Chapter 2 Early Education: Programs, Traditions, and Policies

With the creation of Head Start in the late 1960s, early education became a moderately prominent activity of the American federal government. Head Start was intended to be much more than a preschool program but it funded mostly early education and, in so doing, it brought to a head a 200-year-old tradition of activities that acted much like a research and development se-quence. Across 200 years, practical needs, private and governmental pro-jects, borrowings from philosophy, educational ideologies, and Utopian pro-grams had acted together to produce one form of early education after another and a growing body of sophisticated practice. Beginning in about 1800, changing times more and more frequently brought about situations in which families could not give all-day care to their small children. Some families made informal arrangements; some paid for child-minding; many, particularly the poor, had to abandon their small chil-dren for part of the day. Charitable individuals established caretaking facili-ties. Governments moved in to support such facilities, rapidly and easily in some countries, slowly and reluctantly in others. Early education—programs of controlled experiences for young children built upon a coherent educational philosophy—arose here and there. Individ-uals created these programs, inspired on the one hand by the impulse to help poor children and on the other by visions of the betterment of human society. Enlightenment philosophies of social reform and human development sup-ported these programs. The programs seemed to make the ideas more real. The early educators visited and borrowed; they wrote down their ideas and methods; they lectured and proselytized; they had disciples; they started teacher training programs. Their scattered ventures were fused into a tradi-tion—a community of people linked across space and time whose common cause was early education. The early educators had a sense of communio