Going back and reading a piece of journalism that proved to be accurate has a subtly remarkable quality. Good reporting sometimes manages to be right in a subtle, almost accidental way, rather than loudly, prophetically correct, the kind of thing people quote years later. What appeared to be a fairly standard organizational update from OMEP Aotearoa was covered in a 2010 article on Scoop, New Zealand’s independent news platform. It reads more like a blueprint now that everything that came after has been taken into account.
The World Organization for Early Childhood Education’s New Zealand branch, OMEP Aotearoa, was already functioning with a purpose that many larger advocacy organizations still find difficult to express. The organization dispatched two representatives to the OMEP World Assembly and Congress in Gothenburg, Sweden, where representatives from 72 nations on five continents convened to reaffirm their support for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The right of children to play was the particular focus. As a signatory to that Convention since 1993, New Zealand was supposedly in a leadership position. Perhaps without realizing it, the Scoop article depicted an organization that sought to give that position significance.
OMEP International’s Vice President for the Asia-Pacific region, Doreen Launder, of Wellington, was traveling straight from Sweden to Nepal. Not for a meeting. Not for a picture. Carrying early childhood education materials, she was hiking to two isolated preschools in the foothills of Mount Kangchenjunga with the intention of providing parent-teachers in villages that most international organizations would find difficult to locate on a map with useful advice. It’s difficult to ignore the difference between the language of global advocacy, which frequently remains airborne and never touches the ground, and that kind of quiet, physical commitment.
The 2010 article pointed out a mistake that governments throughout the Pacific region were making and, in certain situations, continue to make. OMEP claimed that the push to accelerate young children’s literacy and numeracy skills, motivated by economic pressure and political anxiety, was undermining the comprehensive, play-based approach that has already been shown to promote long-term success. It was a cautious, non-dramatic argument that hinted at an impending collision. The article pointed out that the Millennium Development Goals for poverty alleviation and education would not be achieved. That needed to be stated clearly by someone. It was stated by OMEP Aotearoa.
The geography of the issue was what made OMEP Aotearoa’s position in the Pacific so important. It was extremely difficult for nations in the Asia-Pacific region, including Indonesia, Nepal, Malaysia, and India, to provide early childhood education at all, let alone high-quality instruction. A Wellington-based organization that was willing to fly to a remote Nepalese village and had direct regional leadership was filling a void left by larger institutional players.
Looking back at these events, there is a propensity to overinterpret moments that were just people carefully carrying out their duties. Perhaps. However, OMEP Aotearoa’s insistence that children’s rights are concrete and exist within curriculum decisions, teacher qualification standards, funding structures, and yes, the availability of play, proved to be a position that the Pacific needed someone to hold. Even though neither the publication nor the organization could have known at the time how much that would matter, the Scoop article caught them in the act.
