Early Childhood Education Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Early Childhood Education - Essay Example   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Education must begin in early childhood since the values, attitudes, behaviors and skills acquired in this period have a long lasting impact in the future life of children. â€Å"Early childhood education helps to lay a sound intellectual, psychological, emotional, social and physical foundation for development and lifelong learning. It also has enormous potential in fostering values, attitudes, skills and behaviors that support sustainable development e.g. wise use of resources, cultural diversity, gender equality and democracy† (Bell, 2009). Thesis Statement:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Child Education in the United States is compulsory and it is provided mainly by the public sector. The ages for compulsory education vary from state to state in the US and it usually begins from age four/five and ends at age seventeen/eighteen. Pre-school is the first educational setting for a child. Pre-school education in US commences at an age of four or five and this setting intends to bring out both social and academic outcomes in a child. My thesis statement is that it is during the pre-kindergarten years that a child will discover and explore all the areas of learning and that the education provided in the pre-kindergarten years should be developmentally appropriate in its approach to the curriculum. History:     Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   An overview of the history of early childhood education shows that there existed a variation in the ages at which children were sent to school. During the early 1900’s of the US, five or six was the common accepted age for the beginning of formal childhood education at the kindergartens.   Towards the latter half of the twentieth century, an institution named ‘Head Start’ was created to provide education to the poor and the disadvantaged children. This institution provided pre-school training to these children during their ages of three, four or five. It is believed that it was this institution which became a model for the early childhood education.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Project Head Start also was successful in changing the attitude towards young children. Gradually, middle-class Americans began to enroll their children in preschool programs under Project Head Start in order to receive the benefits of early childhood education. This pre-school education was so popular that towards the late 1980’s, there were about 39.1 percent of children aged three and four who received early education.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Though Project Head Start was widely accepted by the Americans, it gradually lost its prominence during the later years. Before Project Head Start, â€Å"infant schools providing education for poor children below the ages of five and six did existed in America, in the early half of the nineteenth century† (Vinovskis, 1993) which were created out of the inspiration from European countries. Infant schools were so popular in 1840’ s that about 40% of three year olds attended school in Massachusetts. But, since this movement was discouraged by the majority of the society, only a fewer number of children under ages four or five were going to the infant schools in Massachusetts.  The infant schools of the nineteenth