| In particular communities, the frenzy generated by parents selecting and securing educational opportunities for the preschool set is old news. Parents spend countless hours researching desired schools, donate untold sums of money to said schools while still pregnant, fax applications from labor and delivery rooms in the moments following a child's birth, and camp out on sidewalks overnight in an attempt to secure a spot in a desired preschool.;In this dissertation, I take the preschool frenzy in a privileged suburban community as my point of departure. I journey into the world of elite preschool in an effort to gain insight into the phenomenon, its participants, its context, and the world beyond. In so doing, I first establish that counter to many parents' perceptions, the preschool frenzy is not "just a numbers problem" nor due to market failure. Rather, parents in this community are active in generating the illusion of true competition, and the frenzy is cyclical in nature.;Using qualitative methods and drawing largely on interviews with parents, I conclude that contrary to popular opinion, the preschool frenzy is not fueled by anything so deliberate or calculated as parents' Machiavellian efforts to give children a competitive edge or pave a path to financial success. Rather, the preschool frenzy is fueled by the fear of not being a good enough parent. In certain communities, preschool is a requisite opportunity for parents to display to themselves and to others their devotion, love, and goodness as parents, as evidenced through their preschool choice work. The preschool frenzy can be viewed as a class and culture specific performance of motherhood, born out of the inevitable vulnerability of love, feelings of inadequacy, unattainable ideals, and the sense that children and families are woefully neglected in the public sphere. In their various behaviors with regard to the preschool application and selection process, parents simultaneously subscribe to and reproduce cultural ideals and constructs, thus further cementing them and perpetuating the frenzy.;Throughout this study, I invoke Bowe, Gewirtz, and Ball's analytical metaphor, landscapes of choice. In contrast to traditional studies on parental choice (largely rooted in the individual rational calculus of classical economics), this analytical model captures the complex, reflexive, and embedded nature of choice making. It focuses more on the rhetoric around the process of choosing and less on the criteria for choice itself. It takes as the unit of analysis neither the lone individual nor the social forces that elicit individual behavior. Rather, it focuses on the culture, the collective constructions, and what individuals do with those collective constructions. I also utilize Foucault's analysis of Panopticism to further illustrate the reflexive nature of this phenomenon by exploring the process through which parents become their own toughest critics and thereby participate in their own entrapment.;I conclude by asking how this new framing of the preschool frenzy could lend to more productive approaches to preschool and by asking what light this new understanding of a specific cultural phenomenon can shed on broader, underlying societal ills. |
