Importance of Early Childhood Education

Early childhood education is instrumental in a child’s life because it facilitates the developmental process. Children learn to develop relationships outside their immediate family; they acquire language, reading, mathematics and science skills even if on only a rudimentary fundamental level; and they begin the process of self-actualization, even at this young age. Early childhood education impacts the child be providing a safe and stable environment in which the child can explore, learn, interact with teachers and peers and observe model behavior that can shape the child’s psychological and behavioral development. Early childhood education impacts society by providing a foundation for life-long learning at an early age that can carry over throughout the years as the child grows.
Families benefit from early childhood education by being given educational support and training that can ease them of the burden of providing lessons for their children and leave it in the hands of professional, certified teachers. Teachers create environments in which various exercises, such as music or play, allow children to learn (Ailwood, 2003). As Gray and Feldman (2004) point out, children benefit from being in a zone of proximal development in the sense that they can learn informally a variety of skills and techniques simply by observing their peers who have already acquired the skills that the young learners are attempting to acquire. The major benefit of early child education, therefore, is that it gets students on a fast track of knowledge acquisition simply by placing them in a learning environment wherein they can see others, interact with them, and develop cognitively, emotionally, socially, academically, and behaviorally.
References
Ailwood, J. (2003). Governing early childhood education through play. Contemporary
Issues in Early Childhood, 4(3), 286-299.
Gray, P. & Feldman, J. (2004). Playing in the zone of proximal development: Qualities
of self-directed age mixing between adolescents and young children at a democratic school. American Journal of Education, 110(2), 108-146.