Reframing the Early Childhood Curriculum: Educational Imperatives for the Future

Research on young people's attitudes to the future highlights the extent to which they have difficulty coming to terms with it. They generally perceive it to be threateningly remote and uncertain, with recurring central themes including fear of the consequences of change, the threats of war, technical innovation and environmental destruction. Pre-school children, on the other hand, have a fundamentally different attitude towards the future and attendant notions of time and change. Early childhood professionals are thus optimally placed to lay important foundations for young children's long-term development.

Children maintain a positive and constructive outlook on life, have a strong sense of the continuity of time, are creative and imaginative and have a sense of personal connection with time and the future. All these qualities should be recognised and addressed in early childhood educational programmes as a means of counteracting the difficulty young people experience in knowing what to expect in their future lives and in coming to understand their roles in shaping them.

REFRAMING THE EARLY CHILDHOOD CURRICULUM offers fresh insights by:
-- examining futurists' and early childhood theorists' thinking of the relevance of planning for children's long-term needs in early childhood
-- identifying the skills, attitudes and outlooks required to assist young children attending early childhood programmes in their long-term growth and development
-- exploring the means through which these skills, attitudes and outlooks can be achieved in curriculum frameworks throughspecific goals and learning experiences against the background of young people's and young children's views of the future.