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policy in ECE on teachers who are mostly women. Throughout this essay, I argue that the Indonesian ECE movement‗s adoption of neoliberal principles has lead to further exploitation
of women in this field.
2. Neoliberalism in education
Early definition of neoliberalism emphasized economic policy characterized by privatization of government‗s enterprises, deregulation or less government‗s intervention in the economy,
and competitiveness or the deployment of market mechanisms Cox, 1996. However, Ferguson 2009 explains that the term neoliberalism has been applied to diverse phenomena.
This essay will use
Ferguson‗s definition of neoliberalism as ―a regime of policy and practices‖ that works through and at the same time produces neoliberal agents Ferguson,
2009: 170. Within a neoliberal regime, the government runs like a business, handing over the function of the state to private parties of subcontractors for profit Ferguson, 2007. People
are also seen as economic agents, who have skills, traits, marketable capacities and freedom of choice Gershon, 2011. Both the government and citizens are autonomous market actors.
Citizens are constructed as
―active‖ and ―responsible‖ to achieve governmental results without any direct state intervention Ferguson, 2009: 172. In this context the government-
citizen relationship is a partnership with a distribution of responsibility and risk to maintain each party‗s autonomy in the market Gershon, 2011. For this essay, I focus on teachers, the
community and students; teachers and the community are the responsible subjects and students are the subjects in whom skills and traits should be invested in and nurtured to
produce ‗neoliberal agents‗. In the field of education, Robertson 2007 underlines three key principles of a neoliberal
reform. The first one is the transformation of the mandate the objective of education. A neoliberal mandate of education is to develop competitive economic actors who are efficient,
creative, and problem solvers. The second is the forms of capacity or the means through which the mandate is going to be achieved. Capacity is related to funding and human
resources teacher. Neoliberal reforms emphasise the achievement of a mandate with the most efficient budget. Education providers are usually encouraged to generate additional
income as the government limits its financial support. One strategy of cost efficiency is the reformulation of the teachers salary system. Performance-based pay is usually applied in the
reform. The third strategy is the mechanism of education governance. These are indicators of neoliberal governance in education: outcome-based funding; some services are decentralized
and others are centralized, competition among educational institutions; introduction of a profit oriented private education provider, and multi-
national firms‗ involvement in education Robertson, 2007. I will unpack the policy of Indonesian ECE movement accordingly to the
above principles explained by Robertson 2007.
3. Neoliberalism in the Indonesian Early Childhood Education Movement
