Operationalizing radical hope: Broadening whole-child approaches to restructure the whole system

Although a “holistic” tenet of equitable early childhood education and care, focusing on the whole-child overlooks how systems maintain inequality. Predicated on individual-level interventions, the whole-child approach prioritizes “fixing” children, but not the oppressive systems that contextualize children’s realities. This paper describes historic and ongoing oppressive reasoning that guide educational theory and developmental science. Relatedly, cultural knowledge embedded in the Afro-centric, Ghanaian principles of Sankofa guide our looking back to identify the etiology of asymmetric power relations that characterize formal education systems, which helps redirect how we move forward to rectify unjust systems starting at personal and social levels.