ABSTRACT
The chapter critiques the disconnect between young children’s lived realities and socio-cultural contexts in Africa and the ECD and educational systems that have been created. The origins and sustaining parameters of systems in place are discussed as well as ways of engaging with them to achieve more successful integration between ndigenous child socialization practices and formal educational institutions. The account of origins and sustaining parameters includes Western cultural hegemony, the colonial export of a narrowing staircase model of schooling that defines educational success in terms of extraction of the learner from her/his community and culture of origin, the downward extension of globalized educational objectives from primary school into preschool educational provision, and the construction by international organisations of a premature orthodoxy of best ECD practices grounded in an overly universalised view of human development.
