Table Of ContentThe Child in the World/The World in the Child
Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood
Series Editors:
Marianne Bloch (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Gaile Sloan Cannella (Arizona State University Tempe)
Beth Blue Swadener (Arizona State University Tempe)
This series will focus on reframings of theory, research, policy, and pedagogies in
childhood. A critical cultural study of childhood is one that offers a “prism” of pos-
sibilities for writing about power and its relationship to the cultural constructions of
childhood, family, and education in broad societal, local, and global contexts. Books
in the series will open up new spaces for dialogue and reconceptualization based on
critical theoretical and methodological framings, including critical pedagogy, advo-
cacy and social justice perspectives, cultural, historical and comparative studies of
childhood, post-structural, postcolonial, and/or feminist studies of childhood, family,
and education. The intent of the series is to examine the relations between power,
language, and what is taken as normal/abnormal, good and natural, to understand the
construction of the “other,” difference and inclusions/exclusions that are embedded
in current notions of childhood, family, educational reforms, policies, and the prac-
tices of schooling. Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood will open up dialogue
about new possibilities for action and research.
Single authored as well as edited volumes focusing on critical studies of childhood
from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives are included in the series. A
particular focus is in a re-imagining as well as critical reflection on policy and practice
in early childhood, primary, and elementary education. It is the series intent to open
up new spaces for reconceptualizing theories and traditions of research, policies,
cultural reasonings and practices at all of these levels, in the United States, as well as
comparatively.
The Child in the World/The
World in the Child
Education and the Configuration
of a Universal, Modern, and
Globalized Childhood
Edited by
Marianne N. Bloch, Devorah Kennedy,
Theodora Lightfoot, and Dar Weyenberg
THECHILDINTHEWORLD/THEWORLDINTHECHILD
© Marianne N. Bloch, Devorah Kennedy, Theodora Lightfoot, and Dar
Weyenberg, 2006.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-7497-6
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2006 by
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Companies and representatives throughout the world.
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-53567-5 ISBN 978-0-230-60166-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230601666
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The child in the world : the world in the child : education and the
configuration of a universal, modern, and globalized childhood / edited
by Marianne N. Bloch…[et al.].
p. cm.––(Critical cultural studies of childhood)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-349-53567-5
1. Comparative education. 2. Education,
Elementary––Standards––Cross-cultural studies. 3. Curriculum
change––Cross-cultural studies. 4. Education and state––Cross-cultural
studies. 5. Education and globalization––Cross-cultural studies. I. Bloch,
Marianne N. II. Series.
LB43.C45 2006
372(cid:1).9––dc22 2006044795
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface vii
Beth Blue Swadener, Gaile S. Cannella, Marianne N. Bloch
Foreword: Hopes of Inclusion/Recognition and Productions of Difference ix
Thomas S. Popkewitz
Acknowledgments xv
Part 1 The Child in the World
Introduction: Education and the Global/Local Construction
of the Universal, Modern, and Globalized
Child, School, and Nation 3
Marianne N. Bloch, Devorah Kennedy, Theodora Lightfoot,
and Dar Weyenberg
Part 2 Governing the Universal, Modern
Child and Family
Chapter 1 Educational Theories and Pedagogies as
Technologies of Power/Knowledge: Educating
the Young Child as a Citizen of an Imagined
Nation and World 21
Marianne N. Bloch
Chapter 2 Configuring the Jewish Child: Intersections of
Pedagogy and Cultural Identity 43
Devorah Kennedy
Chapter 3 Problematizing Asian American Children as
“Model” Students 63
Susan Matoba Adler
Part 3 Governing the Modern and Normal
Child through Pedagogical Discourses
Chapter 4 Language Learning, Language Teaching,
and the Construction of the Young Child 81
Theodora Lightfoot
Chapter 5 The Quest for Health in Different Timespaces 99
Dar Weyenberg
vi Contents
Chapter 6 How Might Teachers of Young Children
Interrogate Images as Visual Culture? 118
Nancy Pauly
Chapter 7 The System of Reasoning the Child in
Contemporary Japan 143
Jie Qi
Chapter 8 The Specter of the Abnormal Haunts the
Child: A Historical Study of the
“Problem-child” in Brazilian
Educational Discourses 157
Ana Laura Godinho Lima
Part 4 Governing the Modern and Post-Modern
Citizen and Nation through Universal
Reforms in Education
Chapter 9 No Child Left Behind? The Specters of
Almsgiving and Atonement: A Short Genealogy
of the Saving Grace of U.S. Education 177
Karen S. Pena
Chapter 10 Illusions of Social Democracy: Early Childhood
Educational Voucher Policies in Taiwan 195
I-Fang Lee
Chapter 11 The Foundation Stage Child in a Shifting Sea:
A History of the Present of the United Kingdom’s
Education Act 2002 212
Ruth L. Peach
Contributors 230
Index 233
Series Editors’ Preface
This book is the first in a series, Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood,
focusing on reframings of theory, research, policy and pedagogies in child-
hood. As longtime colleagues in the “reconceptualizing early childhood”
movement, we have discussed for many years ways in which critical cul-
tural studies of childhood offer a complex array of possibilities for writing
about power and its relationship to the cultural constructions of childhood,
family, education, and public policy in broad societal, local, and global
contexts. Our intentions for this series include opening up new spaces for
dialogue and reconceptualization based on critical theoretical and method-
ological framings, including critical pedagogy, advocacy and social justice
perspectives, cultural, historical and comparative studies of childhood, post-
structural, postcolonial (anticolonial), and feminist studies of childhood,
family, and education. As such, this series provides a space for scholarship
examining the relations between power, language, and what is taken as
normal/abnormal, good and natural, understanding the construction of the
“other,” difference and inclusions/exclusions that are embedded into
current and prevailing notions of childhood, family, educational reforms,
policies, and the practices of schooling.
The child in the world/The world in the child: education and the configuration of
a universal, modern and globalized childhoodembodies several of these complex
theoretical framings of prevailing discourses and governmentalities related
to ongoing reconceptualist and critical cultural studies debates in early
childhood as well as elementary education studies. These debates, in partic-
ular, focus a critical theoretical attention on the historicity and politics of
education as these are reflected in the constructions of childhood, educa-
tion, schooling, family as universal, and in need of being universal, within
an increasingly complex, globalizing world. In particular, this volume
relates to increasing calls for standards, the “universal” child, and the
“need” for greater accountability and “best practices” in a range of policies
affecting children and families. Such policies and advocacy discourses are
often based on social prescriptions for populations that comprise the
“other.” Chapters draw from scholarship in the United States, Japan,
Brazil, England, and Taiwan to help frame how the ideas of modernity and
a universal child, as well as standards and policies for all, travel across
borders, and are positioned differently within different localities, and
viii Series Editors’ Preface
“timespaces.” The chapters address early and elementary education issues,
with foci on “the child,” “the curriculum,” and “the world.”
Contributing authors draw primarily from Foucauldian and postcolonial
perspectives and evoke, with Alvermann (2000) and Deleuze and Guattari
(1987), the metaphor of a “rhizomatic” space where it is possible to “question
and re-examine the striated space—our commonplace understandings,
without being so abstract or so open that our analysis has no connection
and no meaning” (Bloch, Kennedy, Lightfoot, & Weyenberg, Introduction,
this volume). Using a range of primarily poststructural methodologies, con-
tributors provide textual and discursive analysis of classroom observations,
policy documents, popular media, curricula, interview narratives, and other
“texts,” all of which are linked to power/knowledge relationships and
implicit governing patterns.
Representing several disciplines, many of the chapter authors have
studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which can be described as
one of the birthplaces of the reconceptualist movement in early childhood,
and a space that reflects a substantial critical and postmodern curriculum
theory legacy. As such, the contributors to this volume have formed a
community of scholars concerned with troubling dominant theories and
paradigms in education and policymaking, particularly in terms of global-
ized discourses that construct the “normal” and “desirable.”
Ranging from close readings of curricular and classroom discourse texts
in several disciplines to cross-national critical policy studies, all chapters
interrogate the notion of universal “best practice” or “best policies” for all.
Consistent with the general themes and problematics of the new book
series, this book opens space for more subtle and complex understandings
of the child in the world, and adds to a postmodern critique of policies and
practices that purport to be for “all,” while excluding or providing different
education for those who are constructed as different or deficient.
Beth Blue Swadener
Gaile S. Cannella
Marianne Bloch
Series Editors
References
Alvermann, D. E. (2000). “Researching Libraries, Literacies and Lives: A Rhizoanalysis.” In
E. St. Pierre and W. Pillow (Eds.), Working the Ruins, Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in
Education(pp. 114–129). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia(trans. Brian
Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foreword: Hopes of Inclusion/Recognition
and Productions of Difference
This volume brings to the fore a particular set of intellectual questions and
strategies for studying schooling. The studies ask the following questions
albeit through a family of resemblances. How does it become possible to
think and act as we do? How are the subjectivities through which we act
and “think” produced historically? And, How do “thought” and reason
function as practices that produce systems of inclusion and exclusion?
The concern with “thought” and reason is to rethink the politics of
schooling. If I look at critical studies in social science and education, the
problem of power is one that assumes a notion of sovereignty. The under-
lying question is how power is exercised to enable the rulers to rule and
others to be ruled. Critiques of neoliberal policies are an example. The
emphasis is on, for example, who benefits and is handicapped through
school vouchers and market-oriented reforms. The end point of such
research is locating the origin of power in order to provoke challenges and
locate the origins of those that prevent change. In this critical tradition,
studies of the family and child make the knowledge of schooling for exam-
ples, an epiphenomenon to transcendental social forces, or the reverse as a
hermeneutic that makes context as natural, the voice of the “real” teacher
as removed from history.
The current volume offers a complementary yet different notion of
power. The concern is with the systems of reason through which the
objects of reflection and participation are produced. My linking notions of
reflection and participation here is not accidental. It is to recognize that
knowledge is not merely about “ideas” that represent social or political
interests of the real. A particular “fact” of modernity is that power is exer-
cised less through brute force and more through systems of reason that
order and classify what is known and acted on.1 This notion of power is
important today as exemplified most feminist studies, critical race theories
and postcolonial scholarship. The rules and standards of reason are effects of
power that generate principles about who we are and should be; and thus
stand not against the real but are embodied in its productions. Therefore,
the studies in this book can be read as challenging the adequacy of struc-
tural descriptions that do not take into account knowledge as an effect of
