This article unpacks how neoliberal discourse functions as a dominant but problematic system of reasoning that changes and shifts the ways in which we come to think about early childhood education and care. A post-structuralist lens is deployed to understand the production of fears and hopes under the looming shadows of contemporary education reforms and social policies. Highlighting Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea as three cases from East Asian cultures, this article seeks to elucidate how a similar neoliberal economic and political imaginary is at work to (re)construct East Asian children as human capital for the alchemy of productive citizens in the 21st century.
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Unpacking neoliberal policies: Interrupting the global and local production of the norms Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) has been constructed as a new site for educational, sociocultural, political, and economic investment. Coupled with such a growing and popular recognition of ECEC as a significant period of children's learning and development are critical issues concerning accountability, affordability, and accessibility to quality education and care for all. Highlighting the preschool education systems in Taiwan and Hong Kong as two examples from Asia, this paper aims to open up a discursive space for reconceptualizing the effects of neoliberal discourse and how such a system of reasoning reconstructed notions of inclusion/exclusion to limit the making of quality education and the provision of care for all.
[Copyright of Journal of Pedagogy is the property of Faculty of Education, Trnava University / Centre for Research in Education, Slovak Academy of Sciences.
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