Early childhood education in the Caribbean

Abstract

This paper analyses the major thrust of previous early childhood education efforts in the Caribbean, focusing on Jamaica, Dominica, and Trinidad and Tobago. It posits that early childhood education represents a chance for Caribbean people to plan, organize, and decide their own priorities. In this sense, early childhood education is viewed as an important part of the human resource development the region needs. The preschool, properly linked into a comprehensive community plan, which has income generating activities as its central feature, can provide mothers with hope, and children with an opportunity to develop a vision of themselves by properly equipping them with the skills they need to learn "how to learn." Research results, both in North America and the Caribbean, are said to suggest the following guidelines for early childhood programmes: 1) income generation for low-income parents; 2) comprehensive social services, which would include, intersectorally, health, nutrition, counselling, etc.; 3) involvement of the mother from the start; and 4) community action as part of the preschool experience. Where development aid focuses on the formal institutions of education, it is felt that it fails for the poor child, simply because cognition cannot be isolated from other areas of the child's functioning. The family is the primary social and economic unit, and the mother, the basic change agent, whose contribution so far is largely invisible, should be the prime target