The Right to Preschool Education in São Tomé and Príncipe: Dilemmas and Challenges in the Conception of a Legal Framework

This paper falls within the work of cooperation with the government of São Tomé and Príncipe and with the United International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), whose purpose is to create the Preschool Education and the Statutes of Education Institutions operating in the same level of education. The complexity and the of this work to the present and future of the children of São Tomé and Príncipe demand from us a huge concerning its realization and a critic surveillance regarding the potential effects of “contamination” transfrontier political guidelines and of “policy borrowings,” which do not have into consideration the realities the country, its cultures, its different social conditions and conceptions of childhood and of family, and its different of organization and of intrafamily relationships. We adopted, in our approach to this project, the starting , theoretically and ethically grounded, that it was necessary to free ourselves of a adultcentric point of view of and of apriorisms that are stuck to the image of the country. Our analysis centers on two dimensions: (1) the dilemmas that we face in the task of conceiving the “policies” of child education to the child population of an country, in our condition of European researchers and teachers; and (2) In the process of shared making of legal framework, focused on the realities of the country, especially on childhood, family, women, and labor . A debate is going on about the proposed solutions that have been suggested, which, in an articulate , respect children’s right to education and leisure, value children’s experiences, and attend the interests of and of the community development.