At most international education conferences, there’s a point between the third plenary session and the lukewarm coffee when you realize the field has quietly advanced without making any announcements. As I browse the abstract submissions for the 78th OMEP World Assembly and World Conference, which will take place in Poznań, Poland in July, that feeling comes on fast. Something has changed. The researchers who are submitting their work are not merely making methodological adjustments. They are reconsidering the true purpose of early childhood education.
At first glance, the conference theme, “When a Child Speaks…” Korczak’s Inspirations for Education and Children’s Rights, seems almost poetic. However, after looking at the thematic framework for a while, it is evident that this is an ethical and political statement disguised in scholarly terminology. Poznań wasn’t picked at random. Janusz Korczak, a doctor and educator who argued more than a century ago that children were not future citizens in training, was born in Poland. They were human beings. Right now. Thinking, feeling, worthy of respect. Instead of leaving his orphaned children behind, he walked them into the gas chambers when he died in Treblinka in 1942. His thoughts outlived him.
The consistency of the topics covered in the abstracts flooding the OMEP 2026 submissions is noteworthy. pedagogy based on rights. learning through participation. Instead of being recipients, children are agents. Ten years ago, curriculum design, school readiness metrics, and cognitive development benchmarks were the main topics of discussion at most early childhood conferences. These issues were intriguing, to be sure, but they came second. They are now the center of gravity. This might be a reflection of something more profound than a scholarly fad. With wars uprooting families, democratic institutions eroding, climate anxiety permeating classrooms, and digital cultures altering children’s perceptions of reality before they can read, researchers appear to be reacting to a world that appears genuinely frightening.
The conference’s seven thematic axes are worth closely examining because they provide insight into what researchers think is lacking in contemporary practice. education without fear and with empathy. Teachers are human rights advocates. Justice, equality, and dignity. Soft abstractions are not what these are. They are a critique of systems that still view children’s voices as a courtesy rather than a right, as well as of punishment-based discipline. In the 1920s, Korczak ran his children’s newspaper and children’s court in Warsaw and made the same criticism, arguing that if adults trusted kids enough to give it a shot, they could rule themselves fairly.
The choice to host a pre-conference event at Treblinka adds an element that this year’s major education conferences won’t have. The gathering of OMEP members among the trees, each of which stands for a national committee and each of which has a Korczak quotation on it, is not a symbolic act. The decision to base a scholarly discussion on moral history is intentional. The organizers, who are based at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, seem to realize how important it is for researchers to consider the significance of their findings rather than merely presenting them.
When taken as a whole, the abstract submissions show that early childhood researchers are becoming less inclined to distinguish between classroom practice and global responsibility, politics and politics, or learning and justice. The symposia formats, which are 90-minute panels with four or five presentations centered around common themes, encourage group thinking as opposed to solitary research. Researchers do more than simply present findings. They are constructing disagreements.
Whether this change in research priorities will result in significant policy change is still up in the air. The Poznań Declaration 2026 will encounter the same skepticism that most collective declarations encounter, and there is still a significant gap between conference declarations and government funding decisions. However, this is a worthwhile viewing. When abstracts submitted to a global conference begin to sound more like ethical manifestoes than research reports, it usually indicates that the field has already made up its mind and the institutions have just not caught up. Korczak would undoubtedly identify that emotion.
