Author: Nelson Rosario

Governments often fail to recognize a certain type of gathering until it is too late. Among them is the yearly hui of OMEP Aotearoa. This unannounced gathering of early childhood academics, practitioners, and advocates, which is typically held in a university lecture hall or community venue somewhere between Wellington and Auckland, has become the site where New Zealand’s ECE policy is put to the test, dissected, and occasionally publicly denounced before lawmakers even look at the documentation. It’s not a demonstration. It’s not a conference in the fancy corporate sense. It’s more obstinate than either of them. The World Organization…

Spending thirty years writing position papers in committee rooms and still thinking those papers are important to a four-year-old in South Auckland seems almost counterintuitive. However, that is basically what OMEP Aotearoa’s longest-serving members have done and still do with a tenacity that verges on silent defiance. With support from UNESCO, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education was established in Prague in 1948 and now has operations in over 70 nations. It has a tiny chapter in Aotearoa. Its seasoned leaders, some of whom have been involved since the early 1990s, firmly believe that local classrooms, despite their lack…

In a time when universities pursue seven-figure research contracts and international partnerships valued at millions, an £800 travel grant seems almost charming. Nevertheless, the OMEP UK National Committee discreetly posts its call for Student Travel Award applications every year, providing a small amount to assist one or two students in traveling to the World OMEP Assembly and Conference. The sums don’t change people’s lives. One could argue that the effect is. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, is one of the oldest international organizations devoted to the rights and education of young children, having been in operation…

A specific type of international development narrative is rarely adequately conveyed. There are no tearful photo ops, no dramatic helicopter drops of supplies, and no celebrity ambassadors. It’s the tale of committees being established, emails between teachers in sun-drenched Kenyan classrooms and drizzly English towns, and cuddly toys shipped across oceans as acts of kindness between preschools that could hardly be more dissimilar. That is the tale of OMEP UK and Kenya, and it merits greater attention than it currently receives. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, was founded in the wake of World War II as…

A selective bibliography of children’s literature was created in 1957 by Aurora Medina de la Fuente, a primary school inspector, while Francisco Franco’s regime was still in control of Spain. On the surface, it was simply a list of books that were thought to be appropriate for young readers. However, it was subtly radical because of the standards she employed, which prioritized psychological preparedness and literary quality over political and moral orthodoxy. Her decisions continue to spark debate in Spanish education departments nearly seven decades later, which speaks to the woman and the slow pace of institutional change. Medina was…

The majority of parents outside the early years sector are unaware of the tiny green passport that is circulating in British nurseries. It doesn’t appear to be much. A kid-friendly synopsis of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is printed inside a laminated cover with a few sticker slots. However, this modest document serves as the foundation for the OMEP UK Early Childhood Education for Sustainable Citizenship Award, which is doing something truly unique in British early education. It asks whether three-year-olds can start to comprehend what it means to be a part of the world and…

Something unusual is happening in Argentine education circles right now, and it has less to do with budgets or test scores than with a question most countries prefer to avoid: what is education actually for? The Argentine chapter of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, also known by its French acronym OMEP, has been releasing a number of policy reflections and analytical documents that are more ambitious than scholarly commentary. They are attempting to change the way a whole area views its youngest residents. The timing is not coincidental. The proposed Education Freedom Bill, a piece of legislation that…

Like many things, it began with an unexpected question. “Grandma, what exactly are children’s rights?” The adults in the room most likely hesitated a beat too long before responding to a question posed by a child in The Hague sometime around 2024. That hesitation and pause turned into the beginning of something much more than a family discussion. It evolved into the Global Children’s Rights Online Project, an initiative that is currently working toward what its founders refer to as the International Online Children’s Rights Museum, which is scheduled to open in 2026. The project has discreetly collected drawings, words,…

Seeing the terms “LEGO” and “humanitarian crisis” in the same sentence is almost disorienting. The brand evokes images of vivid plastic bricks, instruction manuals strewn all over living room floors, and perhaps a painful foot in the dark. But for the past forty years, the organization behind those bricks has been quietly constructing something much more significant and less colorful, and its most recent action may be the most audacious to date. The LEGO Foundation Fellowship, a new international research program that offers up to ten early- and mid-career researchers USD 300,000 each over three years, was announced on June…

During the pandemic, something changed, and it never changed again. There are now empty chairs and leftover craft supplies in public preschool classrooms across the nation that used to have waiting lists. Most discussions about the drop in public school enrollment—more than a million students lost in just four years—focus on older children. However, the youngest students are also going missing, and their parents aren’t holding out for change. Every morning at the kitchen table in Brentwood, California, seven-year-old Scarlett Laughlin completes her formal lessons in less than an hour. After that, she goes to a nearby farm to learn…