The Future of Education

This study designed to share results from a research developed with teachers working in Early Childhood Education public schools located in a small town in the West region of Paraná State, Brasil. The purpose was to verify how their initial and continuing education impact on the pedagogical practice they perform with young children, aging from two to six years old.  The authors based the research on Vigotskii´s (1988) studies, mainly on theoretical fundamentals of the Cultural-Historical Theory and on contemporary authors as Lima (2005), Saviani (2009), Marco (2014) among others, whose guidelines highlight the teacher education value in order to motivate the young children intelligence and personality development. The data production involved two field actions: a semi-structured questionnaire applied to the investigated teachers and classroom observation of teaching practice in distinct situations at school. Results indicate that the teacher initial education fails to provide subjects to enable the future teacher practice with the young children, regarding the value of the child specificities as development, activity, play, learning process and teaching strategies. As to the continuing education, the data production shows that, although the meetings provide peer interaction, professional and emotional experience they are unable to fulfill the needs teachers face in their daily school routine. From this perspective, the authors assume teacher education still demands attention and investment in order to prepare Early Childhood Education professionals for a practice able to lead children to develop their maximum possibilities of learning.

Keywords: Teacher Education; Early Childhood Education; Cultural-Historical Theory;