This work approaches the current politics dedicated to education for small children in Latin America. We emphasize the emergency of the discourses about the "poverty infantilization", which is a ssociated to strategies for targeting actions and of social politics, including the educational ones, nominated as vulnerable segments of the population. Such discourses renovate old practices of compensatory education, creating new controlling actions on children and their families. The analysis of the Brazilian context evinces the growing nexus between the local government initiative and the ones which are predominant in other countries from the Latin American region, especially regarding the segmentation of the Early Childhood Education (Nursery School prioritization). The study developed demonstrates the presence in the region, in government and non-government ambit, of conservative discourses on matters of economistic and biologizing which intend to be guiding in this educational stage.
early childhood education in Latin America; early childhood education; poverty
