Early Childhood Education

Early childhood education has been consistently linked to interventions designed to achieve developmental goals, not only of individual children but also of nations and even the world. The history of early childhood education in the West traces its beginning in philosophical and moral thinking on the goals of pedagogy and the character of the human from Jean-Jeacques Rousseau’s romanticism to John Locke’s emphasis on the environment. Over time, these concerns were replaced by those of the developmental sciences of biology and psychology, which remain a persistent thread in early childhood education. Another thread associated with social reform and child-centered programming emerged in the early 20th-century North Atlantic with particular national and international effects. Now at the turn of the 21st century, early childhood education has ...