Alternative perspectives on
ECD;
Communities at the forefront Dr Fred Wood worked with the Bernard van Leer Foundation at senior level on programme development and operations for 21 years. This included 12 years in charge of operations and programmes, and four years as Director of Programme Development and Training; and culminated in three years as Deputy Executive Director of the Foundation. In 1991 he moved to the United States to take up a senior post with the Save the Children Federation, where he is now Director of Education, Department of Programs.
The case for early childhood development (ECD) has traditionally rested on one of two premises. The first premise perceived ECD as part of the systematic preparation of the young child for primary school, with the implicit aim of compensating for a supposed mismatch between the child’s home background and the assumptions upon which primary schooling were based. The second premise viewed ECD as a substitute for the family, a protective environment that would liberate women in particular from the immediate childcare duty and allow rapid reintegration of new mothers into the work force. Whichever way it was perceived, ECD was a social welfare mechanism, protecting the child against inadequacies in family and community. Both views derive from the notion of the all-caring, all-providing state, whether this be capitalist France or socialist China. Except in a few rare instances – for example, Mexico’s national programme of ‘non-
B e r nard van Leer Foundat ion
12
Early Childhood Matters
scholarised’ early childhood education directed at mothers of children in the first two years of life – the importance of ECD as a systematic effort to positively influence children’s development at this crucial stage has seldom been acknowledged as a feasible programmatic goal. In consequence, the critical significance of the earliest years of life as a fundamental adjunct to fullest brain development as the foundation for learning capacity and competence, remains a largely untouched area of endeavour. Ironically, over the past twenty years this has coincided with a major increase internationally in the number of programmes directed at infancy, largely under the heading of ‘Child Survival’, and spearheaded by UNICEF and other international agencies. These programmes have largely sought to meet physical needs, and have largely excluded those psychological and social development activities that would, in practice, enrich and strengthen the impact of such programmes.
AW Wood
Missed opportunity
Several background factors illustrate the extent of this missed opportunity. The primary factor is that brain research in recent years has gone even further in increasing our understanding of the relative importance of the earliest years, underlining the fact that we may be too late when pre-school interventions are predominantly focused on four and five year old children. On a more practical level, a second factor is that traditional early childhood development programmes – typified by the Bernard van Leer Foundation’s efforts at constructing ‘model’ preschool centres in South Africa in the 1970s – reveal a pattern of high-cost, infrastructure-heavy approaches, with curricula laid down by highly qualified professionals and propagated through service delivery normally demanding high levels of professional knowledge. For policy makers in poor countries this conventional stereotype rules out ECD programmes as a serious programme option.