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nature’ is a child that has to be helped by adults to let free its natural, inherent
capacities. This is to be done by activities such as ’free play’ (fri lek) and ’free
creating’ (fritt skapande). ’The child as reproducer of culture and knowledge’ is a
child that is supposed to receive the fixed content of knowledge brought forward
by the adults and to adapt itself to it, to internalize it, to develop in a certain
order, to later be able to reproduce it as exact as possible. These two images have
their origin in the knowledge production realized by social science and more
specifically developmental psychology. The theories of the Swiss developmental
psychologist Jean Piaget and the American developmental psychologist Arnold
Gesell, have influenced pre-school practices since after the Second World War 7
The naturally developing child, is also an individual child. In pre-school practices
the focus has been on each child’s individual needs. 8 This can be explained by the
way the two concepts ‘natural’ and ‘develop’ work. Within the logic of measuring
a child, who is supposed to have inherent, natural capacities, that needs to be
expressed, to a pre-determined scale of development, the focus will, of course,
be on each child. It becomes important to see where each individual is, in his or
her ‘natural state’ and then find out how this corresponds to the pre-determined
scale of development. The gaze, formed by developmental psychology, and used
in relation to the individual, naturally developing child, is a gaze of lack and
needs. This is due to the way the child has been mapped and defined by the
theories of developmental psychology. This mapping implies a sort of ‘normal
curve’ of development for the child to follow. Developmental psychology defines
a specific way to develop, through certain specific phases to reach a specific goal.
A ‘normal curve’ excludes all children that do not go through the predetermined
development. These children lack some necessary clues to proper development.
But even the ‘normally’ developing child is a child in need and of lack, since it
is always defined in relation to what is to come, in relation to what abilities to
obtain in the next phase of development. Teaching in this perspective is all about
judging where the child is on the developmental scale to be able to give the proper
developmental help, so as to get the child ‘on track’. 9 So, the individual, naturally,
developing pre-school child, is often seen as a child in need and a child of lack.
a child
Now, there is something paradoxical with this individual child. How can we
talk about individuality, when there are only so many identities to take? If the
child’s identity is supposed to be individual, but still is measured up to and corrected
to fit into, an already determined scale of development, are we not, then,
talking about a very limited kind of individuality? An individuality, that really is
nothing more than something sucked up through a society’s way of organizing
individuality as a convenient common feature of all its subjects. Individuality as
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