Exploring early childhood care and education in Canada, this text discusses key issues such as: what programmes are available to parents and what are their origins?; how have adults been prepared to work in these programmes?; and what policies guide the programmes?

Taking up a little-known story of education, schooling, and missionary endeavor, Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner focus on the experiences of very young a native' children in three British colonies. In missionary settlements across the northern part of the North Island of New Zealand, Upper Canada, and British-controlled India, experimental British ventures for placing young children of the poor in infant schools were simultaneously transported to and adopted for all three colonies. From the 1820s to the 1850s, this transplantation of Britain's infant schools to its distant...