Global Crisis: Local reality?: An international analysis of ‘crisis’ in the early years

Abstract

In a recent keynote speech Paul Standish noted ‘there is agreement in judgments. But how the response to those judgments is realised is always cultural’ (paper presented to PESA Conference, Taiwan, 2012, p. 2). Making judgments about what constitutes ‘crisis’ for children is not necessarily agreed universally, though clearly there are some commonalities across many countries, as evident in United Nations on the Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCROC) agreements. This article examines the local rhetoric and reality of ‘crisis’ for children in countries across the world. What constitutes a crisis for children, and how this plays out in the contexts of nine countries is explored by the authors based on the insights of each countries’ (OMEP) (www.omep.org.gu.se) Chapter representatives. Policies will be juxtaposed with provision based on the experiences of OMEP members reporting from their various contexts. Taken together they provide a contextualised perspective on ‘crisis’ and its relationship to a non-absolutist foundation to children’s rights. The article concludes that what constitutes crisis from a global perspective warrants consideration in the context of local reality—in this locale the concept of every child as having access to ‘rights’ is far from realisation.

Keywords:

• Crisis
• Global
• early childhood education
• right
• poverty

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge OMEP correspondents from: Cameroon, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Europe, France, India, New Zealand, Sweden and United Kingdom. Without their contributions this article could never have been developed. This article was first prepared for the Children in Crisis Conference, University of Waikato, October 2013.

Notes

1. A recent report NZ Office of the Children’s Commissioner (2012) suggest that such international poverty measures distinguish between abject poverty (i.e. deprivation of basic life essentials) and relative poverty (social, cultural and religious dimensions of poverty).

2. Like UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank, and literally thousands of NGOs who strive to help children towards a better life. The United Nations has worked towards a number of international agreements—Human Rights, UNCROC, Education for all, the Millennium Development Goals, the Literacy DECADE, the DECADE for Education for Sustainable Development, to name a few.

3. A source that is rejected by Stuart (this issue).