Early Childhood and Neoliberalism in Colombia: True Discussions, Government Rationality, and Conducting Behaviour

In this chapter, we view early childhood in Colombia as a field that establishes discourses and practices that prescribe what children are from birth until they are six years old. We also discuss early childhood as a disputed social space that includes institutional interventions that shape subjectivities for productivity and social arrangements so that they are consistent with the neoliberal capitalist world. Further, early childhood is also assumed to be a social control device that legitimises a particular rationality of government and certain ways of conducting behaviours (Foucault, M. (2007) Nacimiento de la biopolítica. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica.; Rose, N. (2011) Identidad, genealogía, historia. In Hall, S. y Dugay, P. (eds.). Cuestiones de identidad cultural. Buenos Aires and Madrid: Amorrortu editores.). This is done through standardized care models that reduce rights to the level of services, and promote inequality and exclusion in children and their families, adding to exclusion due to the state, social class, ethnicity, and territory. This double condition of early childhood (as both a field and a device) allows us to understand how care policies directed at this group of society substantially change meanings around citizenship and the public realm, as these are reduced to the provision of services to poor beneficiaries. The text is divided into five parts: an introduction; a look at children through childhood studies; the emergence of early childhood as a discursive horizon; the rationality of government and the conduct of behaviour in early childhood policies, and conclusions.