The early childhood education movement gathers strength with each passing year. The few states which do not yet have free public kindergartens strive to achieve them. Increasingly one hears talk of free public programs for all four year olds. Almost surely, publicly-aided day care programs will become a larger part of our public services. And there is today so much investigation and experimentation with services for children under age three-toddlers, infantsone has to think of four and five year olds as the "aging early childhooders." The early childhood education movement has a quality of inevitability. We seem sure to have more and younger children in groups, and to have them for longer and longer hours. The need for such a development is rooted in basic and irreversible social and economic forces. These causal factors are almost too numerous to list: the education of women; the widening aspirations of women; the mechanization (really the de-sexing) of our economy (job after job is no longer amenable only to man's muscle or strength or height); the simplicity and ease and speed of the care of our houses; the suburbanization of neighborhoods; the mobility of families;