Humanist Utopian Folly

A Rort By Any Other Name

An allegedly damning report on Early Childhood Education ("ECE") in New Zealand has just been released.  Apparently things are terrible.  Just terrible.  But before we look at the details, a brief recap on the recent history of ECE would be in order.

What we now know as ECE was brought in by Helen Clark, the former Labour Prime Minister.  Clark was a hard core feminist ideologue.  To advance the revolution, Clark knew that women needed to be released from the duties of motherhood so that they could foster their careers.  This has long been a theme of the feminist ideology, which has viewed children as an impediment to women achieving and experiencing equality in the workforce.  But Clark was also a pragmatic realist.  She and her feminist cohort knew that the nation would never accept state funded day-care centres for babies and toddlers.  But if they were framed as schools or pre-schools they would be far more acceptable.  So it proved to be.

Thus, Early Childhood Education--a nation-wide network of day-care centres--came into existence.  They are largely funded by the taxpayer.  They are popping up on every suburban street corner.  They are called "pre-schools" to maintain the charade.  But essentially they are places for parents to park their children from the age of zero onwards, whilst adults go to work. In the universal vernacular they are known as Daycare Centres--much to the chagrin of the ideologues.  But the vernacular is accurate.


Part of the original charade was to have ECE administered by the Ministry of Education.  But now we have the hilarious situation where the ECE network is damned as failing dismally in its educational work.  In effect, reality is hitting home: the vast majority of ECE centres are daycare facilities and no more.  But hugely expensive ones, because they have to be staffed by "teachers", trained to be Early Childhood educators.  It's somewhat akin to the government insisting that all domestic meals meet a certain nutritional standard and requiring that all home cooking be done by trained chefs.  The sole result would be a vast rise in household expenditure.

Professor Carmen Dalli is incandescent with righteous indignation.  She has read the recent report on the state of ECE in New Zealand and it is a failure.  People with the barest modicum of common sense will be saying, "I told you so".  Of course it is a failure--and it always will be.  The only things it succeeds at is being the most expensive form of daycare ever conceived.  But, thunders Professor Dalli, children in ECE centres are not being taught properly.  The core curriculum requires that three year olds are taught to be "competent communicators and explorers"--and that teaching must come from teachers who are specially and expensively trained and who are paid salaries commensurate with their specialist "skills". 

ERO's latest report on how well early childhood services are supporting infants and toddlers to be competent communicators and explorers is very sobering.  It highlights again what we have known for some time: there is a need to strengthen specialist training for those working with infants and toddlers in early childhood services. This need was evident in an earlier report by ERO published in 2009. The 2009 report showed that in just under half of the centres, teacher-child interactions did not foster and extend children's interests and ideas.  Additionally, fewer than a quarter of centres had "well-embedded programme planning", meaning that three-quarters of centres did not. . . .

Today's report shows that over the last six years nothing much has changed to improve the quality of infants' and toddlers' experiences in early childhood services. This is despite the fact that the Government has been repeatedly advised of the need to improve provision for this youngest age group, including by the Sector Advisory Group which Government itself set up in 2012 to make recommendations on exactly this issue. [NZ Herald. Emphasis, ours.]

But it's not just the training that makes it expensive.  It is the "required" teacher-pupil ratio:

. . . the ability of adults to engage in one-to-one interactions with infants and toddlers is directly related to there being enough adults to go round. Research shows that for this to happen a ratio of 1 adult to 3 under-twos is ideal and 1:4 is good enough.

ECE centres are now awash with children under three.  In order for these children to be "taught" how to be "competent communicators and explorers" there needs to be an expensively trained ECE "teacher" for every three children.

Let's cut to the chase.  In effect the agitprop is all about ECE centres providing surrogate mothers for children.  The kids are to be divided up into little families of three, and a surrogate mother is to "teach" the children to be "competent communicators and explorers" as well as changing their soiled nappies, feeding them, and taking general care of them--something which, apparently, their natural parents are completely incompetent to do.  After all, those dumb stupid parents have not had the benefit of years of ECE teacher training.

We predict that the ECE crusade will turn out to be a miserable failure.  In the meantime, however, expect regular incandescent explosions from experts angry that their utopian visions are not being realised.