A few weeks into my sophomore year of college, I got an on-campus job working at the university daycare. I was assigned to the Twos Room and as they walked me in on my first day, it felt like walking into a hurricane of pure activity. Between the three teachers and nine two-year-olds, there were stories being read, plastic cups being washed, potties being used, hugs being given, and a steady roar of squeals and tears combined. Unsurprisngly, I loved it immediately.
Over the next few months, I saw the kids grow right in front of my eyes, getting stronger with their movements, more talkative with their peers and adults, and demonstrating more and more knowledge of colors, shapes, and animal sounds. I got to build relationships with parents and siblings and grandparents and caregivers, and share in their milestones and anxieties. Furthermore, I did this with the most amazing women who, from the moment they met me, treated me with love and respect, and inducted me into a collaborative co-teaching approach to working with children.
At the time, I was a Political Science major and I was becoming disillusioned with it. Despite my love of discussing current affairs and reading on the historical conditions that produced them, I could not connect with many of my eagerly ambitious classmates, and I was frustrated with limited course offerings, including classes on Africa that were either about aid or Aids, very little else. Nevertheless, like my peers, I applied to several summer consulting jobs, and I was swiftly rejected from them all. I would lament about my prospects to my boss in her office where I would hang out long after clocking out, and one afternoon she asked with genuine confusion, “Why don’t you teach here for the summer?” And with that question, my life was changed.
Education is an old and familiar concept. From Plato’s Academy in Ancient Greek to the madrasas of Northern and Western African, civilizations have long understood the centrality of education to creating progressive societies, and by the start of the new millenia, education is declared as an inalienable human right. Childcare, conversely, is new and alien, reserved historically for the most privileged. Whirlwinds of changes in the 20th century begin to make apparent a need for its expansion – women pushed into the workforce due to the Great Wars, urban sprawl and the elevation of the separate, nuclear family, the growing empowerment of women, international economic crashes killing single-earning household structures, and so on.
Despite these developments, when women (and their mothers and their sisters and their grandmothers) work outside of the home, the question of who will watch their children is posed into the ether. Formalized systems of childcare emerge and almost immediately build in hierarchies of oppression. Women are not seen as having a right to work, and without any movement to make that choice easier, universal childcare as a social service remains in the boulevard of broken dreams. The lack of political prioritization of the industry also results in few labor protections and dismal wages, making it fitting that its workers are those who lack other options are almost exclusively immigrant women of color. Yet, despite meager compensation to its employees, families continue to pay astronomical costs to childcare centers forced to keep up with maintenance and licensing costs. Though the burden of this is felt across income levels, high quality childcare by the 21st century emerges as a class privilege.
Childcare in the United States reveals the subconscious of the state – its insistence on keeping women in the home, its relegation of women of color into low-wage, low protected work, and its maintenance of class structures that even determine whose children are safe. But how do these perceptions of childcare influence the system that it precedes? What is the relationship between childcare and education?
I spent that sophomore summer at the daycare and I started my junior year with the commitment to becoming a teacher. A month after graduating from college, I began a Masters program in Elementary Education that also included getting my teaching credential, and then halfway through, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. I completed my student teaching online, accepted an upcoming position to teach kindergarten, and I spent the summer of 2020 watching the discourse around school openings take place.
Teachers across the country, led by their unions, argued against returning to classrooms at a time when hundreds of thousands were dying a day from a virus that was still not quite understood. A line had been drawn in the sand between workers deemed “essentials” and others who were not, in which the work of the former was critical to bringing ease to the lives of the latter, despite hazards to health and safety. On what side were childcare workers and teachers?
Childcare workers, in large part to the lack of political organization and bargaining means, were deemed essential and were quickly sent back to work. Teachers, fighting against the “essential” designation, often made it a point to explicitly insist that they were not childcare workers and should not be grouped with them. Teachers were, instead, professionals, they insisted, and deserved the privileges that came with that label, which during COVID, meant being protected against the deadly disease. As a bargaining tool, childcare became a dirty word, needed to be distinguished from the work we do as teachers. But in many ways, distinctions between teaching and childcare are often stressed, even though they need not be.
As teachers, we pride ourselves on what the job means. We spend years of schooling, take test after test, and then we engage in the intellectual work of lesson planning, curriculum adaptation, and staying up-to-date with new research in our field. Teachers are just as easily heralded in the same breath that we are disrespected, and as a result, we make sure to stress the seriousness of our work. Consequently, we then speak with disdain when it comes to the aspects that take us away from our professional work, be it tying shoelaces, putting up bandaids, and cleaning up bloody noses. That work, we decry, that is childcare which is separate to the work of teaching. But should it be? Surely, childcare is teaching too. The work of picking kids up, holding them close, and watching over them is work where we teach them first and foremost how loved and deserving of love they are. Childcare imparts many of the same soft skills that teachers work to impart on their students in terms of how to speak, move, and be around others, whether through nursery rhymes or class discussions, tummy time or drama class, playing and group projects.
Moreover, what makes us think that teaching isn’t caretaking? We pass on to students the knowledge and skills they will take to use in their lives, and that is a form of caretaking too. The work we do in the classroom around creating goals, checking for understanding, affirming students, these teacher moves and instructional approaches, they are ways of taking care of the young ones under our watch.
Too often, given the negative and complicated historical legacies and contemporary conditions of childcare, teachers look to create a false separation between the two, when instead, the synonimity between the two could be stressed and expanded upon. How might we begin to extend the organised labor rights and machinations that exist for teachers to include early childhood workers too? In what ways would that work create change towards equity by improving the conditions of the most marginalized? What would it look like to make space for the caretaking work in the classroom? Particularly post-COVID, how might we prioritize taking care of students recovering from the trauma of the past few years, rather than hyper-fixating on “learning loss”? How do those of us who work in service of children and their families see the commonality in our vocations and callings?
Right after that sophomore summer, I moved from working with toddlers to working with infants, as young as four months and all who were under a year old by the time the school year started. I would arrive in the mornings, wipe down the surfaces, clean any remaining dishes, and turn on the white noise machine in the nap room. I would talk to the other teachers about the afternoon before, their commutes to work that day, and we would swap stories about our families.
Then the babies would arrive. And I would teach them sign language, and talk to them as I changed their diapers, and I read Little Blue Truck so many times that I would walk out of my shift a few months later murmuring the words to myself. And that was greatest job I ever had, those two years in the infant room. I learned what it meant to engage in caretaking, and making sure the human beings who you are tasked to watching over are returned safe and sound, and I learned what it meant to teach, and introduce the entire world to its newest inhabitants as you watched them grow day by day.
In my experience, teaching and caretaking, for better or worse, cannot be divorced from each other. Nor should they be if we are to create students who are prepared in all the different ways, and to create a society in which all work is treated with respect. We’ve got to move closer to stand together. We’ve got to stay together instead of stay apart.
Thank you for this public acknowledgment of the value dynamic of “childcare” and the value attribution to those who care for the children and for the example of relating it to your experience Alicia.
I enjoy and take value from following your thought and experience processes.
I love you calling this distinction into question. Obviously I’m a stan for teachers but I always wonder about the divisions that deem certain professions careers and others jobs.