1948, Prague. Europe was still trying to comprehend what had happened to the world, counting its losses, and physically rebuilding. Nevertheless, in the midst of that unsettling environment, a group of advocates and educators came together to take an action that may have appeared to some onlookers to be almost naively optimistic: they made the decision to establish an international organization solely focused on the welfare of young children. not rebuilding. Not in economics. Kids.
It recently celebrated its 75th anniversary as OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education. It’s the kind of anniversary that merits greater recognition than it typically receives.
It is worthwhile to take a moment to consider the founding story. It started in 1946, two years before Prague, when the UNESCO Assembly in Paris received a proposal for a global organization from Lady Allen of Hurtwood of the United Kingdom and Alva Myrdal of Sweden, two individuals who are hardly mentioned in the mainstream history of postwar international organizations. The welcome was cordial. Eventually, 19 nations from five continents sent delegates to the 1948 Prague conference, where Myrdal became the first World President of OMEP and it was formally established. Myrdal would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but it was for different work and decades later. Her contributions to early childhood advocacy may have always been somewhat overshadowed by her other accomplishments.
The founders were reacting to a sort of post-World War II moral reckoning. There was a sincere, pressing humanitarian concern about what children had gone through and the kind of world they were inheriting; it was more akin to grief than abstract policy language. The impulse to protect the youngest, most vulnerable people from whatever came next had a specific emotional texture in 1948 that’s hard to fully reconstruct. However, it is reflected in the organization they established.
UNESCO, UNICEF, and the WHO had sent observers to the third World Assembly by 1950. That’s an impressive trajectory for a three-year-old organization focused on early childhood education. Looking back, it seems that the founders realized something that the larger international community took much longer to come to terms with: that what happens to a child between birth and age eight shapes almost everything that comes after, and that this is a fundamental issue of social stability and human rights rather than a charitable afterthought or soft concern.
Currently operating in more than 70 nations, OMEP has special consultative status with UNICEF and the United Nations. Its members have attended important UNESCO conferences, contributed to statements on educational inequality made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, and repeatedly argued—sometimes in rooms full of people who don’t want to hear it—that early childhood has historically been the overlooked category in global education policy. Its headquarters are located in Buenos Aires, a long way from that conference room in Prague. It wasn’t a novel argument when OMEP’s representative stated at a UNESCO education meeting in 2021 that children are often neglected because most people believe that education starts at age six. The company has been producing it in different forms for 75 years.
It’s difficult to ignore the unique kind of perseverance needed to maintain the same position over decades, in various political contexts, during conflicts and pandemics, and in the face of changing global priorities. That’s precisely what OMEP has done. The question of whether the world has consistently paid enough attention is a different, more uncomfortable one, and it appears to be still very much open.
