Childhood as Social Investment, Rights and the Valuing of Education

This paper discusses the impact of and close interplay between global discourses on children, notions of (a good) childhood at the national and local levels and childhoods as these are lived and experienced in particular social contexts. Two increasingly powerful global images of children are explored: Children as individual subjects with rights to participation as stated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child ( CRC ) and children as human capital and early childhood investment. I argue that the market‐oriented politics and ‘global images’ of childhood are connected to particular ideological notions of what it means to be a human being, and an increasing individualization, separating children from an intergenerational social order. The discussion is empirically grounded in case studies in Norway and Ethiopia. The paper highlights the contradictions especially with respect to safeguarding local livelihoods and knowledge suggesting limits to the ‘sector based’ approach to children's participation and rights to education. It highlights the need to move the focus from children as objects of investments to a ‘politics of recognition’, in ways that value individual dignity and knowledge as constructed by children and adults within local ‘belonging communities’.