I am in the final days of a grad class titled "Excelling in the Early Childhood Classroom". My usual style with classes, from HS to my Master's degree, has been to at best skim the readings to find the specific information to answer the questions or write the essays. But this class was different. I read our course textbook from cover to cover. "Developing Young Minds: From Conception to Kindergarten" by Rebecca Shore was a great read, and if you're interested in the research and science behind all of this, I recommend getting a copy, or borrowing mine if you are local. The first eight chapters focused on the science and research, while the last two gave incredibly practical bullet point tips and advice for implementing it in either a classroom setting or at home.
To be honest, I walked away from most of the reading feeling pretty disheartened and discouraged. The vast majority of our neural network is built in the first three years, and I teach four and five year olds. As the struggles of our K-12 educational system (in the US) illustrate, if we wait until Kindergarten, it's too late. The author gave two illustrations of this that really stuck with me, and hopefully will encourage us to take seriously the congnitive development of babies and toddlers. Her first example was that of a train. Consider the K-12 education system to be a train, and a child's brain to be the tracks, or infrastructure. You can buy the world's most technologically advanced and expensive train and bring it to the US, where we have embarrassingly poor rail infrastructure, or bring it a country such as Japan, which has a highly advanced rail network. The train (or K-12 school) will be practically useless in the States. We don't have enough tracks, nor the right kind of tracks, to make use of that train. Currently, we blame the train and it's conductors. But that same train can function very well in a place where there is a large rail infrastructure which includes the recent technology needed for the train to perform at its best. While many Kindergarten classrooms are full of "Japans" or "Europes" many are also full of "Thailands" or United States" (referring here to rail systems only, not educational systems). At times the lack of infrastructure is due to risk factors such as poverty, but not always. And even if it is, why aren't we addressing it? Why do early childhood classrooms often have teachers with lower levels of education than K-12 teachers who earn less money than other teachers if their job is as important if not more so? Why aren't we getting more and better information into the hands of caregivers (in homes or at facilities) from the very beginning?
Her second illustration was brief but powerful. When we don't develop children's brains from the beginning, it's a bit like building a skyscraper, and then when you're done, asking K-12 education to install the plumbing. Good luck with that.
So, how do we install that plumbing from the beginning? The first step is awareness. Most people know that babies need certain things in order to grow and develop socially and emotionally. But it's not doing them justice if we say "as long as they are well loved they will be okay". Many things have to happen in those early years, things revolving around language, nutrition, music, logic, the five senses, and complexity. This isn't about teaching a child to play the piano at age two, it's about exposing them to music, specifically complex music (specifically Mozart and Bach) and then if possible even teaching music theory (specifically with the Kodaly Method). It's not about teaching your toddler to read, but about talking to them using complex vocabulary and structure, reading to them, talking to them some more, and then when they are developmentally ready, teaching them letter sounds (NOT letter names! Those can come later. It's much more important that they know that M says mmmmmm [not muh] than to know it is called Em, which starts with a short E sound) or to recognize environmental print. And, I say this because it's part of the research, not because I am judging anyone, but one of the big problems or issues is TV and screen time. In 1999 the American Adacemy of Pediatrics made a recommendation for the number of minutes (daily) that a child should have TV or screen time under the age of two. How many minutes? 0. And no, it's not only because of an obesity issue, it's because of what goes on in the brain of a young child when they are watching TV vs. when they are not. This includes educational programming. And yes, there are some "you need to sit here quietly so that mommy can do X, y, or z" alternatives given in the book, but I don't actually think anyone besides the Amish achieves that lofty goal.
I could go on, but I'm sure you have gotten the point that preparation for school begins in the womb (reading, singing, nutrition, etc.) and not on the first day of Kindergarten or even Pre-K. All of these things can happen in a loving and knowledgable daycare setting, or they can happen in a loving and knowledgable home, or a mixture of the two. They can happen if mom says home with the kids or dad does, if Grandma is the primary caregiver or the child spends most of their day in a daycare/preschool setting. All of those options have the opportunity to develop the child's brain, or not. But we have to know what to look for in quality care for our youngest children, or what to do and provide if we care for them at home.
The final chapter of my textbook is 15-16 pages of practical specific ideas for things to do at home with a child of 0-60 months, with at least half of it focusing on 0-12 months. If anyone wants copies of any or all of those pages, in lieu of reading the entire book, let me know and I am happy to get them to you.
I wish I could change the world, the way early education is structured and funded, or the way information is or is not given to new and prospective parents, but I can't. Most people I know do a brilliant job with their kids, in part due to their own education level and access to information and resources. But sadly, it's not all kids. Things like No Child Left Behind fail in large part because many kids were left behind in the five most critical years before they even got to school, and that, I wish I could change.
