As laboratory schools and research centers spread across the United States some at major research universities—so too did the influence of child development research on teacher preparation. By the 1930s, many middle-income children attended nursery school and/or kindergarten for purposes of enhancing their development and their teachers sought training in departments of home economics, psychology, or education.
By mid-century, the kindergarten was increasingly viewed as the first and best place to establish children’s “readiness” for formal schooling. Jean Piaget’s treatises on the child’s distinctive ways of reasoning—most disseminated decades after they were first published—provided new windows on children’s developmental processes and new rationale for an early childhood education.
Ideas about the period of early childhood—and children’s early education were also reflected in and supported by businesses. For example, by the end of the nineteenth century, major toy companies were marketing toys as educational games. The twentieth century saw a dramatic increase in mass-produced toys,
many of them designed for solitary play. Lincoln Logs, Erector sets, and Crayolas enhanced constructive and creative activities and provided new interest, in play that could take place indoors. Subsequent debates on the value and nature of toys, and their roles in educational environments, were sparked by such leading figures as Montessori, Roland Barth, and Erik Erikson, among others. Controversy surrounding the contributions of play to children’s learning, identity, and development became a part of the early childhood education discourse.
Early Childhood as Contested Terrain
Each of the above features—the notion of scientific research as a basis for decisions about early childhood, the premise of early intervention into the lives of children deemed “at risk,” and the presumed benefits of capitalizing on children’s early learning potentials—has generated controversy as well as new policy initiatives throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.
There is little doubt that decisions by governors and state legislatures to invest public revenues in early childhood programs has been influenced by advances in child development knowledge that have occurred during the past quarter century, including new understandings of the infant brain as brimming with neurological
potential waiting for stimulation rather than as an empty vessel seeking to be filled.
Such political involvement in ECE has brought long-desired recognition as well as unanticipated challenges, as evidenced by theNo Child Left Behind Act and new performance standards for Head Start that are more akin to those of elementary schools than what many believe is appropriate for young children. The nature and
aims of science are also at stake, as funding agencies increasingly emphasize the importance of empirical evidence to the exclusion of qualitative forms of inquiry in the determination of developmentally appropriate educational practices as essential to maintaining the “scientific” and professional status of the field.
As the stakes increase for research that can demonstrate “what works” in early childhood classrooms, postmodern scholars and contributors to the reconceptualist movement question the capacity of research to tell it “how it is,” and caution against the certainty based on empirical knowledge, especially when such “truths” include a standardized image of childhood. Within this oppositional context, professionally derived determinations of quality and developmentally appropriate practices in the United States continue to be informed by child development research; and comparative studies of early education, in turn, continue to demonstrate alternative interpretations of high quality early care and education. In short, debates about the role of early childhood education and the consequences of various curricula and teaching methods on children’s lives echo many of the debates of a century ago. And yet the field has much to acclaim, as the following policy initiatives show.
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