- Title
- Early education and 'the child' as sites of politics: a comparative study of Hungary and Australia
- Creator
- Millei, Zsuzsanna
- Relation
- 37th Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Comparative and International Education Society (ANZCIES 2009). ANZCIES 09: Conference Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference (Armidale, N.S.W. 24-27 November, 2009)
- Relation
- http://www.anzcies.org/conference.php
- Publisher
- University of New England/Australian and New Zealand Comparative and International Education Society
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- A broad body of research considers children and childhood as a ‘substance’ (Foucault, 1994) that different discourses objectify in varying ways, for example, that children are innocent or children are going through phases. We accept these discourses as telling about children’s true nature. I approach the child here rather as a ‘form’ that can vary according to what knowledge was created about this ‘form’ and which knowledge was accepted as true. Following up on an earlier study that examined the shifting conceptualizations of ‘the child’ in Western Australia, I embarked on new research that investigates the ways in which ‘the child’ was thought about in Hungary under state socialism. I chose Hungary because these sites represent two political regimes: socialist/communist and liberal/capitalist, and as such offer different institutional structures for early childhood education. Through the utilization of the constitutions of ‘the child’ I outline from the Hungarian study, I aim to de-stabilize some of the taken-for-granted constitutions of ‘the child’ that are embedded in the recent field of early childhood education in Australia. Another aim of this paper is to report on the initial findings of the Hungarian study. Due to the complexity of the work at hand, I narrowed the focus in this paper to a particular education program document, the Educational program for kindergartens from 1971. The analysis first explores a brief history and the shifting nature of state engagement with early education in Hungary to create a historical and political context for the analysis. Then I move into discussing some of the intellectual traditions by centering on the nature of education this document outlines. This way of proceeding with the analysis enables the creation of a space in which constitutions of ‘the child’ could be identified. By conceptualizing the state as the constructor of educational paths and the interpreter of ‘the child’, I aim to answer the following questions: What conceptualizations of early education this document outlines in Hungary during the socialist period? How these conceptualizations of education constituted ‘the child’ as their subject? The overall question of this paper is: In what ways are constitutions of ‘the child’ in socialist/communist Hungary and in liberal/capitalist Australia today different or similar? This study involves historical refocusing and a conceptual retooling. It also uses an alternative method of history writing, that is, genealogy in a Foucauldian sense.
- Subject
- early childhood education; Australia; Hungary; children; socialism; capitalism
- Identifier
- uon:9104
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/920236
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780909347130
- Full Text
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