Teaching in early Childhood Education: ambiguities, contradictions, suspicions

Abstract

The text analyzes teaching in Early Childhood Education from a critical perspective, highlighting its ambiguities, contradictions, and historical challenges. It is based on the understanding that teaching young children cannot be reduced to assistentialist or spontaneous practices but must be recognized as an intentional pedagogical action of an intellectual and political nature. The essay revisits the historical trajectory of Early Childhood Education in Brazil, emphasizing its origins marked by care, social control, and unequal access, which still resonate in contemporary practices. In discussing conceptions of childhood, the text problematizes naturalized views and reaffirms the child as a subject of rights, embedded in complex social, cultural, and ecological contexts. In the field of teacher education, it emphasizes the need to overcome the dichotomy between theory and practice, defending praxis as a fundamental dialectical unity for critical teaching practice. It also analyzes the processes of devaluation of teaching in Early Childhood Education, associated with the feminization of the profession and the myth of the “natural educator,” which obscure its professional and intellectual character. Finally, the text advocates for the construction of grounded and critical pedagogical practices committed to children’s integral development, recognizing teaching as a space for knowledge production, cultural mediation, and social transformation.