Children’s development, capability approaches and postdevelopmental child: The birth to four curriculum in South Africa

Abstract

This article explores how three well-known conceptual frameworks view child development and how they assume particular figurations of the child in the context of the South African National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four. This new curriculum is based on a children’s rights framework. The capability approaches offer important insights for children’s rights advocates, but, like psychosocial theories of child development, assumes a ‘becoming-adult view of child’, which poses a serious threat to children’s right to genuine participation. They also share the exclusive focus on understanding development as located ontologically in the individualised human. In contrast, critical posthumanism queers humanist understandings of child development and reconfigures subjectivity through a radical philosophical decentring of the human. The relevance of this shift for postdevelopmental child in the context of the new South African early years curriculum is threaded throughout the article. A posthuman reconfiguration of child subjectivity moves theory and practice from a focus on assessing the capabilities of individual children in sociocultural contexts to the tracing of material and discursive entanglements that render children capable. This onto-epistemic shift leads to the conclusion that the National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four requires a fourth theme (with guiding principles), which would express a multispecies relationality and an ethics of care for the human as well as the nonhuman.