La Educación Pikler-Lóczy: Cuando educar empieza por cuidar

Abstract

The educational system that Emmi Pikler and her team established at the Lóczy Institute in Budapest testified for more than 60 years that it was possible for babies and toddlers to have a healthy and harmonious development while growing up in institutions, without their families. This system creates optimal human and material surroundings to promote the full development of the child during early childhood and in a situation of collective education, on the basis of two principles: by establishing a privileged relationship of attachment with a stable adult who provides care in all its details in the best possible way, so it becomes high quality care; and by promoting complete autonomy in the child's movement and activity without direct intervention. The adult only intervenes indirectly in order to continuously propose, construct and deconstruct the scenes such activity needs. It is a dialectic proposition that integrates the subject, the baby or child, and the context of development in a mutual and constant transformation, which makes it psychogenetic too. It begins with bodily care and the promotion of the child's well being, and systematically goes back to re-establish it, so that in the areas where he does not need the adult's collaboration, the motor function and voluntary activity, the baby or small child may discover, unfold and develop all his capacities, if he wishes so. Thus, in Lóczy, educating starts with caring.