CHILDHOOD, TEACHING, AND PUBLIC EDUCATION, FOUNDATIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION

Abstract

This article problematizes teacher education through the articulation between childhood, teaching, and public education, taking Early Childhood Education as a strategic field for understanding the disputes that shape the education of young children in Brazil. It is grounded in the premise that teacher education is a structuring dimension of educational debate, since conceptions of the child, curriculum, care, assessment, public policy, and the right to education are inscribed within it. From this standpoint, the chapter argues that preparing teachers for Early Childhood Education requires a humanistic, critical, and anti-racist foundation, committed to the defense of public schooling and to the recognition of the plurality of childhoods. More than preparing professionals to implement pedagogical practices, it involves constituting subjects capable of interpreting the historical and social density of childhood, of reading institutional everyday life in its pedagogical thickness, and of acting in the face of the inequalities that shape children’s experiences in a society marked by hierarchies of class, race, and territory. The article was developed through a theoretical, bibliographic, and documentary study carried out in dialogue with scholars in the fields of Early Childhood Education, teacher education, and critical studies of education, as well as with legal and policy frameworks that recognize the child as a subject of rights and Early Childhood Education as the first stage of Basic Education. Throughout the text, it is argued that teaching in early childhood requires an attentive reading of the relations among time, space, materials, play, interactions, language, care, and family participation, rejecting both early schooling and curricular standardization, as well as the emptying of educational experience. It also discusses how teacher education must confront the spread of managerial and market-oriented rationalities that reduce education to performance, measurement, and adaptation, thereby weakening the public character of educational institutions. Finally, it argues that consistent teacher education requires recognizing care as a pedagogical dimension, affirming the centrality of interactions and play, incorporating anti-racist and inclusive perspectives, and strengthening practices of study, reflection, and pedagogical documentation. It concludes that thinking about teacher education from the standpoint of childhood means disputing projects of education and society, while reaffirming public schooling as a space of rights, cultural production, democratic coexistence, and human formation.