"Sociologist Bruce Fuller traveled the country - sitting in preschool classrooms, exploring into the origins of universal preschool in California and Oklahoma, and interviewing this movement's leaders - to understand the ideologies of childhood and the political forces at play. He details how these new progressives earnestly seek to extend the rigors of public schooling down into the lives of very young children. Fuller then illuminates the stiff resistance by children's activists, ethnic leaders, and conservatives, who hold less trust in government solutions and more faith in nonprofits and local groups in contributing to the upbringing of young children. "--Jacket.