Children are the future, which is where most discussions about children and sustainability begin. The planet will pass to them. We have to keep it safe for them. Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson has spent the better part of four decades meticulously and tenaciously outlining why this framing—which sounds generous and progressive—is precisely the wrong way to think about it.
In addition to holding a UNESCO Chair in Early Childhood Education and Sustainable Development, Samuelsson is a senior professor at Gothenburg University in Sweden. From 2008 to 2014, he was the World President of OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education. Researchers, educators, and policymakers’ understanding of the relationship between young children and the planet they already live on has gradually changed as a result of her publications and lectures, which she has given at forums like OMEP World Congresses and UNESCO World Conferences. The change sounds subtle. Its consequences are not.
Her main contention, supported by decades of research, is that children are more than just passive objects of the world that adults create or destroy. They are currently capable and engaged participants, what she refers to as competent kids with real ideas, real agency, and a real interest in the decisions that affect them. It goes beyond simple innocence when a five-year-old in a Swedish preschool draws what she wants the world to look like. She is exhibiting awareness, preference, and a reflective ability that adults routinely undervalue. Samuelsson and her colleagues gathered information from more than 44,000 children in more than thirty countries through the OMEP World Project on Education for Sustainable Development. Although the children’s statements about nature, justice, and their aspirations for the world were in line with their own cultural realities, they consistently displayed a level of concern that the “children are just the future” framing subtly obscures.
She distinguishes between what she refers to as the “child perspective” and “children’s perspectives,” which is one of her most insightful conceptual contributions. Adults create the child perspective, which is their best effort to envision what is beneficial for a child and is based on policy, intuition, and research. It is frequently helpful and has good intentions. Children’s perspectives, on the other hand, are distinct because they are the real voices, insights, and thoughts of children themselves, gathered through authentic democratic engagement. In practice, the difference is crucial. Sustainability is taught through a curriculum created with children in mind. A pedagogy that incorporates children’s perspectives lets sustainability emerge from what children already notice and care about — the tree outside the classroom window, the water that runs dry, the neighbor who has less. It’s more honest and more difficult to construct.
Her work is directly related to the UN’s Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals. She has been an outspoken supporter of treating early childhood education as foundational infrastructure rather than a soft social service, the kind whose absence, as she noted in her OMEP writings, became starkly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic when the removal of childcare revealed how deeply economies and families depend on it. She has advocated for a UN Decade for Early Childhood Care and Education, arguing that the SDGs will remain aspirational documents rather than lived realities if young children are not firmly placed on the global agenda.
Reading through her body of work gives the impression that Samuelsson has been presenting a patient and fundamental argument for longer than most institutions were prepared to hear it: that sustainability is a way of relating to children, to knowledge, and to the world that must permeate everything rather than a content area to be added to preschool curricula somewhere between counting and drawing. To be honest, it’s still unclear if that argument has gained traction in the rooms where early education policy is actually decided. But now that she’s made it, the conversation is different.
