ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to expose, through archival research, the diversity that characterizes the global state of early childhood care and education (ECCE). From a focus on a select literature available to the author, it glimpses into the different facets by which some cultures raise competent children, pondering why the field gives less attention to the vibrant variety of the ECCE services of the Majority World (Kagitçibasi, 1996) while highlighting those of Anglo-American cultures. While evidence acknowledges diversity, current understandings have yet to translate into the theory, research, intervention, and pedagogy of international psychology (Stevens & Gielen, 2007) in terms that mirror the immense variation in global developmental trajectories and the cultural curricula that generate them. Are rights activists and the development community really aware that many Majority World children “hide” their true identity because contemporary ECCE services instill shame in them for being different from the normative Western child (Vandenbroeck, 1999)? Therefore, the chapter does not judge as rogue scholarship the questioning of why the development community is advocating the reinforcement of institutional services that generally subvert the ECCE
systems of Majority World peoples and enclaves of inner city children in the Western world, thereby denying rights, dignity, even humanity, to the vast majority of the world’s children and families.
