Culturised Early Childhood Development. The Well-being and Healthy Development of Young Boys and Girls

This book argues that the worldwide trend of turning children into ‘early learners’
at ever younger ages is detrimental to their well-being and healthy development.
Instead, ECD – Early Childhood Education efforts should foremost be a ‘culturising’
endeavour.

Culturised ECD is here seen as an enjoyable and wholesome process that challenges
and engages children. It fosters their curiosity and eagerness to be active and
to explore, enables them to use their faculties, talents and skills, and contributes
to their development as well-rounded persons since it helps them in valuing, searching
for, finding, contributing to and creating beauty and meaning in life as well as
appreciating the connectedness of things organic and inorganic. It also engenders
children with hope and “the audacious attempt to galvanize and energize, to inspire
and to invigorate world-weary people”. It is the totality of those activities that enables
young boys and girls to participate in things that are meaningful, pleasing and
good. It recognises that ECD is all-encompassing and should therefore be much
more than providing children with ‘schooling’.

The following issues are addressed, culturised ECD and its:

• effect on the well-being of children; this regardless of their future, inside or
  outside the school or employment market
• impact on the longer-term development of children; do they become more
  resilient, experience fewer obstacles when enrolling in formal basic education
  and when adults, will they fare better, socially and economically?
• relevance when faced with such ‘hot topics’ as violence, discrimination and
  social exclusion of children.
• contribution to reducing poverty and inequality, or helping young boys and
  girls, both as children and later as adults, to cope with both.

The authors, Nico van Oudenhoven, originally a child psychologist, and Rona Jualla
van Oudenhoven, an educational sociologist, are both connected to ICDI – International
Child Development Initiatives, located in Amsterdam (The Netherlands).