ABSTRACT
The field of early childhood education as a whole has not always valued children as able participants, or even as reliable informants about their own lives and experiences. The anthropological thought and inquiry have contributed to refocusing the position of the young child and child-centeredness in relation to adults, and also disrupted the dominance of developmental psychology as the primary frame for understanding how the youngest children learn and grow. Early childhood education has historically been defined by developmental psychology and its maps of how people move from infancy to adulthood, learning everything from how to grasp a small object to how to think about abstract concepts. An anthropological contribution to early childhood education is the idea of the child as an agentive participant and reliable informant. Another important contribution anthropology makes to the larger study of children and childhoods is problematizing and recognizing how the field of early childhood education is replete with adultism.
