EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION, RIGHT TO KNOWLEDGE, INEQUALITY AND EVALUATION: REFLECTING ON QUALITY REACH

Abstract

This article aims to build arguments in favour of a large scale evaluation of the context of Early Childhood Education, defending the development of tools that take into consideration three important aspects of the aforementioned stage of Basic Education. That is, the access to knowledge, inequality and interactions, under the perspective of guaranteeing the children’s right to quality education. For this, there are three parts in the article: (1) a brief history of Early Childhood Education in Brazil, with emphasis on the access to knowledge and learning; (2) a discussion about guaranteeing the right to quality education in a society that is as rife with inequality and structural racism; (3) an argument about the need to consider two aspects - knowledge and inequality - in the evaluation of Early Childhood Education, extracting important lessons and experiences from the set of large scale evaluation processes of the other levels of Basic Education. It is considered thus that the necessity of debates and research in the field of Early Childhood Education evaluation that take into account those aspects and aiming at producing national information on everyday pedagogical practice that can reinforce or fight against inequality in education, as an important point.