Opposition to EYES and the OpenEye campaign:

The following text is from theRichard House article, "Dark Forces in the Nursery? Struggling for the Heart of Childhood", New View, Winter 2007/8

When even infants are expected to achieve "69 early learning goals", you know that no area of life is free from [the] tyranny of targets. --Helene Guldberg

In England as I write (early December), major stirrings are afoot in the sphere of early childhood and of your youngest children's experience. Widespread concerns exist amongst both parents and professionals regarding the current government's impending Early Years Foundation Stage (EYES) legislation, due to become law in England in September 2008. Along with a number of colleagues, several of whom are active professionals within Steiner (Waldorf) education, the new and independent 'Open EYE' Campaign (standing for 'Open Early Years Education')-launched to give a voice to concerns spread across the whole range of the early years field-maintains that this new legislation is fundamentally damaging to flawed and that its likely unintended consequences will be counter-productive and fundamentally damaging to children. For some of us, this legislation is merely a special case of a wider cultural and spiritual phenomenon-the attack upon childhood in particular and the attack upon the human being more generally...

For information on the OpenEye campaign, press coverage and access to the petition website calling for an urgent review of the EYES, and removal of the 'legal duty' to deliver the rigid and regimented learning and development requirements, click here.

To access the website organised by Steiner school parents, read the letter from Wynstones School applying for excemption from the rigid and regimented learning and development requirements of the EYES, and for other relevant literature, click here. Feel free to contact the OpenEye campaign by clicking here.

Steiner schools are certainly not the only ones concerned by EYES. The Save Our Nurseries campaign can be found here.

See what the mainstream press has to say here, and here.

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