In July, Bangkok is not a quiet city. As soon as you step outside, the heat hits you, and the same restlessness can be felt inside conference rooms as well. The 76th World Assembly and International Conference of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, or OMEP, took place here in the last few weeks of July 2024. The theme of the conference, “Right from the Start for ECCE: Step Beyond All Together,” felt almost defiantly positive.
There were people from more than 60 countries there. A wide range of people were in the room, from teachers working in village schools to policy advisors with UN credentials. They all had the same strong belief that the years from birth to age eight are not a wait period for real education, but the real thing itself.
OMEP isn’t a well-known name outside of education, which is one reason why events like this one tend to be missed. Since its start in 1948, the group has worked to protect young children’s rights as a matter of human rights, not just schooling. It has a permanent office at the UN in Geneva, where it keeps an eye on how member states follow the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This is the most widely ratified UN convention in history, with only the United States not signing on.
The Bangkok assembly made room for honest conversation, which doesn’t happen very often during the formal UN review process. In his keynote speech, Mathias Urban, Director of the Early Childhood Research Centre at Dublin City University, talked about what he called the “compounding catastrophes” that are affecting children’s lives right now. These include climate change, forced migration, the effects of pandemics, poverty, and what he called the “structural consequences of global capitalism.” The list wasn’t easy to read. What it said wasn’t diplomatically soft, though, which may be why it came off the way it did.
Being in that room makes you think that there is a bigger difference than most people think between what experts say and what governments actually pay for. “Polycrisis” is a word from political economy that is used by Sheldon Shaeffer, Chair of the Board at the Asia Pacific Regional Network for Early Childhood, to describe when more than one system fails at the same time. His point was clear: teachers of young children can’t just teach reading and math and be done with it. The worlds these adults are taking care of are actually less stable than the ones previous generations lived in.
Some international education groups still don’t think much about the overlap between environmental justice, social equity, and economic resilience in early childhood settings. Asiya Foster, OMEP’s Vice President for North America and the Caribbean, brought this up in the conversation. It’s still not clear if most member countries’ policies are set up to deal with this kind of intersectional thinking. Most models for funding early childhood were made in a different time and with different ideas about how stable things would be.
What the Bangkok assembly showed more than any vote or resolution was how far apart principles and practices really are. There are 54 articles in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. At the heart of everything OMEP does are the rights to equality, best interests, life and development, and for children to have their voices heard. These ideas don’t cause a stir. They have been backed by most governments. The more difficult question, which the group kept coming back to, is how much it will cost to honor them and who is willing to pay.
There isn’t a clear answer to that question yet. In the middle of July in Bangkok, people from 70 different countries showed up to argue about it. This shows that the conversation is not going away.
