Vaccination Revisited: Negotiating Parental and Community Authority in Early Childhood Education (Issues in Education‪)‬

For several years, my wife Sherri and I have served as the co-presidents of our children's preschool, a nonprofit parent cooperative with classes for 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children in Washington State. Although state law requires that parents submit their children's immunization records as part of enrollment protocol, as presidents, we typically do not examine this information, given the broader organizational responsibilities connected to our position. Imagine my dismay, then, when after penning an op-ed in our city's newspaper about the troubling rise in parental exemptions from school vaccination requirements, I was informed that approximately one out of every six children in our preschool was not vaccinated. Compulsory vaccination emerged in the United States as part of a "bio-politics of the population" in the latter half of the 19th century, as medical technologies were applied on political and spatial levels through the development of modern administrative systems of surveillance and regulation (Foucault, 1978, p. 139). Those opposed to vaccination at the time--and especially parents of young children--took their fight to courtrooms, state legislatures, school boards, and, in some instances, to the streets through acts of civil disobedience and even mob violence (Colgrove, 2006; Leavitt, 1982). While historians have, as Nadja Durbach (2005) notes, "often seen anti-vaccinationism as anti-progressive," people's resistance to what was an often insensitively administered, "invasive, insanitary and sometimes disfiguring procedure" (pp. 2-3) more than a century ago should be viewed today within the context of a more informed, empathic, and subtly nuanced understanding of the past.