Expansion of Early Childhood Education in Indonesia: Finding Voices, Telling Stories

Abstract

Young children are often projected as the future beneficiaries and guarantors of national development agendas. From early 2000 to the present, the Government of Indonesia has deployed policy initiatives that made tremendous advances in the rapid increase of access to early childhood education services. From only 17.71% in the early 2000s, enrolments in ECE skyrocketed to 67.51% in 2017. The drive for such achievement has been inseparable from global education movements, especially since the Education for All (EFA) Dakar Framework for Action articulated a specific goal for ECE in 2000. This thesis documents an inquiry into the implications from these national and global policies, how the obsession with quantity both transforms and is being utilised by the people most affected. Using Foucault’s governmentality framework, this thesis provides insight into how ECE interplays with subjectivity from the angle of centres’ owners and teachers. Stories are generated based on an ethnographic case study carried out in a semi urban neighbourhood in Atambua of Indonesia's West Timor region. In terms of historical moments, this thesis captures many beginnings in the life of ECE located in a community known for its precarious living. From ECE expansion as a travelling global policy, the history of women in ECE, the establishment of the centre, the “birth” of teachers, and interactions with children, competing discourses are identified and analysed. In interactions with development projects and government policy, ECE opens possibilities that are not necessarily linear or coherent. The effect of ECE discourse is fruitfully observed through the postcolonial hybridity – its combinations, complementarity, tensions, and interpolation. Using a combination of postcolonial and feminist poststructuralist interpretations subjects and subjectivity, this thesis argues that the impact of the spread of ECE goes beyond the official technical development practices underpinned by economic assumptions. Instead, the formal initiatives also interact with, stimulate, and utilise sentiments and people's historicity that shapes their involvement in neoliberal education development. The claim to improve equity through the provision of ECE and education services for children from poor families has been unsettled through exploration of these complex landscapes. On one side, the ambition for scale is critiqued mainly for how it has been done at the expense of poor providers and through the perpetuation of women as cheap labour. However, utilising concepts of subjects and subjectivity, the same process has also enabled deployment of possibilities through which the manager and school teachers could enact and negotiate their subjectivities while actively living with the consequences.