Early Childhood Education: A Defense

Early Childhood Education: A Defense and Manifesto

It is well established that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have difficulty in high school and even elementary school, due to poor academic preparation for the rigors of education. However, in seeking it address these deficits it is not enough that children at risk merely receive support once they embark upon conventional schooling. Rather, students must be prepared to learn from the early grades. They must come to their first day of formal schooling ready to learn. Learning takes place through the conceptual device known as scaffolding, which basically means that concepts and knowledge build upon one another -- a child cannot learn how to do fractions without knowing how to add and subtract, for example. The increased stress upon standardized assessments in learning has sharpened pragmatic interest in providing meaningful basic skills education to children at younger and younger ages.

The need to maximize the young child's natural capability of learning provides the philosophical basis of childhood development programs. From birth, children are eager learners, communicating with the world through touch, taste, sight, hearing, and sound. Early childhood development ensures that these first learning interactions with the world are of a high quality, and are directed and guided so that children can acquire the basic concepts they will be expected to know in school, such as colors, numbers, and letters. Early learning programs may also help the children explore new interests that defy even developmental models by giving children opportunities to explore their personal passions, such as dinosaurs, as well as alert educators to potential troubles the child may develop in school.

The benefits of early development programs are social as well. Development programs help children to acquire the basic social skills of engaging with peers and teachers in the classroom. "Over the past four decades, many studies have been conducted of the immediate and short-term (one or two years) effects of programs on the learning and development of children from low-income families. Both quantitative research syntheses (that pool estimates across studies and apply statistical tests) and traditional best-evidence reviews have found that such programs produced meaningful gains in cognitive, social, and emotional development during the preschool years ("Eager to Learn: Educating Our Preschoolers," 2000, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, p.130). Interestingly, the research suggests that there is no specific early childhood pedagogy that is inherently superior rather what is important is that children receive exposure to learning as soon as possible. "While no single curriculum or pedagogical approach can be identified as best, children who attend well-planned, high- quality early childhood programs in which curriculum aims are specified and integrated across domains tend to learn more and are better prepared to master the complex demands of formal schooling" ("Eager to Learn: Educating Our Preschoolers," 2000, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, p.307).