Redrawing What Counts as Education

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses on the constitutive dependence of the education system on the performance of the political system. It shows that the recent redrawing of what counts as institutionalized early childhood education in Germany largely originate in the impulses of global organizations in the political system of world society. These early childhood educational institutions operated for centuries at the margins of the formal education system, and they were only relatively recently incorporated into the core of the system. In the course of this development, the global program of early childhood education replaced a system that privileged the simulation of familial environments over pedagogical achievement, and it was designed from the start as a learning process that brings together pedagogical and social objectives.