Teaching Toward Freedom: Early Childhood Education and the Challenges Ahead

Schools are always contested spaces, places where our assumptions about and hopes for humanity are worked out on the ground. Early childhood education is not immune from the struggles over what it means to be human and what the dimensions of a good society are or should be. This article offers an argument for early childhood to take up the challenge. This article was originally prepared as an oral keynote presentation for the June 2005 meeting of the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators in Miami Beach, FL.