A mid-sized Polish city that most people outside of Europe couldn’t locate on a map is the focal point of an unusual development in the field of early childhood education. The 78th OMEP World Assembly and Conference will take place in Poznań this July, bringing together academics, researchers, and—perhaps most importantly—policymakers from over forty nations. It may not seem like much, but that final detail is crucial. It is not an easy logistical or political task to get education ministers and senior officials in the same room as child development researchers and preschool teachers. However, since 1948, OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, has been quietly accomplishing just that, working with the kind of unwavering perseverance that usually goes unnoticed until it starts to work.
This year’s theme, “When a Child Speaks…” Korczak’s Inspirations for Education and Children’s Rights, sounds like academic jargon until you know who Korczak was. Polish-Jewish pediatrician and teacher Janusz Korczak operated an orphanage in Warsaw and refused to leave the kids under his care when the Nazis deported them to Treblinka. He accompanied them on their walk to the trains. His educational writings, which were written decades before the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, made the case that children were present, thinking, feeling beings who should be treated with the same respect as adults. It feels purposeful and a little awkward to host this conference in his native country, which is still dealing with the fallout from that past. which is most likely the point.
Additionally, the presence of policymakers is not accidental. OMEP has years of experience integrating itself into global education frameworks, especially around Sustainable Development Goal 4.2, which calls for universal access to high-quality early childhood development and care. The organization also has consultative status with the UN and UNESCO. OMEP, which has active national committees and is represented in sixty-seven countries, serves as both a lobbying tool and a scholarly network, though its members would probably object to the latter. Given that the conference is taking place in the final stages of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development—a deadline that appeared ambitious in 2015 but now appears almost unachievable—there is a feeling that it is intended to be more prominent than usual.
For all of this, Poznań itself is an intriguing stage. The city, which is halfway between Berlin and Warsaw, has been the site of international trade shows since 1921 and has a reputation for drawing large crowds. Adam Mickiewicz University’s buildings, including the Collegium Iuridicum Novum with its thirty-two lecture halls and strangely lovely oval auditorium, will host the conference sessions. When attendees arrive at Šawica Airport, they will discover a city that is both small enough to travel by tram and rich enough in history—from its place in Poland’s founding mythology to the Enigma codebreaking work done within the Kaiser’s Castle—to occupy even the most restless delegates in between plenary sessions.
In reality, what will those sessions yield? The program is framed by seven thematic axes, which range from children’s rights to participate to teachers’ roles as human rights advocates. The Poznań Declaration 2026, a collective statement anticipated to outline shared commitments on inclusion, sustainability, and children’s rights, may be the most significant result. These statements have a mixed record: they make headlines, spread throughout ministries, and occasionally subtly alter national curricula. How seriously the policymakers present take its language back home and whether anyone follows up six months later may determine whether this one takes off.
Nevertheless, there is a noteworthy aspect of the trajectory. The conference held in Bologna last year examined creativity and the arts in early education. By focusing on voice and agency, Poznań asks not only how children learn but also whether adults are open to hearing what they already know. Observing this shift, it is difficult to avoid wondering if OMEP is placing a wager that the world is now prepared for Korczak’s main question due to the political moment’s overlapping crises of inequality, displacement, and democratic erosion. While guiding kids through the streets of Warsaw eight decades ago, he posed the question. At its core, the July conference is a bet that representatives from forty nations may finally have a solution. or the integrity to acknowledge that they don’t.
