Administrative Reform: The Technology of Accounting and the Subjectivity of a New Pedagogical Desire

Through the example of a Danish reform of educational plans in early childhood education, the paper critically addresses administrative educational reforms promoting accountability, visibility and documentation. Drawing on Foucaultian perspectives, the relation between knowledge and governing, implied in the reform, is analysed as a technology of accounting. A technology producing ‘the professional nursery teacher' as a reflective daily researcher, who outlives her pedagogical desire as an analytical care of the optimisation of ‘the learning child'. Thus, the paper analyses the micro physics of administrative technology, tracing how the humanistic values of education embed and are embedded within ‘the professional nursery teacher' as an object and subject of administrative practice. Rather than undermining the humanistic potential of education, it is argued that the technology of accounting, in this way, can be seen as a practice which mobilises and optimises this humanistic legacy, reproducing and transforming it into a new pedagogical desire.