Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rich, Sharon J.

Titel

Constructing the Child: A History of Canadian Day Care

Ist Teil von

• Canadian Journal of Education, 1998, Vol.23 (2), p.222-223

Ort / Verlag

Toronto: Canadian Society for the Study of Education

Erscheinungsjahr

1998

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Finally, [Varga] raises some critical questions about the dilemmas surrounding the social implications of early-childhood education. She critiques the normative perspective of child care and questions the specific role of caregiver assumptions in an understanding of children. She points out that in North American child-care settings children are largely viewed as incompetent adults who need others to organize their time, space, and materials. She concludes that so-called child-centred education not only is far from child-centred but also is dominated by the assumptions of adults whose practices (despite their intentions) simply legitimate a questionable orientation to child development. She notes that these assumptions have been formed uncritically through a perception of childhood as a series of developmental stages with behavioural tasks for each stage. Her argument for systematic and ongoing critique of the normative approach to child care, coupled with her suggestion that the child should be understood as a competent being who exists and develops within a social context, is persuasive. Unfortunately, Varga does not include a discussion of the ways in which the normative approach has been used to distance women from their children and from those women and men who provide care. Adding a discussion of this nature would provide another way to begin to consider the influence of the normative approach on the lives of young children and their caregivers.