ExchangeEveryDay Past Issues

I once worked for a food bank in NYC where the director during podium speeches would declare that her job was to put them out of business. I did not believe it then and find it resonates with this issue of institutional forms of care in my work to improve outdoor facilities in preschools.
As I struggle to compete with restrictive outdoor schedules, rubber paved grounds with cold steel structures, and staff that would rather play with rules than possibilities - I often wonder if we can get past the institutions we have created. There is a basic acceptance that this is the way things are so we might as well get use to it rather than challenge a system that employers, parents, staff and children have become dependent upon. To rock the boat is to risk losing income, professional status, or even your own drive to instigate change when you find yourself without a common cause.
I basically have to accept that children will be introduced to the world through the confines of a preschool. I try to make a difference by making their outdoor experience reflect some of the stimuli that they would encounter had they been raised by a functioning community – one where other children dwell, for instance. Our neighborhoods are empty during the day and socialization has become a concept not a natural encounter.

These are wonderful insights on the distinctions between institutions - after all, many homes are also institutions as well, based on Jim's definition. Once source of breaking out of institutions is the range of animated films produced by Pixar Animated Studios under the direction of John Lasseter. Watch these films and observe how institutions are established and in what ways the film lead the viewer toward the cracks that lead to increased freedom. "WALL-E," the most recent Pixar film, demonstrates on the space ship exactly what today's EED describes. Go see it in theatres or wait for it on DVD.

We say a mouthful when we name these issues around institutionalization. The freedom-structure continuum is seminal in all our lives. Yet we also know how many wonderful advances have come from those who in various ways thwarted the accepted structures; and how much joy in life as well.

In talking with parents, I've called the experiences children have in the creases of adult supervision "benign neglect". Many of our best memories come from these discoveries.

I think there are many aspects driving the child care/early learning industry to homogenize and quantify the lives of young children. They are the same as occurs in the geriatric industry. I don't have the solution, but I welcome early childhood folks holding these issues up to the light.

Thank goodness for Jim Greeman speaking out. Anyone interested in centers based on non-institutional, homelike environments is welcomed to check out www.lifeways-center.org.

I think that the "institutional" is derived from the pressure of state inspectors, with the mentality that all children are abused until it is proved otherwise. They approach a facility as the authority instead of a friendly team player trying to help to make a preschool better. It makes for nervous directors and inturn nervous employees. This ends up ligitimizing "the puppy pen" facilities that the industry is trying not to be.