Short answers, pulled from the story.
Maria Montessori opened the first Casa dei Bambini in 1907. The school was established in a slum of Rome and introduced a prepared environment where children could learn through self-discovery.
The zone of proximal development is the space between what a child can do alone and what they can achieve with the help of a more knowledgeable person. Lev Vygotsky proposed this theory in the 1930s to explain how social interaction guides cognitive growth.
The Perry Preschool Project began in 1962 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The study enrolled 128 three- and four-year-old African-American children from low-income families to test the long-term effects of high-quality preschool education.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted in 1989. This international agreement recognized the right of children to education but did not explicitly include early childhood education until the Sustainable Development Goals were adopted in 2015.
The World Bank report released in 2019 found that every dollar spent on high-quality early childhood programs leads to a return of $7.3 over the long term. This economic case highlights the cost-effectiveness of investing in young children for future labor markets.