Early Childhood Education and the Political World

Abstract

This study analyzes how the organization of knowledge and practices in the field of Early Childhood Education conditions the idea of the political world. It can function both to encourage conformism and the reiteration of order as well as to build resistance and encourage the construction of a new society. The first portion of the study focuses on early childhood as a historic product, demonstrating how the practices inscribed within it have been woven from a given concept of dominant social assistance in the field of social policies. It then approaches the elementary school teacher as a social being who has part of his or her subjectivity formed from the material determinations of his or her professional practice. Finally, it concludes with a brief review of early childhood education as a political event that is socially determined and which involves relations and powers that can define sociabilities that are more or less inured to the dominant social order.