Abstract
Aesthetics has always been a fundamental dimension of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), and it has been treated as a relation between matter and mind in a non-dualist and integrated way. Today, however, this dimension and relation is neglected. Abstract and formalist ideas of education, expressed in generalized standards, accountability and neuroscientific explanations, are forced upon educational practice and theory. To counter such neglect, one of Bergson’s major works, Matter and Memory (1988), is in this article used to critically assess abstract formalism as a badly stated problem in the aesthetics of ECEC and it is joined with historical and contemporary pedagogical-aesthetical resources that may be capable of re-activating the aesthetics of ECEC.