Childhood Plasticity (1)

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Childhood Plasticity (1)

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.

Plato

Early childhood education and care has attracted enormous attention over the past decade. This has been partly driven by research indicating the importance of quality early experiences to children’s short-term cognitive, social and emotional development, as well as to their long-term success in school and later life.

The equitable access to quality pre-school education and care has been recognised as key to laying the foundations of lifelong learning for all children and supporting the broad educational and social needs of families.

In most OECD countries, the tendency is to give all children at least two years of free public provision of education before the start of compulsory schooling; governments are thus seeking to improve staff training and working conditions and also to develop appropriate pedagogical frameworks for young children (OECD, 2001).

Neuroscience will not be able to provide solutions to all the challenges facing early childhood education and care but neuroscientific findings can be expected to provide useful insights for informed decision-making in this field.

Very young children are able to develop sophisticated understandings of the phenomena around them – they are “active learners” (US National Research Council, 1999).

Even at the moment of birth, the child’s brain is not a tabula rasa.

Children develop theories about the world extremely early and revise them in light of their experience. The domains of early learning include linguistics, psychology, biology and physics as well as how language, people, animals, plants and objects work.

Early education needs to take good account of both the distinctive mind and individual conceptualisation of young children and this will help to identify the preferred modes of learning, e.g. through play.

Infants have a competence for numbers. Research has indicated that very young infants, in the first months of life, already attend to the number of objects in their environment (McCrink and Wynn, 2004). There is also evidence that infants can operate with numbers (Dehaene, 1997). They develop mathematical skills through interaction with the environment and by building upon their initial number sense (further explored in Chapter 5).

"Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science", 2007, page 43