ in early childhood education

The IELS entered a ‘main study’ phase in 2018 in a ‘first wave’ of assessment involving three countries (England, Estonia and the USA). The English Department for Education (DfE) released International early learning and child well-being study (IELS) in England: Introduction to the research in August 2018, which outlines how England participated in the field trial for the IELS conducted in 2017 and how the country will participate in the 2018 study. The National Centre for Educational Statistics (NCES) summarised the participation of the USA in a website page devoted to the IELS launched in December, 2017 (National Centre for Educational Statistics USA, 2017). On this website, they identify the USA as one of ‘several other countries’ participating in the field test (there are two others), and state that the USA will continue with the main study in 2018. The IELS is described as providing ‘the opportunity to better understand the skills and competencies of US children at the beginning of primary school and how they compare to the skill profiles of 5-year-olds in other countries’ (National Centre for Educational Statistics USA, 2017). Where the NCES writes that the IELS is the opportunity to see how ‘early education and care systems prepare children for primary school’ (National Centre for Educational Statistics USA, 2017), the DfE writes that the IELS maintains a holistic approach which ‘is innovative and particularly important in order to give a rounded picture of children’s development’ (p. 9). There seems to be a divergence of vision between these participating countries, showing the tensions which may arise from the data collected in the study. (The author has been unable to find any online reference from Estonia about that country’s participation in the IELS).

Whether the children who participate in the study are contextualised or are treated homogeneously in order to produce ‘comparability’ is an important question to ask, and one that is not adequately addressed by the participating countries. The OECD’s approach to context is limited. In addition to collecting data by assessment on four domains of children’s development – emergent literacy, emergent numeracy, self-regulation, and empathy and trust – the IELS will collect information about children’s individual background (including age, gender, language, immigration background, parental SES and family composition), home learning environment (including relations to the child, activities with the child, and home learning), and early childhood education and care experiences (including age of entry, duration, frequency, type of Early Childhood Education and Care setting(ECEC). What is not being collected is more contextually relevant and diverse information, which would not be easily assimilated into the cross-national comparisons being sought within this large-scale study, such as local understandings of what is valuable in education, the voice of the child, and the values of the parents and families. The ‘decontextualised’ child who thus emerges from the IELS, who is moulded to fit the educational values of the OECD, may be more easily comparable to similarly decontextualised children of other countries – but this is achieved at the expense of a holistic view of the child and her pedagogical environment, and cannot apprehend the rich diversity and complexity of children, childhoods and pedagogies. Instead, this decontextualised child is fashioned to promote the dominant language of ‘quality education’, and a ‘desire for a clean and orderly world, devoid of messiness and complexity’ (Dahlberg et al., 2001: 2).

The child is not the only participant to be decontextualised by cross-national standardised assessments such as the IELS; they can have an adverse effect on the contextual knowledge of teachers, thereby undermining its value. Viewed through an understanding of the effects of the power/knowledge dynamic, the lived experiences of teachers with children and families is minimised in favour of external assessors who measure, audit and assess educational ‘outcomes’. The development of these assessment tools, in which data is taken from the educators and analysed without their involvement at any stage of the process, constitutes the workings of power relationships between teachers on the one hand and assessors and policymakers on the other, who may well hold different values and beliefs regarding approaches to pedagogy. Such treatment of teachers and the act of education is informed by ‘a broader drive to position policymaking as a technocratic exercise, to be undertaken by an elite band of experts who are immune to the influence of politics and ideology’ (Morris, cited in Moss et al., 2016: 346). This ‘broader drive’ seeks to reduce the contextualised and interpretive act of teaching to a set of mechanistic technical practices, which can be self-regulated and self-monitored by teachers themselves against a standardised set of ‘desired practices’, as well as being easily externally monitored.

The value of studying the child and teacher in context was more prevalent within earlier studies undertaken by the OECD; recommendations for policy design advised governments to view children and childhoods as inextricable from their contextual settings. For instance, the inaugural report, Starting Strong I, (OECD, 2001), a study of early childhood policies and services in 20 member states from the OECD’s initial Starting Strong project running from 1996 to 2006, recognised the existence of the ‘diverse views of children’ (OECD, 2001: 8) and recommended the ‘need for policy makers to become aware of national or cultural constructions of childhood…[as] this variability imposes caution and sensitivity to context’ (p. 63). This report also articulated the importance of a participatory approach to quality improvement, proposing in particular that ‘defining, ensuring, and monitoring quality should be a participatory and democratic process that engages staff, parents and children’ (OECD, 2011: 11).

This earlier study of early childhood education by the OECD, and its two major reports Starting Strong I and II (OECD, 2006), explored diversity between countries in a positive way. There was not the impetus to decontextualise in the interests of defining a universal ‘what’s best’ and to promote the replication of pedagogical practices in other milieus with indifference to their cultural compatibility. While some nations were found to positively benefit from educational goals based on ‘school readiness’, other nations found these goals to be antithetical to their understandings of the purpose of education (OECD, 2001). These and other differences were viewed as characteristics of unique and functioning systems, rather than symptoms of broken ones.

The OECD subsequently changed its perspective. Later reports, Starting Strong III (OECD, 2011) and Starting Strong IV (OECD, 2015b), sought to critique diverse practices, displace local understandings and values, and foster unification of early childhood aims and goals, situating diversity in tension with ‘quality’. To mitigate these ‘risks’ to ‘quality’, Starting Strong III (OECD, 2011) was presented as a ‘A quality toolbox for early childhood education and care’. The writers for the OECD select images of ‘best’ practices being enacted within the member countries to function as ‘practical solutions for anyone with a role to play in encouraging quality in ECEC’ (p. 15). The IELS is furthering this ‘what’s best’ aim, with narrow areas of development being assessed, and advancing particular educational ‘values’ which generate desired images.

This shifting perspective and approach of the OECD towards early childhood education demonstrates a desire to promote particular forms of learning over others, and a singular ‘truth’ about what’s best, rather than to explore and understand other ideas, other knowledge and other truths, and to value the diversity of early childhood experiences that exist. As Moss (2017) has argued, and as the IELS demonstrates, the danger of OECD’s dominant discourse, the story of quality and high returns, lies in a preference for simplicity and standardisation over complexity and diversity. As a consequence, the OECD promotes particular and narrowly defined domains of learning as ‘best’, couching their educational ‘values’ within the neoliberal economic discourse, and setting a narrow scope for children to learn and develop within. As Foucault (1996) observes ‘power is not a thing, it is a relationship between two individuals […] such that one can direct the behaviour of another or determine the behaviour of another’ (p. 410). Within this narrow view of the early educational world where language and numeracy are privileged, there is little room, for example, for the artistic and creative expressions of the child. Instead, the IELS is setting the terms of engagement within early childhood education by privileging letters over art, numbers over dance, self-regulation over music, and so on.

This matters because the OECD has a strong impact on governments’ education policy as the next section will show. Owing to the influence of studies such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the OECD has assumed the position of international adviser on education policies and practices. This position of global power raises questions about the particular educational views that the OECD is choosing to promulgate, which in turn raises concerns about the OECD’s advancement of particular political ideologies. Some have argued that the OECD maintains a non-partisan status (see Thrupp, 2014). But others contend that the OECD promotes the shared values of OECD member countries, including a ‘commitment to liberal democracy, market economics, and human rights’ (Woodward, 2009: 715); and further that it endorses a particular ideology of governance, based upon neoliberal precepts, through its adoption of international large-scale assessments of educational systems (Sellar and Lingard, 2013). From this perspective, the research conducted by the OECD is not independent, as Thrupp (2014) conceived it, but instead deeply embedded in specific world views, particularly the promotion of market ‘sensibilities’ within democratic societies (Foucault, 2012).

The OECD’s world view is also paradigmatic, adopting but apparently unaware of the ‘hyper-positivistic’ paradigm in which it is operating (Moss et al., 2016: 346). This positivist perspective causes the OECD, in its development of the IELS, to be seemingly unaware of a large body of critical, reconceptualising research focussed upon early childhood education (Urban and Swadener, 2016), work that adopts other paradigmatic positions. However, perhaps it is not a lack of awareness that has led to the OECD ignoring such literature and the issue of paradigm, but rather the specific paradigmatic position it has assumed on early childhood education, namely positivism’s denial of alternative perspectives.

Despite the well-documented existence of alternate forms of conceiving ‘learning’ and the promotion of other ‘truths’ (Moss, 2014), the dominant discourse in early childhood education, neoliberal and positivist, persists. Such discourses maintain social inequities by reducing space for transformative educational practices (Moss, 2017) and by the enactment of power relationships which do ‘not act directly and immediately on others…[but rather] act upon their actions’ (Foucault, 1982: 785). These relationships constrain others not through direct force and violent coercion, but indirectly by removing the power of others to move freely, by subtle tensions which restrict their capacity and impetus to move themselves from where they are, and by blinding them to how they are constrained and how momentum can be achieved.

Neoliberal, neoconservative and globalising discourses promoted through the IELS

According to Foucault (2008), governance within the economic model involves regulating not in response to legality or moral correctness, but to promote a positive economy; the value of these effects will be in their economic success or failure. Nation states comply with this vision out of a desire to remain competitive within the global market and the fear of being economically disadvantaged. The OECD advances neoliberal, neoconservative and globalising discourses, arguing, for example, that ‘in an increasingly global economy, countries find more value than ever before in comparing progress across countries, sharing best practices and improving ECEC globally’ (OECD, 2011: 293). Situating progress, globalisation, and economics alongside each other in relation to the governance of early childhood education involves the development of a power/knowledge dynamic, a dynamic already apparent in responses to PISA.

As already noted, the OECD has established a strong influence over national education policies, based on its international assessments of student performance, especially PISA. Sireci (2015) states that the results of PISA ‘cannot be overestimated because they influence educational policy decisions across the globe’ (p. 1). These results position countries in order of their performance ‘to indicate who is better and who is best’ (Biesta, 2010: 10). Governments subsequently become concerned that what is ‘best’ in education should be guided by the findings of these studies and by the OECD’s recommendations, rather than question the methods deployed and the gazes they and the OECD promote and normalise.

This process of self-governing through PISA manifests itself in various ways. In response to the PISA rankings, some countries compare and alter their curricular approaches to emulate highly performing countries, hoping by so doing to improve their nation’s performance, a process of ‘globalisation’ which transforms teaching and learning within individual nations (Burbules and Torres, 2000). Some countries focus on changing educational practices as a result of their performance on PISA, for instance increasing the frequency and narrowing the scope of national and local testing in order to train their students to perform better in PISA (Berliner, 2011). Other countries adopt policies of higher-ranked countries ‘wholesale’ without consideration of context, or what local practices they will replace (Ercikan et al., 2015). Yet other countries, in response to the narrow bands of learning assessed within PISA (and potentially the IELS) promote a neoconservative ‘back to basics’ approach to education, limiting the scope of educational subjects and enhancing a ‘technical’ approach to teaching by shifting pedagogy away from the contextualised knowledge of the teacher in favour of standardised instruction and a ‘one-size-fits-all’ curriculum.

By leading to an impoverished vision of education, through narrowing the curriculum and modifying teacher practices towards a more instructive mode of engagement with students (Berliner, 2011; Labaree, 2014), standardised assessments may, therefore, reduce creativity, self-fulfilment, and exposure to a variety of possibilities capable of developing children’s nascent talents beyond the confines of curricular basics (Zhao, 2011). In this way, the OECD has developed strategies of soft governance, disseminating particular educational ‘values’ and promoting global changes, repositioning power relationships between countries, governments, families and educational settings (Bieber and Martens, 2011). The OECD’s position as a ‘global administrator’ and international adviser on education epitomises the power/knowledge relationship, in that the OECD’s position of influence is used to determine and endorse certain knowledges and a ‘best’ form of education, and to normalise certain educational values over others.

The power of the OECD through PISA, and other assessments it is developing such as the IELS, threatens the ‘autonomy of national educational systems and the sovereignty of the nation-state as the ultimate ruler in democratic societies’ (Burbules and Torres, 2000: 4). Through this power, the OECD is becoming not only a ‘global administrator’ and international adviser on education, but the architect of the ‘global educational policy field’ (Sellar and Lingard, 2014: 917), a key part of a wider role of directing ‘globalism’ arising from the organisation’s unique position to both respond to globalism and to frame it in a particular way (Sellar and Lingard, 2013). In this context of OECD’s global governing role and drawing on Foucault’s understanding of relationships of power/knowledge, questions need to be raised regarding the effects of the IELS as a technology contributing to the OECD’s ‘soft governance’, which not only repositions power relationships between countries, governments, families and educational settings, but between nation states and the OECD.

Within the global market in which the OECD plays such an important role, traditional factors of production are viewed to be inferior to the new global currencies of knowledge and information technologies, reconfiguring the relationship between education (particularly early education) and ‘profitability’ (Farquhar, 2008). The ranking of children in the context of a ‘knowledge economy’ (Roberts, 2004) situates them in a new relationship between skills, knowledge, and ‘competitiveness’. Given that knowledge is considered a form of ‘currency’ within the global market, and that children in some countries will be ranked as having more ‘knowledge’ than those in other countries, it would follow that (within the logic of the neoliberal market) children in one country will be considered to have more ‘currency’ than others owing to the IELS country rankings. The demand of neoliberalism that individuals constantly produce evidence of their worth in society, demonstrating their levels of enterprise and production (Apple, 2004), will thus be extended into the early years through the IELS. In this way, the study will reify neoliberal images of the child, as individuals who are valued in ‘market terms’ (Davies et al., 2005: 347), and in turn the ‘IELS child’ will be seen as a measure which will rank a nation.

This discursive construction of the child goes beyond previous neoliberal incarnations of the child as current and future human capital, and draws children and families into more complex and potentially destructive relationships of governance. There are political and ethical ramifications for this image of the child which need to be considered at length and in depth. Yet, as articulated by Moss (2017), the danger lies in the replacement under neoliberalism of the political and ethical by the ‘technical’. The consequent normalisation of these visions of the child – as a quantifiable subject who should be measured and ranked in relation to other children in other countries in order to ‘improve’ early childhood education – obfuscates the ethical repercussions of this act.

Issues of consent also need to be considered as one of the ethical conundrums surrounding the determination of a child’s ‘currency’. Children are placed into a compromised position when expected to participate within the IELS without being extended the right to consent or refuse (Moss and Urban, 2017). Within neoliberal paradigms, individuals ‘must always be ready to be rejected as relevant players if they are no longer of any value’ (Davies et al., 2005: 347), yet the children who are a part of this study have been offered no explanations of the implications if they do participate, and been given no choice whether or not to participate in the first place. Children are not only expected to submit to participation, but also to be ready to accept the possible failure which may stem from a lower-ranked performance. As one of the principles for the design of the IELS is to ensure the well-being of the children within the study (OECD, 2017: 14), it is reasonable to argue that positioning children in this way through a questionable form of assessment is not only bringing children’s well-being into jeopardy directly, but also indirectly through the interdependent nature of well-being between child, family and society.

Assessing young children according to standardised measures – locally, nationally or internationally – is a movement spurred on by ‘contemporary preoccupations with assessment, accountability and value for money’ (Crossley, 2000: 320), within a dominant economic discourse of neoliberalism. International large-scale assessments, such as PISA and TIMMS (‘Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study’, a series of international assessments of the mathematics and science knowledge of students under the auspices of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement), have emerged and grown within this neoliberal climate, promoting the measurement of students to assess their future viability within the global market. The IELS is similarly inscribed with economic rationality, seeking to ensure that governmental ‘investments’ into early childhood education are being realised through children’s performances by evaluating the ‘economic legitimacy’ of particular educational strategies. Within the Call for Tenders (OECD, 2015a) a document issued at the outset of the study, the OECD claims that ‘as nations increase their public and private investments to support the care and education of young children, it is to be expected that they will want information about the contributions of these investments’ (p. 32).

Reinforcing Nussbaum’s (2010) view that nations are ‘thirsty for profit’, Moss et al. (2016) highlight that recent OECD studies have moved towards ‘a discourse of outcomes and investment’ (p. 344). The IELS promotes such a hegemonic economic gaze, and in the process severely limits the ability of families and communities to freely determine and enact their educational visions for their children.

Conclusion

Neoliberal, neoconservative and globalising discourses in education today are interwoven with each other and actualised collectively. Neoliberal desires to ‘compete within the market’ create a need to compare performance ‘potential’ globally; in turn, globalisation transforms concepts of teaching and learning in individual nations towards a more standardised neoconservative approach. The narrow skills advanced through neoconservative approaches are then hailed as the most assured way to ensure individuals can participate and compete in the global market. The interactive process of reinforcement and reification between and within these discourses position them and the visions they offer as the only way – there is no alternative – to reduce the space for possible alternatives and maintain social injustices. The governments of participating countries in the IELS study demonstrate a lack of cohesion as to the specific purpose and intentions of the study, yet can clearly articulate their desires to use the data to ‘compare’ the performance of their children with other nations, and subsequently seek to ‘enhance’ this performance in order to remain ‘competitive’ in the global market. To compare children, they are decontextualised and moulded to fit the educational values of the OECD. The IELS will project a ‘best’ education and ‘appropriate’ educational ‘values’, which align with the desires of the OECD acting as the architect of the ‘global educational policy field’.

The consequences of depoliticising children’s participation in the IELS, combined with a neoconservative approach to education and a global and neoliberal vision of the child, could realise the bleak vision predicted by Martha Nussbaum when she writes,

Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements. (Nussbaum, 2010: 2)

The IELS is a form of insipient governmentality (Foucault, 1979), but Foucault emphasises the notion that ‘there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight’ (Foucault, 1982: 794). Foucault (1996) writes,

what I mean by power relations is the fact that we are in a strategic situation toward each other…When we deal with the government, the struggle, of course, is not symmetrical, the power situation is not the same; but we are in this struggle, and the continuation of this situation can influence the behavior or nonbehavior of the other. So we are not trapped. We are always in this kind of situation. It means that we always have possibilities, there are always possibilities of changing the situation. We cannot jump outside the situation, and there is no point where you are free from all power relations. But you can always change it. (Foucault, 1996: 167)

Power is productive: when power is enacted something is produced. Power is not autocratic, a matter of force and compulsion, within the Foucauldian conception, nor is it ‘top-down’; it is instead a tension which is dependent upon certain expressions of autonomy and self-determination. Foucault (1982) writes ‘when one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others … one includes an important element: freedom’ (Foucault, 1982: 790). As the ‘others’ in the relationship of power, all citizens who disagree with the interpretation of ‘education’ expressed by the OECD, and manifested in its international assessments such as PISA and IELS, are incited to exercise this inherent freedom, to highlight the spaces where alternate forms of early childhood education presently exist, and to refuse to submit to these impending technologies of assessment. These spaces may be presently available for educators to view (Davies, 2014; Moss, 2018; Rinaldi, 2004), or else, while in existence and flourishing, may as yet be undocumented, for example within smaller settings. Spaces where children are respected, listened to and their individuality and diversity is enhanced are spaces to be upheld, for the teachers within these spaces demonstrate the strength of the ‘struggle’ and the hope which underpins it.