"It's Still Not Good!": assessments, moralities, and classifications in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This article examines how evaluative practices in Early Childhood Education are produced through everyday interactions and contribute to processes of classification and school hierarchisation. Drawing on three “frames” in which teachers publicly comment on activities carried out by children, we explore how evaluation exceeds pedagogical activity and comes to operate as a situated moral practice. The study shows how comments, gestures, corrections and implicit comparisons can transform momentary performances into attributes associated with children, producing public exposure and embarrassment. Such practices, often naturalised within school routines, operate as symbolic microviolences and anticipate classificatory logics associated with schooling and literacy. Children respond to these evaluations in different ways, through silence, hesitation and bodily withdrawal. Evaluations also mobilise references to family, particularly when performance is interpreted through expectations related to domestic support and familiarity with schooling. We conclude that these everyday interactions contribute to the early production of moral classifications and unequal school trajectories, long before any formal processes of evaluation.