European states differ tremendously in the extent to which their national education systems administer preschool programs, and whether or not these services can serve as day care for working parents This article traces contemporary policy differences in three countries—France, Sweden, and Germany—to the effects of nineteenthcentury conflicts between religious and secular forces over education Intense, clericalanticlerical conflict in France led to the incorporation of preschools into the national education system In Sweden and Germany, the more accommodating relationship between church and state assured that no such incorporation took place These decisions had lasting consequences for the nature and extensiveness of child care services for preschool-aged children

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Forging the Frontiers Between State, Church, and Family: Religious Cleavages and the Origins of Early Childhood Education and Care Policies in France, Sweden, and Germany:

In the early world of the Israeli Jewish child, the kindergarten is the dominant molder of experiences beyond the intimacy of the family. The kindergarten initiates the lengthy process by which child is turned into citizen, in large measure through the state system of education. Between the ages of two and six, the great bulk of Israeli Jewish children attend kindergarten on a weekday basis throughout the school year (Shamgar-Handelman 1990). Within the kindergarten, the child participates frequently in two sorts of event that practice aspects of an ethos of statism and citizenship. One that we addressed elsewhere (Shamgar-Handelman and Handelman 1986) is the celebration of annual national and traditional holidays. The other is the birthday party, a celebration of age. In that earlier essay we argued that the implicit designs and practices of these holiday occasions operate to shift the allegiance of the little child from a social order within which the only hierarchy is that of the family to one dominated by the civil collectivity, within which the family is allocated a subordinate place. This shift in the child's perception of hierarchy [however it is accomplished in different social orders] is crucial to the reproduction, from generation to generation, of the hegemony of the modern state. In this essay we discuss the pervasive motif of the birthday party, that of exact age. Ostensibly the party celebrates age for the sake of the personal maturity of the child. The child's passage from one numerical age to another is constructed to mark his growth and ongoing socialization into the norms of the collectivity (Weil 1986).1 Although less obvious, we argue that the birthday party designs experiences of age and ageing that prepare the child for his participation in the bureaucratic ethos of the state. We will discuss three prominent, implicit messages of age and ageing in the birthday party. One is the individuation of the birthday child in terms of a cultural taxonomy of time, that of age, which momentarily fragments the self according to temporal categories. Another is the child's reclassification from one age category to another, in accordance with this taxonomy of time. The third emphasizes the experiencing of time as continuity, for categories of age are shown also to be one's personal past, present, and future. The birthday party inculcates the youngster into a taxonomy of time. This perspective stems from three premises. First, all social order depends for its coherence on systems of social classification. Second, in the modern state, ideas of exact age are "good to think," in Levi-Strauss's terms; for they are integral to frameworks of classification used to create social order (Musgrove and Middleton 1981:53). Third, modern bureaucracies invent social taxonomies and apply them

Celebrations of bureaucracy: birthday parties in israeli kindergartens

In response to global attention to the young child, early childhood programs have become a national and provincial focus in Indonesia since 2000. The roll out of public programs for low income communities has made use of a longstanding mode of delivery: the volunteered, community-based labour of women. Although susceptible to analysis as a mode of governmentality, an older scholarship on the domestic community, its role in social reproduction, and its shaping by global accumulation offers significant insights as to why this method for delivering social welfare persists, even as it dovetails with more recent work on care and networks of global care labour. Based on ethnographic work in Yogyakarta, this examination of changes in international development regimes considers the contradictory effects for the empowerment of women as against children. Ultimately, the care labour required for early childhood programming, which has been taken to follow from the naturalised link between women's socially appropriate care work and childrearing, provokes instead questions about the awkward relationship between children and women. That is to say, recent developmental regimes seem to promote the empowerment of children as against women. By foregrounding social reproduction, this awkward relationship becomes a productive way to consider the limits of governmentality and to reconsider the domestic community as critical to understand globalisation, neoliberalisation, and the reorganisation of development and social welfare in the early twenty-first century.

Women Against Children: Early Childhood Education and the Domestic Community in Post-Suharto Indonesia

An explosion of early childhood programs in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, has followed on disaster, democratization, growth of the middle class, and global neoliberal reform at the beginning of the twenty-first century. New forms of professional expertise have emerged as a part of this global assemblage to deal with the expanded notions of development advocated by the World Bank and other intergovernmental organizations. Yet, what has remained relatively unremarked is the continued reliance on older New Order forms of social welfare linked to the community form and women's labor. Here, trauma healing programs aimed at the young after the 2006 earthquake, new preschools and playgroups in the era of democratization, and the proliferation of international curricula and pedagogy illustrate how the restless contingency associated with global assemblages is rooted in durable forms of community organization.

“Anything Can Be Used to Stimulate Child Development”: Early Childhood Education and Development in Indonesia as a Durable Assemblage

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.

Ann Taylor Allen

Papers

Gardens of Children, Gardens of God: Kindergartens and Day-Care Centers in Nineteenth-Century Germany