Session Information
Session 7, Historical Perspectives on Educational Provision (Part 1)
Papers
Time:
2005-09-09
09:00-10:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Ulrike Mietzner
Contribution
The field of early childhood education has changed many times during the last decades of the 20th century. The number of children participating in preschool education has also increased, almost doubled in Finland. Today more than 95 per cent of an age group of six-year-olds are in preschool education in Finland. Most of these children are in preschool in day-care centers and others of them are in schools. It is a problem in the discussion on education in Finland that the preschool education organized by society is so complicated. But what kind of origins the preschool system has in Finland?This paper looks at Finnish educational system and preschool system from an historical perspective. In most countries education has been the traditional means by which people have improved their prospects for satisfying lives. It is clear from many histories that the modern thrust of early childhood education has been evident only since the post-Second World War period. Since these times the social goals of the unifying educational system has been educational equality and children's rights. According of the study the professional debate about preschool started in Finland quite early, in 1944. However the local preschool experiments started in Finnish kindergartens and schools much more later. In order to gain a better understanding of how different factors, interests and groups have affected preschool system's formation, the study has focused again on this debate and on the preschool organization by state. The main aim of this research is to examine the social origins of the preschool system from the time of the rise of the question of preschool for all six-year-olds up to the reform of the legislation on preschool education, from the 1940's the 2000's. The educational goals and interests representative of each historical period is analyzed by using the official documents as empirical data: e.g. parliament debates and decicions, laws, reports of educational committees, statewide preschool curricula. Also the aim of the study is to develop methods which make it possible to distinguish dominant group's goals and educational interests from assertive group's goals and interests that have had an influence on the planning of the preschool system. It seems that the formation of the Finnish preschool education system does not originate from the goals of either dominant or assertive groups. Is it really the eventual and unintended product of all of them seeking state intervention for their own ends simultaneously?Keywords: Children's rights, early childhood education, educational equality, history of education, preschool
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.