Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

964 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
families, including health, the ninth edition emphasizes, “When children are healthy, they achieve
better” (2004, p. 34). Achievement, of course, refers to a cognitive response to artificial stimuli
that does little to nurture the child’s sense of awe and wonder at existence or nuanced relationships
to self and the world on a web of interdependency.
The space that is created by dropping some of the emphasis on child-centeredness, whole
language, open education, etc., in the seventh edition, allows for more than just increased coverage
of assessment. Several new pages on School to Work appear in the eighth edition (“School to
Career” in the ninth). Preservice early childhood teachers read about kindergartners who research
jobs, salaries, and required skills and hear how schools like Western Dubuque Community
Elementary emphasize the world of work for their youngest constituents:
For the past three years, counselors have developed career portfolios on each child to build a record of the
activities completed. All first graders used the new portfolios and the national Career Guidelines to track
career awareness. Third graders visited area businesses and then created newspaper ads ...(2004, p. 359)
We wonder what happens to the soul when exposed so young to life goals embodied as a series
of steps to your place in society’s economic machine.
As we consider these strategies that draw our youngest learners into the governmentality
of educational reforms, we think of the failure of the accountability-driven system to reduce
inequities in academic achievement. In spite of such failure, educational reformers continue to
support the very techniques that have generated the inequalities in the first place: higher standards
(which stigmatize average performance), increased surveillance (which, through tougher codes
of conduct, further restricts opportunities to learn self-agency), and more explicit punishment and
reward systems.
As the discourse of early childhood education more and more adopts this same ideology of
standardization and accountability, we run the risk of subjecting children at ever younger ages to
a system that stigmatizes them. It increasingly robs them of the opportunity to understand living
as a nuanced journey of awe and wonder punctuated with both joy and sorrow. We worry that
such texts too closely suggest a curriculum and classroom practice that demands for both teacher
and young students unnecessary conformity and the inherence of a neglect of difference. In spite
of that danger the textbooks examined here continue to increasingly define the necessary for
early childhood professionals as observing, testing, and normalizing. This change in discourse
is not pointed out to preservice teachers after the seventh edition. In addition, the soon-to-be
professionals are seldom challenged to critique any position. Indeed at one point they, as readers,
are told that in spite of the controversy over testing children as young as preschoolers, they
“will probably be involved in discussions that help assume that this process of evaluation is
developmentally appropriate” (2004, p. 218).
IMPLICATIONS
What do the discursive strategies noted above mean for students in early childhood teacher
education programs? How does the presentation of official knowledge across the three editions
shape what it is possible for them to think about the education of young children? How is
their understanding of themselves as early childhood educators affected? How are their beliefs
constrained regarding their own personal sense of agency for advancing a concern for social justice
and the honoring of multiple perspectives in order to challenge the status quo? Unfortunately, it
appears that current preservice teachers are being molded into agents of the status quo, who are
taught implicitly not to think critically about their work or their world.