ABSTRACT
One of the most challenging tasks we face nowadays in Brazil is to transform the views that adults have about early peer interaction into new perspectives that are just beginning to be spread among daycare teachers. The pedagogical point of view of many teachers is still centred on the adult, i.e. on the transmission of an already made culture, with the concern to control and introduce discipline quite early on in young children’s lives. In many ways, this adult-centred perspective mirrors teachers’ own experiences, since their own education has been based on an authoritarian teaching model. For many researchers, barriers against pedagogical work centred on children’s needs has been influenced by the historical construction of children attending daycare centres and pre-schools in the 19th and early 20th century as recipients of charity bestowed on the socially handicapped/deprived (Kulhman 1991). Following the two World Wars and the battle for human rights, the plea for the right to education for children of diverse social groups was extended to children attending early years services. However, that concern was suppressed during the military dictatorship, which governed Brazil with exceptional powers from 1964 until the 1980s. The principle of early child education and care as a right for the children, an option for families and an obligation of the State was only introduced with the re-democratization of Brazil and the new Constitution of 1988 (Brasil 1988).
