Tinkerbell

Pulling machinery apart is fun. Car engines, computers, clocks, pumps... there's nothing like dismantling a creation to see how it works.

It only gets tricky when you have to put it back together, and while that kind of task can be undertaken in the centre with some equipment that needs repairing, you can safely assume that when the case comes off the CPU it's well and truly all over for that computer!

Tinkering - as a bloke with a workshop - is part of my life, and it's been interesting to watch many colleagues who rarely, if ever, pick up a spanner or screw driver, get up to speed with its potential as a fun 'learning experience'.

Check out Let the Children Play on the blogroll to see how others are enjoying it. The Austin Tinkering School is of course heaven - they get to do it all day!!

Jealous or what.

From play to empathy...

Sitting around the kitchen at a friends while the kids riot in the lounge produced some interesting ideas...

I have never considered the link between imaginative play, empathy and democracy before. Have you?

Novelist Ian McEwan opines that empathy, as in the ability to think and feel what it might be like to be someone else, sits at the centre of morality and is the most important competency our children should be learning.

As children we develop empathy through our play, particularly make-believe or fantasy play. It is here that children get to try out social roles that are outside their world and practice social interactions safely within the context of 'it's just play'. Dramatic play is by its nature full of confrontation and challenge, it the schizophrenic plot and ensuing tension that keeps play interesting as well as throwing up social dilemmas to be worked through where we learn to think outside of ourselves.

Apparently (no references sorry) research of the top one thousand USA crims found that their commonality was a lack of play as children. A lack of empathy enables you to kill randomly, to hurt without caring, to exploit without hesitation. Sound familiar these days?

The totalitarianism of the individual as championed under neoliberalism does not need or nor want empathy. Capitalism does not need or want empathy.

Empathy leads to truer more authentic democracy based on equality, community and mutual aid.

Dramatic play provides the foundation for developing empathy, but to enhance this learning we need to get in there, to be a co-player, to be throwing open-questions, ideas and challenges into the play that keeps it dynamic, but also allows the learners to build social competence.

Think Vygotsky, the Zone of Proximal Development and social justice education.

Now, play like it really matters.

Look Ma, life-long learners....

I've really come to hate that phrase 'life-long learners'. It oozes political bullshit, another hegemonic whitewash that covers up the reality of neoliberalism, globalisation and the Global Knowledge Economy, or 'GKE' to the academics. It's the education buzz-word of the decade...

Life-long learners are the drones of the GKE; those whose jobs are constantly being disestablished as we (as a nation) move further and further away from producing tangible products to play the game of hyper-capitalism - ideas, knowledge, data, information - all that shit that poorer countries can't under-cut us on... “Designed in New Zealand, Made in fucking China.”

Jane Gilbert's 'Catching the Knowledge Wave' (2003) dives into the festering sore of neoliberalism to explain that 'knowledge' in the neo-liberal context does not mean old knowledge, but innovation, as in a process.

“Minds, instead of being like containers – databases of stored knowledge, will need to be thought of as being like processors and/or resources that are connectible to other minds – to generate new knowledge.”

So knowledge is no longer “matter”, but an “energy” that “causes things to happen”, the knowledge we gain is not to be used as intended, but rather as a catalyst to modify and improve; ie, to generate new knowledge.

Thus we are 'life-long learners' who do not dilly-dally with content, but put that knowledge to use to generate new knowledge, new ways of making and selling shit to the plebs. Knowledge is the product of societies that don't actually do much any more. We don't produce tangible goods, we just design the packaging. The actual hard work is left to third world countries where costs are cheapest. The knowledge wave is essentially hyper-capitalism and by aligning with it as a country we are aligning with the exploitation and oppression of the world's poor.

In early childhood education this way of learning if fundamental. Children are building upon prior learning as they meet new challenges and assimilate or accomodate this new knowledge. We ain't too worried about content, it's dispositions to learn that matter: motivation, perseverance, collaboration, reflection...

It's a catch-22 situation countered by a critical analysis of power that is rooted in social justice, equity, and the freedom to live ones life as they want. It's a tough job but someones gotta do it eh?

Life-long learners don't have to be mindless sheep. My new mantra.

dis//able

I recently had the good fortune of getting to visit a few centres on the business of disability. I was primarily an observer – and I'm a bloody good observer – but I also got to talk with the experts and get the inside story...

To be honest I'm really disappointed at the piss-poor effort to include children with disabilities. In fact some centres were like the dark ages with teachers (yes qualified and under the dictate of Te Whāriki) refusing to work alongside these children. What the fuck?

Ignored, left sitting alone for long periods, denied resources (“She just spills paint so we've stopped giving her any”), or subtly placed into an 'island of inclusion' where they are of course welcome, but we'll get in an expert to look after them and essentially they'll have their own 'special' curriculum and have sweet fuck-all to do with the centre community... (as long as they're quiet eh?).

Too often 'inclusion' came across as a product rather than a process with responsibility abdicated to support workers and specialists. Part of the problem is the curriculum, Te Whāriki, loaded as it is with deficit discourses concerning disability, it essentially provides an opt-out clause to establish a separate, adult-controlled curriculum for disabled learners. It also uses that fatal word “assumes”.

“The curriculum assumes that their care and education will be encompassed within the principles, strands blah blah...” It talks of “activities” (read: teacher controlled, not self-initiated), IEP's with “realistic objectives” and finally puts the boot in with the term 'special needs' just in case those personal discourses weren't already peaking about how some freak is going to totally fuck with your morning session...

Back to school you lot, or back into your closet.

Oh, it's not all doom and gloom. I witnessed some beautiful relationships, some joyous friendships and heaps of laughs... what inclusion is all about.

And so the babies go out with the bath water....

After an interesting week spent visiting several centres on work-related stuff it's become very clear that parents haven't sucked up the results of funding cuts but are simply pulling their kids out of hours above their 20-hour-free allocation. Some centres in the middle-class 'burbs are retaining a good percentage of their 'extras', but in the poorer areas they are reporting to be losing over half of the children who attended longer than 20 hours.

So obviously not many parents are able or prepared to pay fees. Centres do not collect and so look forward to experiencing a budget shortfall. How long will they suffer before staff are fired and the bastard State wins?

National Twists the Knife...

Pre-budget briefing papers released today show that the NACT Government is not intending to pass on wage increases won by Kindergarten teachers to other types of early childhood services.

How bizarre. Or not.

This amounts to a further $20 million cut on top of the $285 already cut from centres employing more than 80% qualified staff. NZEI's Judith Nowotarski says, “with no flow-on funding, early childhood services will struggle to pay teachers the same rates as their kindergarten colleagues. That represents a huge step backwards for early childhood teachers in their fight to have their professional status recognised.”

The sad reality is that the Kindergarten model as we know it is being gradually killed off as the cheaper (with less qualified staff) and more flexible private sector explodes in growth. Their business model is more acceptable to neo-liberalism and it's odd they've been dealt an underhand here. I just hope any anger is not directed at Kindergarten teachers...

There are so many overlapping discourses it's hard to know who to kick:

 -   Free-market capitalism for creating 'investment opportunities' and thus dumbing down educare;

-   The private sector destroying the hard-fought-for standard of professionalism by simply dragging it's arse in the pursuit of profit;

-   A neoliberal Government shedding community assets on the sly;

-  A piss-weak union...

Kick 'em all I guess.

Now we do know that the Government dropped any notion of cutting the 20hrs-free policy beacuse it's so popular hence the cutting off of every other limb. Are we seeing the softening of the population to accept rising childcare fees? If NACT make it back for a second round will they attempt to further shed the private sectors reliance on funding and firmly put the 'neo' back in neo-liberal?


These moves, and a dozen others in various areas, show a Government hung up on ideology rather than pragmatic thought-out strategies for lifting the standard of education and thus the health of the nation. Unequal societies crap out in every measurable way, from GDP, teen pregnancy, hospital admissions and suicide rates... you name it and we bomb. Aotearoa ranks third or fourth in the world for inequality. This is no paradise.

While this Government continues to systematically shift the wealth of the nation further into the hands of the rich by slashing funding at every opportunity, we're essentially stuffed as a country.

Our strength is in numbers, but it also lies in a critical analysis of knowing just what the fuck is going on in education today and at the present time while we have unionised numbers, we simply don't have this knowledge or ideological unity.

In the words of the old-school IWW union, or Wobblies, lets educate, organise and agitate for real change.

Imagination is more important than knowledge...

In The Press today (28-8-2010) “Kindergarten teachers say "brutal funding cuts" are threatening to squash their historic service to 26,000 Kiwi families.”

And so the war begins with the first shots fired in what appears to be a battle more about ideology than budgets – no matter how much Tolley harps on about 'unsustainable costs'.
The true agenda straight from the horses mouth: "You have a philosophical point of view and I respect that. But I can't afford to pay for it.”

Indeed. Of all the shit this government throws cash at – namely the rich – investment in early childhood education, which is estimated earns this country $13 for every $1 spent, no longer seems to be a priority. Slicing $419M from the budgets of fully qualified centres means writing off potential gains of $5.5 BILLION - as well as downstream reductions in crime, social welfare, and health costs.

Duh. And that's about it really.

Costs will be passed onto parents, many of whom will  be forced to remove their children from centres. 'Oh please don't do that', says Tolley, use unqualified staff instead. Hmmmm bums on seats and fuck quality? Yep.

Kindergartens represent 15 percent of early childhood education services and cater for around 22 percent of children enrolled in a service - forty percent of four year olds attend a kindergarten. But enrolments are dropping – from around 45,000 for the several years to just below 40,000 for 2010.

Kindergartens have moved philosophically since government funding has turned ECE into a gold-rush for investors. They had to. There are now 30 different models of kindergarten with the traditional two session day all but history. This flexibility is good, it moves Kindergarten out of its middle-class enclave with the privileged mums at home, to better reflecting the working reality of most young families.

Kindergartens are sticking to their guns with qualified staff providing quality education and the waiting lists to enrol (16,000) suggest Kiwi's remain supportive. So what's the next move? Will NZEI grow some balls?

Unfortunately, in the market place of education, Kindergartens are now a minority. Kindergartens provide a free service, are non-profit, operate with 100 per cent qualified staff, are philosophically/politically 'left-wing' and quite rightly consider children to be far more important than profit margins. That's just not on eh?

The neoliberal 'New Zealand Experiment' of the 1980's turned education into a commodity for consumption with 'free-choice' as the carrot: you get what you pay for. Education is now closely tied to the nations economic success (rather than your fluffy idea of success) and the focus is on quality outputs (ie, economic potential) rather than quality inputs like qualified teachers, resources, and a step-up for marginalised groups. This is the battlefield.

Early childhood education is increasingly under 'downward pressure' to better prepare our children to fit more easily into an education system rigidly defined and controlled by this political agenda.

Private ECE providers are to a degree already toeing the line with curriculum content narrowing to met skill-based objectives – they are essentially 'pre-schools'. Kindergarten's are no educational utopia, but essentially they say 'fuck that', let the kids play, let them live in the here-and-now exploring and learning in whatever direction their interests take them. This is why they are under threat, why parents are being forced away from supporting them. It a cynical, nasty move from Government to destroy the last bastion of learner-controlled education.

Sarah Farquhar of the Early Childhood Council who represent the capitalist wing of ECE has called for a review of Te Whāriki, saying it lacks concrete learning outcomes. It doesn't. What she means is that it's not required that children must count or read to a measurable standard – like it matters or something.

Fucking rich white people and their idea of normalcy.


Funding cuts:
·    $295M from abolishing the two highest funding bands for centres, creating a new 80%+ band (funded at a lower level than the previous equivalent) and capping the number of centres that can access this new funding band.
·    $275M from not going ahead with previously Budgeted ratio improvements (reducing the number of children per teacher for some age groups), which were supposed to take effect in July 2009.
·    $43M from reducing support for people to train as early childhood teachers, recruit new teachers, or return to the profession
·    $10M from ending all Ministry-supported professional development in early childhood education.
Total cuts in 2009 & 2010 budgets:  $623M

Funding increases:
·    $92M for targeted initiatives to increase participation, particularly for Maori, Pasifika and low-income families, over the next four years.
·    $20M for including 5 year olds, kohanga reo and playcentres in the 20 Hours funding scheme, which had previously only applied to 3 and 4 year olds and teacher-led services (kohanga reo are sometimes, and playcentres are always parent-led) – to come into effect July 1st 2010, the $70M is spending in 2010/11, 2011/12 and 2012/13.
·    $47M for an inflation-level 2.4% increase to the non-staffing component in the funding rates for many of the funding categories.
·    $35M to cover some services being able to access higher funding because primary-trained teachers will count towards accessing higher funding bans, again over the next four years.  This is a bit of a dubious increase to claim, because many of these services might have been able to access the higher funding bans without the change to include primary-trained teachers, by using early childhood-trained teachers as more people completed their training.
·    $10M in costs for implementing the cuts to funding rates listed above.

Total increases in 2009 & 2010 budgets:  $204M

Thus in the term of this National-led Government they have cut $419M out of early childhood education in just their first two years in power.

Funding statistics courtesy of thestandard.org.nz – thank you :)