ABSTRACT
A central concern motivating early childhood professionals is their shared commitment to the fundamental objective of laying foundations of life-long learning for the children in their care. Early childhood professionals play a vital role in imparting the skills, attitudes and aspirations which are central to young children’s development. The relevance of futures studies to early childhood educational frameworks has hitherto not been studied systematically by either futurists or early childhood professionals. In the main, the discourse has addressed issues in isolation and lacked reference to the relative values and shared concerns of both disciplines. This chapter will demonstrate the many principles that are shared by futures studies and early childhood education and will argue that the implementation of a futures-focused curriculum provides the means of extending and rearticulating existing developmental objectives from the vantage points of new perspectives.
