A couple of weeks back, in my local secondhand bookshop, I found an original copy of Gough Whitlam’s policy speech delivered at Blacktown Civic Centre on 13 November 1972. It’s an instructive document to read, enlivening in its practical and clearly-stated determination to establish a progressive modernising agenda — and a salutary reminder of how far to the right Australian politics has been pushed, and how timid the ALP with its milquetoast liberalism and sinister undercurrents of cruelty, despair and violence, has become.

There’s a utopianism in Whitlam’s speech that would seem ludicrous in today’s suffocating political climate of racism, jingoistic cheerleading, moral panics, and tedious culture wars. Whitlam proposes to legislate for land rights, establish universal health care, provide free dental care to all school children, end conscription and annul all prosecutions for draft dodging, oppose French nuclear testing, support independence for Papua New Guinea, abolish university fees, initiate a “massive attack” on housing costs, establish a national disaster response body, make education the fastest-growing area of the budget, and increase individual welfare payments to 25 per cent of the average male salary. If the last commitment were in place today, a base fortnightly Jobseeker payment would be about $1160 — four hundred dollars higher than it is now.

But perhaps the most striking aspect of Whitlam’s speech is his repeated insistence on the education and well-being of children, statements that make it abundantly clear that he was looking to mark a sea-change in how governments viewed children, and how it thought about its responsibility to them. This was particularly the case for early childhood education — previously a tiny, marginal and disregarded aspect of the education edifice — which was about to find itself launched into the forefront of progressive social change.

Proposing a “new charter for the children of Australia” Whitlam says that

the answer to the modern malaise of juvenile crime, drugs and vandalism is not repression and moralising. The answer is to involve the creative energies of our children and our youth in a creative concerned community.

Statements like these — and Whitlam’s speech is full of them — are an embrace of the idea of vulnerability, a willingness to address a conviction that childhood pain is not only an intolerable thing to witness, but should neither be countenanced nor protracted by any government policy. If the problem is adult repression and moralising then the antidote has to be the development of a capacity to listen, hear uncomfortable truths and create societies in which children have autonomy.

The key part of Whitlam’s “new charter for children” was the establishment of universal preschool education — which he was weaving right into the fabric of his reformist project, in a way that nobody had before and nobody has since — and it’s here I want to focus my attention.

Preschool education was one of the utopian projects of the late 1960s, and Australia was getting on board. The landmark 1962 Perry Preschool Study in the US concluded that for every dollar spent on early childhood education, seven were saved in future spending on welfare, incarceration and so on, and that these positive effects were multigenerational. Later US early childhood programs such as High/Scope raised the figure to $27. These cold-blooded, somewhat protestant American arguments were nevertheless strongly tied to the project of civil rights, and universal equality.

In translating this for Australia, Whitlam made the following extraordinary statement:

The greatest single aid in removing or modifying the inequalities of background, environment, family income or family nationality (in the case of migrant children) or race (in the case of aborigines [sic]), will be the provision of preschool education.

It’s a big case to make — preschools as remedies to capitalism’s brutality, to anti-democratic forces — but not without merit, as we shall see. It’s as if Whitlam was implying that you can oppose fascism by thinking about and supporting children’s play, as though if you listen to young children, if they learn to have a voice, if they feel thought about and looked after, then certain base principles of a capitalist order will be challenged.

That project is dead in the water, of course. The field of contemporary Australian early  education, now dominated by privatised child care — of which more later — is one of surveillance and policing, compliance, extreme regulation, deliberate construction of neoliberal subjectivities — children as a type of property — and reductive understandings of what play, and children, are for.

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Not long before they published The Dawn of Everything, Davids Graeber and Wengrow wrote an online piece parsing some of the arguments they were later to introduce in their book:

Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale — the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude — the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence … Here too, we predict, the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.

The Left has to take this as axiomatic, I think. There’s no revolutionary or reformist project without this, and never has been. In The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Kristin Ross writes that the victory of the Commune demonstrated that

If the separation between state and civil society does not exist, then politics becomes just another branch of social production.

The Commune, says Ross, put an end to the idea that labour and politics were solely class attributes. In other words, politics became the province of everybody, everyone had the attributes of agency. If we are to take Whitlam’s exhortations seriously this includes children — and not children “as well”.

The field of early education in a country that had only just abolished the White Australia policy wasn’t ready for Whitlam’s decolonial project. All it had to offer was “learning through play”, a reductive approach hacked out of the developmental theories of the Swiss epistomologist Jean Piaget, in which the purpose of play is to ‘learn’ conceptual kinds of organisation. Conveniently, adult could be experts in this and authoritatively tell children how to play.

As play doesn’t work like this — at least as far as children are concerned — various problems occur, more or less located in the domains of control, coercion and so on. In play, children create themselves, imagine the minds of others, get to grips with existential realities, often in very profound ways.

In marketised reality, by contrast, children are turned over to what we might call “neoliberal play”, which of course takes place in neoliberal children’s centres where children’s world is dominated by activities like memorising the alphabet, “learning colours”, copying handwriting exercises, and forming queues. Each of these is an activity designed to reassure the modern parent that their child has a stringently policed self (can “self-regulate”, as current parlance puts it), is a functioning unit of the neoliberal state, and a prime candidate for instruction in large groups five days a week. Repression and moralisation: the twin psychic drivers of colonial Australia.

Australian early education is now dominated by institutional childcare, most of it privatised, a starkly neoliberal enterprise if ever there was one that has swamped any notion of early education as a progressive ideal.

Whitlam briefly addresses childcare provision in his 1972 speech, but it seems to him self-evident that childcare can be a tool for women’s empowerment, giving women with children the options of study or work while maintaining a family life. The massive privatised warehousing of children so that everyone must work all the time was the project of the Hawke government, whose neoliberal energies were directed at eviscerating the labour movement, undoing Whitlam’s legislative program, and laying the foundations for the precarious, impoverished, casualised, desolate workplace we know so well. The pivot from children’s services as a tool of women’s empowerment and a forum for children’s agency, to an enabler of economic productivity to keep the stock market worm trending upward, was one of Hawke’s lasting achievements, and in crushing Whitlam’s project for children has had a profound impact on children’s lives: on what it means to grow up, on what it means to be a family, on what it means to be in relationship with another.

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The utopian US early childhood programs of the 1970s were publicly and defiantly predicated on amelioration of deprivation and inequality. Think of Sesame Street and its values-driven curriculum, and attempts to portray children as thinking members of a multiracial community who want to learn.

Australian early education unsurprisingly struggled — and now struggles more than ever — with any kind of radical politics or radical pedagogies. In the absence of any coherent philosophical agenda other than complying with the demands of a capitalised world, it has flirted with a mosaic of imported fads: brain science for three-year-olds; “intentional teaching”; “attachment teaching”, and even “doing” Foucault.

It wasn’t just the Americans who were at work thinking of early education as a political enterprise. If US early education wanted to attack the legacy of industrial slavery, the northern Italian preschools of the communist municipalities of Reggio Emila grappled directly with the reality of fascism. As they literally built their preschools out of the rubble of World War II, it seemed an urgent and entirely relevant question for communities who had fought partisan actions against both Italian fascists and Nazi occupiers to ask how to make human beings who would be resistant to fascist ideas.

The question of children’s agency, children’s ability to think and critique, was to preoccupy the Reggio Emilia preschools for the next few decades with remarkable results. In effect, as a colleague of mine intimately involved with the Italian project once wrote, they created “a different sociology”.

The Italian pedagogies touched down in Australia in the 1990s. Here, they were immediately leached of any political content, appropriated by elite private schools, and dressed up with a Vogue-ish aesthetic not far removed from the photographs of Anne Geddes, before being filtered down to everyone else. Rather than using what could be described as non-fascist pedagogies to interrogate what it would be like to have non-colonial pedagogies — and non-colonial sociologies — the encounter with Australian neoliberal schooling resulted in more of the same: soothing images of children’s compliance. You can’t really listen to a child and prepare to be challenged by their autonomy and their desires if you already have a picture of who you think they are and what they should become.

Of course, children will resist these kind of shenanigans for a long time — some longer than others. Not everyone dreams of being a school prefect, a landlord or a border force cop. But resistance, an attempt to find agency and meaning, can look like an existential threat to bourgeois colonial life — which is why, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, we lock troublesome children up and punish them as brutally as possible as early as we can.

What are sometimes called children’s ‘symptoms’ can sometimes be read — that is, listened to and understood —  as a language, a speaking of some truth about the child’s world and their inner experiences. Sometimes it is said that this is a speaking of the “truth of the family”. But families, as we know them today, are neoliberal structures, colonial artifices in fact, and within that framing of children’s lives, symptoms become part of the search for meaning within those structures, a sometimes puzzling and distressing description of what it is like to try and grow within them. Very young children dig for meaning with whatever they can find, are willing to set fires to things to find meaning. They will turn emotional life upside down and inside out, asking for meaning. What we give them are The Wiggles. In Whitlam’s vocabulary, we have given them repression.

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It’s a media story that continually resurfaces: there is a critical shortage of early childhood staff in Australia, particularly in childcare. This isn’t surprising, as institutional childcare is stressful, exhausting and boring work, badly paid and poorly regarded. It isn’t working with young children in itself that is exhausting — though it is one of the platitudes of modern life that young children are exceptionally tiring — but trying to work with children within the stultifying, regimented expectations that children’s centres are expected to operate under, in which play is regarded as primarily a cognitive activity, cognition is conceived as the ability to complete a series of pre-determined tasks and children’s explosive, endlessly curious inner life is reduced to the demand to self-regulate, is a task of endless policing.

It shouldn’t be unexpected then that many early childhood professionals struggle to play, to embrace transgression, to follow children’s play wherever it goes, to be able to work with signs of hope and take the time to be puzzled by behaviours they don’t immediately understand. To use Graeber and Wengrow’s words, you can’t initiate the “painful loss of human freedoms” at the small scale, without having lost something yourself. To spend a lot of time in the presence of large groups of young children is to be part of relationships of intense desires and beliefs, explosive curiosities and sometimes inexplicable psychic pain. And I guess if you are part of a social order that doesn’t think about children much and reserves its strongest feelings for them when it’s time to hate them — then developing a hard shell to deal with children’s emotional demands is one of your only available tools.

In As We Have Always Done, the Nishnaabeg writer and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson tells a traditional Nishnaabeg story about the child Kwezens (‘little woman’) who is out exploring the bush on her own, intending to gather firewood for her mother.

Kwezens decides she’ll take a rest under a tree and worry about the firewood later. When she lies down she sees Ajidamoo (“red squirrel”) up in the branches, nibbling and sucking at the bark. Kwezens is curious and decides to imitate Ajidamoo. She discovers that the tree is full of sweet water. She runs home to tell her mother. Her mother, says Betasamosake Simpson, has “three hundred questions” (including ‘where’s the firewood?’). Kwezens tells her mother the story. Her mother “believes every word because she is her Kwezens and they love each other very much”.

“This is one of my favorite stories,” writes Betasamosake Simpson.

It’s one of my favorites because nothing violent happens in it. At every turn, Kwezens is met with very basic, core Nishnaabeg values — love, compassion and understanding. She centres her day around her own freedom and joy — I imagine myself at seven running through a stand of maples with the first warmth of spring marking my cheeks. I imagine everything good in the world. My heart, my mind and my spirit are open and engaged and I feel as if I could accomplish anything. I imagine myself grasping at feelings I haven’t felt before – that maybe life is so good that it is too short; that there really isn’t enough time to love everything.

Nothing violent happens in it. … I imagine everything good in the world: if we have difficulty of thinking of these as revolutionary sentiments, it’s at least partly because childhood, especially early childhood, has become an empty space. Wigglified, as it were. But in my own reading of this extraordinary story, so generously related by Betasamosake Simpson, there is in her summary of it, a bitter mourning co-existing with a profound optimism. “I imagine,” she says three times, traveling back from the traumatic nightmare of global capitalism and colonial exploitation to the other side of capitalist childhood, where we find something very straightforward but so difficult to see in the privatised warehoused childhoods Australia has been bequeathed: the ability to conceive of a childhood in which it is the most ordinary and unexceptional thing to think that you could have “everything good in the world”, a world in which “there really isn”t enough time to love everything.”

“Adult trauma always tracks backwards,” writes the American literary theorist and psychotherapist Laurence Rickels in Only Psychoanalysis Won The War — a line of detonation from the present to the past, which of course isn’t really the past. Development is always unfolding and unravelling now — otherwise you wouldn’t be able to learn anything — and the capacity to keep unfolding, or sometimes unravelling, is a reminder that we are always children.  So, I track back to the advent of modern Australian early childhood education in 1972, and a promise of social renewal, of a massive disruption of the colonial attitude. It’s as though there was a brief moment in Australian public life, and the public lives of children, when something incredible was possible. It’s painfully ironic that the most recognisable image of Whitlam’s tenure — the handful of red sand returned to Vincent Lingiari — is of an Australia that never really existed. It was an Australia that was suddenly, briefly, visible in front of everyone: an Australia of generous possibilities, of reflection and attentive regard, an Australia that evaporated as soon as the image and idea of it appeared, torn down by the brutal reality of Australia’s colonial politics, the ruthless collusion of establishment forces, and a public climate of fear, cynicism and mutual suspicion that is still alive today, as the referendum on The Voice showed us.

The story of how Whitlam’s downfall was engineered is still staggering in its revelation of the bonds of class loyalty that unite the Australian establishment. As Kristin Ross argued, outside revolutionary endeavours such as the Commune, politics is a class attribute. Some people get to do it and the rest of us don’t.

When you place children at the centre of your political assumptions, and the kind of interactions and environments that help them grow up, one can see with Graeber and Wengrow that the “painful loss of human freedoms” really does begin “at the small scale” and that relationships of “the greatest intimacy” equally contain the possibility of the “deepest forms of structural violence.”

In other words, when children are excluded as political, desiring agents, many diverse forms of control, social organisation, identity, love, desire, hate and institutions and regimes of care immediately become possible, and the coercion and violence that capitalism specialises in expand exponentially. Conversely, when children do attempt to exert agency, forms of protest and hope that are obstacles to whatever the ordained status quo is, they become ‘perverse’ — not really children but a kind of alien, demonic species. And consequences must follow. This is as true of children incarcerated in Australia, as it is of children in Gaza.

Image: Alexander Grey

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