Early Childhood as a Time to Learn

Understandings of early childhood as a time for learning emerged from child development laboratories such as John Dewey’s at the University of Chicago. The mantra of “learning by doing” was soon part of the discourse of the early nursery school movement of the 1920s, and children were not the only ones who were busy. Social activists and others committed to progressive education traveled abroad and returned with new perspectives on early educational practices. As Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten came under criticism, the ideas of Maria Montessori gained favor. Abigail Eliot returned from England with new ideas about the “total child” concept, including a focus on parents. Teacher training schools were launched, and by 1925 a National Committee on Nursery Schools was convened a group of women who eventually served as founding mothers of the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

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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Early Childhood as a Period of Human Development Worthy of Study

It was within the context of industrialization and the modernist project at the end of the nineteenth century that the pursuit of scientific knowledge and social progress began to influence the study and education of young children (Lubeck, 1995). The twentieth century was proclaimed as the “Century of the Child” and students of child development became partners with social advocates for an early childhood education. William James proposed that child study serve as a scientific basis for pedagogy; and G. Stanley Hall urged mothers to observe and record their children’s development.

Eventually rejected as not sufficiently “scientific,” Hall’s informal approaches to child study were replaced by more systematic and “scientific” methods, many based on Edward Thorndike’s ideas on educational measurement. As the notion of “ability” as a measurable characteristic became more widely accepted, the emerging field of child development embraced notions of normative development and soon asserted its scientific status over the field of early childhood education. Child Study and Child Welfare Institutes, among them the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, and university laboratory schools created new settings in which professionals could work with and study young children. Throughout the second quarter of the century, early childhood institutions continued to develop in response to new understandings of child development. In this new century, amidst growing controversy, much of it fueled by Western European scholars and philosophers, child development theory and research remains the primary knowledge base for early childhood education in the United States. New brain research has added to the conviction that there is much to learn about, and much to promote during, the period of early childhood.


Early Childhood as a Time to Intervene
Early educational initiatives have historically been vulnerable to social causes and, in the United States, many have focused on children deemed underprivileged. Decisions about which children needed an out-of-home educational experience were reflected in the charity movement and the day nursery movement ; some of these innovations also reflected the changing work habits of American families. Concerns about child labor and child welfare drew attention to children’s physical and psychological needs—especially those born in poverty or
to uneducated parents. In 1912, the Children’s Bureau was established as a symbol of federal interest in young children as well as the beginnings of a concern with the “at risk” child.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, early childhood educational services expanded in directions established decades earlier. Wealthy children stayed home or enrolled in play groups or private nursery or preschools. Children of poor families and/or those whose mothers worked enrolled in federally run or privately funded daycare centers, nursery schools, or kindergartens, with family daycare in the homes
of nonfamilial adults the most common. At a time when notions of universal stages of cognitive development were being detailed and the role of constructive play took on a new importance in promoting early intelligence, President Lyndon Johnson launched Head Start as a centerpiece to the War on Poverty.

Begun in 1965 as an eight-week summer program, Head Start soon became a large-scale social welfare program that has varied as a function of politics as well as growing understandings of child development. In 1975, another group of children—those with disabilities—was identified as entitled to publicly funded
early intervention services. Eventually renamed and amended in 1997 to include younger children, The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) effectively changed the landscape and the language of early childhood education, from the classroom to teacher education to a new field of early childhood special education. To date, U.S. policies have continued to prioritize funding for children needing early intervention over the provision of universal early care and educational services.
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What Is Early Childhood Education?

Early Childhood Education (ECE) has been described as many things: a form of applied child development, purposeful and targeted early intervention, or any of an array of services designed to support the learning and development of children in the first years of life. For most people, as acknowledged in the following passage from a forthcoming publication by one of the editors (Cochran, 2007), early childhood education refers to services provided during the period from birth to the age of compulsory schooling:
Early care and education policies and programs involve the provision of (a) child care  to preschool-aged children, and care before and after school to school-aged children while their parents are employed or receiving further education; (b) other child development focused and early educational experiences to preschool-aged children; and (c) child development, child care, and early education informationmade available to the parents of preschool-aged children.

This definition provides room for many of the more narrowly focused child care and early education programs and providers found across the country, including child-care centers, family and group family child-care programs and networks, preschools, nursery schools, Head Start programs, and prekindergarten programs. It also includes efforts to inform and educate parents about child development, child-care alternatives, and approaches to teaching preschool children appropriate social, cognitive, and language skills. For some in the field, however, this definition does not capture all of the meanings of early childhood education.

The term “preschool children” in the definition refers to children during the period immediately prior to their entry into primary school. In the United States, this age group is typically three- and four-year-old children, and the endpoint of this definition wavers between the ages of four, five, and six. In the absence of national policies, kindergarten (for five-year-olds) remains nonobligatory in many states across the country but is a part of compulsory schooling in others. Further acknowledging the socially constructed nature of this time in the life of the child, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) defines early childhood as the period from birth to age eight. As editors, we agreed to avoid a fixed definition of the age range of the field, given these vast disparities in common use. As the reader will soon learn, a majority of the contributors have interpreted the age range of these volumes to encompass the period from birth through age five. The absence of early childhood perspectives in the primary grades has emerged as an area of major concern to many in the field.

Nor did we delimit the language used to describe the field. For many Americans, child care (of infants and toddlers) is distinct from early childhood education (interpreted as a form of early schooling). For others—the editors included—the field of early childhood education embraces the multiple systems of early care and education, as acknowledged in the previous definition. For some, the politics of this discourse is central to the controversy in that adults who are identified as caregivers typically earn less than those identified as teachers. On the other side of this particular coin is a growing concern about increased efforts to “teach” infants and toddlers so as to promote early brain growth and development. Many of our international contributors refer to systems of early care and education.

This introduction to the field of ECE is not a digression; rather, it acknowledges the fact that much of what is thought about and done for young children is wed to the particular sociocultural and historical contexts within which children live and learn and grow up. It is for that reason that we have solicited entries on the ecology of early childhood, represented in Volumes 1, 2, and 3 with entries on the changing nature of families, the growing prevalence of media and technology in children’s lives, and new concerns about children’s physical health (e.g., obesity), and their mental well-being (e.g., violence, drug abuse).

We also invited contributors in Volume 4 to describe the “place” of childhood as interpreted and experienced in their various cultural contexts. These entries include discussions on how childhood has changed, both from a legal point of view (as expressed through laws and conventions of children’s rights) as well as the position of the child in various extra-family spaces. Throughout the four volumes of this work, contributors from various fields have responded to our invitation to add to the ongoing debate about the nature and meaning of early childhood, drawing upon literatures in anthropological studies, child development, education, psychology, sociology, social policy, and the history of childhood itself. Their entries provide a compelling case for the complexity of the field, its dependence on collaboration, its varied positioning within diverse cultures, and its inevitable controversial nature.
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