The key to the global transformation of a country is not so much in the graduate degrees (quite necessary, by all means) but in early education, in the level of training of its teachers, in the importance given by a country to its early childhood schools. It is rightly said that if we want to know how a country will be in the future, it is enough to see how its early childhood centers are now. Fully convinced of this, in some of the countries of the so-called first world, governments are investing higher percentages in early childhood than in the rest of the levels of the educational system.

Today, early childhood education is the subject of a deep reflection around the world. It is logical, when the great masters of pedagogy of the first half of the last century: Vigotsky, Wallon, Piaget, etc., were pointing to the importance of this kind of education. To this we have to add the impressive advances that are taking place in the knowledge on how the human brain works through the research work in COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE. Today, neuroscience demonstrates in an unequivocal manner the importance of very early education in the development of the human brain.

Today we know that when the child is born, he has a full range of potential possibilities. He carries within many promises but they will be vain if they do not receive from his human and physical setting a sufficiently rich set of stimuli of all kinds. Contemporary biological sciences, and especially neuroscience, tell us that the nervous cells, especially developed in the human species, can not reach its full evolution if there are no exterior stimuli that provoke reactions that set those functions in motion, to help them improve and fully develop,

If we provide stimulation at the right time, the shaping of the nervous system, base and support of the intellectual scaffolding of the adult will be much better. The Texan author Robert Fulghhum is very right when he says “Everything I needed to know on how to live and what to do and how it should be, I learnt at kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the mountain of the university but in the sandbox”. Obviously, in the sandbox he did not learn the complex formulas he later learnt at the university but he opened his intellectual capacity to learn them.

Today, no one argues against the idea that the first years of life are the most significant for the development of the human being and all the Scientific Community agrees that in this stage is laid the foundation for the development of personality that will consolidate and improve in the later stages of life.

This is why this age is so important for the future of man as an individual and as a person and of the need to educate him so that he reaches the maximum potential in this development, that makes possible a healthy, capable individual, and that the sum of all the individuals can bring about the transformation of the world, that certainly needs to change and take on a new course.

While no one argues against the need for early education, there is plenty of controversy on how this education should be.

We find that most of the educational laws applicable for this educational stage are heavily loaded with cognitive elements that are more closely linked to the INSTRUCTION and not to the EDUCATION of the child.

We feel that most of the times there is confusion between the terms TEACH and EDUCATE. While there is a dialectical unity between them, there are differences between the terms teaching and education. While teaching is simply transmitting information (reading and writing, mathematics, etc.), education is a more ample process that, even including teaching, is really developing and improving the skills and aptitudes of the child or adolescent for his perfect adult formation.

It is clear that we need to change the concept of education that educational systems are currently using as the mere transmission of knowledge.

To educate is to prepare children to live in society but also to transform it with their attitude, especially when we live in a convulsed world, dominated by a negative relation of the behaviors and values of the human being that are the origin of numerous social conflicts: violence of all kinds, even in the schools, among the children; the deterioration of the environment, alienation, poverty, consumerism, drug addiction, etc. If we delve into the causes of this negative vision we easily find the predominant model of socialization and relation in our society: we live in the culture of violence and disrespect, which we must change. But it is also necessary to reflect on the fact that our current society is this way is due to the education we have been giving.

To educate today, as is implicitly defined in article 29 of the International Convention on Child Rights must be to develop the personality, the aptitudes and the mental and physical capacity of the child to their maximum potential.

And to develop the personality of the children, we have to educate them in what we have known traditionally as values, which will become the base of the personality of the future adults.

Starting from the premise that when the child is born he does not know the norms, guidelines and moral and social values of his community, the educational agents become the facilitators of experiences and relations that facilitate their progressive social maturation. Teachers should be given time, at the same time as elements to do this, to fully develop their role, which is not other than the formation of a personality rich in values in every child.

The formation of the personality, a basic goal of education and of values education, in fact, the pillar of the Delors Report: “Learning to live together” is becoming more and more relevant in the recent years, as Dr. Koichiro Matsuura, General Director of UNESCO pointed out before the High Level Group of the Education for All Initiative.

To learn to live together in a richer and more fair society it is indispensable to educate from early childhood the norms that rule, or should rule this life together, such as solidarity, generosity, effort and hard work, a critical and corporate spirit and a long list of what we have always understood as values.

And, in this sense, we should insist and see that values education is not just a general subject but a key area in the curriculum and provide teachers with adequate materials to develop it.

FULLY AWARE OF THIS, WHEN WE PLANNED FOR THE

1ST WORLD CONFERNCE
PEACE EDUCATION IN EARLY CHIOLDHOOD

IT WAS THOUGHT THAT AS A RESULT OF IT, THERE SHOULD BE A SOLEMN DECLARATION TO SET THE POSITION OF TEACHERS ON THIS ISSUE. THIS IS HOW THE IDEA OF THE DECLARATION OF ALBACETE WAS BORN. IT BECAME A REALITY IN THIS LANDMARK CONFERENCE.