Educational Theories and Pedagogies as Technologies of Power/Knowledge: Educating the Young Child as a Citizen of an Imagined Nation and World

Abstract

This chapter uses a cultural historical approach to focus on early childhood programs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States, and new discursive languages and practices in the early twenty-first century. During the first period, new discourses came to govern the reason through which children, parents, teachers, and programs were constructed as modern, well-educated, developed and civilized (Bloch & Popkewitz, 2000). While I draw on two enlightenment philosophers’ ideas, Rousseau’s and Locke’s, as influences on nineteenth century discourses, transcendental, idealist, and evolutionary social biological theories also framed early childhood pedagogical practices as these were formulated in the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. These discourses are also part of a larger assemblage of constructed imaginaries about which children, parents, teachers, and programs were good, and, by contrast, were also bad, and, therefore, in need of intervention to become better, assimilated citizens in the changing climate of the United States at the turn of the century.

Thank you to my co-editors and others from the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Class, Fall, 2005 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for their comments, help, and discussion. Omissions and faults are my own independent responsibility.