THE CONCEPT OF EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

INTRODUCTION

You must have seen or probably attended some pre-school establishments which are given different names in different places. Can you mention some of those names to your classmate? You must have also learnt some things about children generally in one way or the other in some of the courses in this programme. That is good! However, you may not have learnt what early childhood education really means and why it is necessary. Therefore, you are going to learn in this unit the meaning of early childhood education and its importance.

OBJECTIVES

After studying this unit carefully, you should be able to:

•  explain the concept of early childhood education. 
•  enumerate four reasons why early childhood education is necessary particularly for Nigerian children. 

The Various Definitions of Childhood Education

Definition of Childhood

In discussing anything about childhood education, it is necessary for us to first identify a child. That is, who is a child? If we are able to do this, then it will not be difficult for us to classify children into stages namely; early, middle or later childhood.

According to the National Child Welfare Policy of 1989, a child is anybody who is 12 years or below. But this has been modified a little recently. Thus, a child in Nigeria is now considered to be anybody below the age of 18 years. This appears to agree with the United Nations age definition of a child. As you may be aware, the Nigerian law also regards anybody below the age of 18 years as a child (minor). In other words, anybody below the age of 18years in Nigeria cannot vote or be voted for because he/she is still a child.

Now that we have been able to identify who is a child, let us look at the classification of the childhood period. There are three major ways of classifying childhood. These are the early childhood, the middle childhood and the later childhood. The early childhood period is generally referred to as the period from birth till about the age of five or six (Charles et al 1978). In other words, it is the period before the official primary school age in Nigeria. It means that early childhood does not go beyond the pre-school or what is popularly called nursery school year in Nigeria.


There is a recent development in some parts of Europe, which appears to have modified the early childhood period to about 8 years. According to some childhood organizations such as Organization Mondial Pour L'Education Pre-scholaire (OMEP), National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and Early Years Education's (EYE), this period is from birth till about eight years. This means that in Nigeria, early childhood period will extend to primary three pupils and not limited only to the nursery school children. Therefore, in our discussion of early childhood education, we may not have to limit ourselves to the nursery schools. We may have to discuss both pre-primary and primary schools so as to take care of this recent development in some parts of the world. In the next section of this unit, we are going to examine the various establishments that take care of
early childhood children which we now say include children up to 8years of age.