The Persistent Gap between Education and Care: a ‘History of the Present’ Research on Belgian Child Care Provision and Policy1

Abstract

The first Belgian crèches for children from birth to three years of age date from the nineteenth century. From 1919, formal legislation on child care was developed. In the early twentieth century, the origins of Belgian childcare and in its initial legislation some core aspects of present‐day child care policy and practice can be found. This article will focus on two of these historical aspects of Belgian child care. Both features have far‐reaching consequences for the organization of present child care provision, for professional qualifications and for policy matters. The first is an aspect that is very common in Western Europe, and a source of current pedagogical debate: the persistent gap between care for the infant and the education of the preschool child. The second is a typical Belgian feature of childcare: subsidized liberty as a specific form of public–private partnership. This article wishes to contribute to the debates on viewing childcare policy and practice by historicizing these issues. A close look at Belgian child care history reveals how the gap between education and care and subsidized liberty occurred and in what context. Consequently the early twentieth century will be highlighted. However, it will also focus on oppositional discourse in the 1970s. In this period, another antagonistic debate took place, namely regarding compensation programmes for ‘blue collar’ parents. The article will briefly point to some remarkable similarities between the discussion in the 1910s and the 1970s. The outcomes of these discussions, as well as the concepts underpinning them, explain the persistence of the division between education and care. The debate between Henri Velge and Elise Plasky, around which this article is composed, has been studied previously by Belgian historians. The scarce research on Belgian child care history focuses on child care as a women's employment issue, somewhat neglecting the educational aspects. This vein, i.e. that historical research itself is embedded in the discursive regime separating education from care, is the very subject of this article. Therefore, research was conducted from a hermeneutical perspective, looking at coherences between discourses and their social, economic and cultural contexts. This research aims also to acknowledge the critiques of De Certeau regarding the focus on discontinuities in the construction of history. 1 The author would like to offer special thanks to the Bernard Van Leer Foundation for making the research possible and to Maria De Bie, professor at Ghent University, promoter of his PhD dissertation on which the article is based.