The international organisms' directions for national policies of early childhood education: from the right to focusing

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze the discourses present in documents produced by international organisms and local governments which direct, above all, the policies of early childhood education on the basis of a conception of education as public policy, as government project, under the responsibility of the State, and as a right for everyone. Based on the analytical framework of policies developed by Dale (2004), we focus our analyses on texts of various documents produced mainly by UNESCO and by UNICEF. The objective here was that of identifying the directions of these organisms for early childhood education and their implications for the actual implementation of local policies. The analysis reveals that the interpretive shift of social issues observed in the Latin American context gives support to the direction, recurrent in the documents, of adopting early childhood education as a strategy to tackle poverty and, in so doing, promoting social equity. The repercussions of such directions in local policies for early childhood education, particularly with respect to the universalization of this right, are alarming, since the analyses point to a movement of expansion of conservative and excluding perspectives that end up reinforcing the segmentation of the education of children younger than six.