Education gap
A friend of mine recently found out that their pre-school teacher was striking some of the children of the pre-school on the face, and immediately took her child of the the school and moved her to one of the city's pre-schools with more accountability. Even though my friend reported the offending teacher to the police, there doesn't seem to be any motion to prevent the teacher from continuing work.
This brings me to a more general observation. Pre-school education is largely neglected in our culture, even though it is a large part of the most important age of development of a personality. Meaning: the things that happen to us in our pre-school days become engrained in our character and stay with us and affect the path of our entire future. The idea that the first five years of life are highly important in forming personality is well known and accepted among the scientific community. Also it is widely accepted that people are most receptive to learning spoken language in their first few years of life. During the ages of 2-5 a person learns spoken language, the basis of social interactions, how to use the body (senses, movement, etc.), and aspects of higher-level personality (self-awareness, character, etc.) Spoken language is the key for learning written language, body movement is the basis for sports ability, and personality and social interactions are fundamental throughout life.
My own studies of artificial neural-network learning algorithms coupled with my recent experience in learning a new language fully convince me of the importance of this age in education. A neural network under a back-propagation learning algorithm is changed by every input that it sees, but the first few inputs have the strongest effect. This is an example of an optimization algorithm that looks for the closest local minimum, and ignores all others even they may vastly superior. Although the brain is much more sophisticated then a simple artificial neural network, there is convincing evidence that the artificial neural network provides a first-order approximation of the brain. I am convinced that the social conditioning learned in this period (things like: "the world is round," "boys are smarter then girls," or "I am not smart enough to compete with others") will stay with you for life unless you go through a monumental multi-year effort to un-learn them.
Despite this, in politics and law there is little focus on this period. In the past (more then, say, 50 years ago), children generally spent most of their time with their mother or a nanny before starting kindergarten. However, today many children spend half their waking hours in a pre-school or nursery. These are widely considered to be places to keep children safe so the parents may pursue their careers, but not generally considered to be part of the children's education.
Don't take this to mean that I want pre-school to look more like elementary school. On the contrary, the atmosphere of testing, stress, and obedience found in elementary and high schools rubs me the wrong way. I am arguing that parents should consider the nursery or pre-school as being more important in determining their child's future then elementary school. Most important is the atmosphere or spirit of the nursery. You should study the social interactions between toddlers in the nursery, between teachers or guardians and toddlers, and between guardians. An "ideal environment" for this period is difficult to define, but should be given much thought. My personal opinion of an ideal pre-school teacher is someone who is patient, nurturing, eager to talk, sing, tell stories, and answer elementary questions, and sensitive to the social interactions around them.
This brings me to a more general observation. Pre-school education is largely neglected in our culture, even though it is a large part of the most important age of development of a personality. Meaning: the things that happen to us in our pre-school days become engrained in our character and stay with us and affect the path of our entire future. The idea that the first five years of life are highly important in forming personality is well known and accepted among the scientific community. Also it is widely accepted that people are most receptive to learning spoken language in their first few years of life. During the ages of 2-5 a person learns spoken language, the basis of social interactions, how to use the body (senses, movement, etc.), and aspects of higher-level personality (self-awareness, character, etc.) Spoken language is the key for learning written language, body movement is the basis for sports ability, and personality and social interactions are fundamental throughout life.
My own studies of artificial neural-network learning algorithms coupled with my recent experience in learning a new language fully convince me of the importance of this age in education. A neural network under a back-propagation learning algorithm is changed by every input that it sees, but the first few inputs have the strongest effect. This is an example of an optimization algorithm that looks for the closest local minimum, and ignores all others even they may vastly superior. Although the brain is much more sophisticated then a simple artificial neural network, there is convincing evidence that the artificial neural network provides a first-order approximation of the brain. I am convinced that the social conditioning learned in this period (things like: "the world is round," "boys are smarter then girls," or "I am not smart enough to compete with others") will stay with you for life unless you go through a monumental multi-year effort to un-learn them.
Despite this, in politics and law there is little focus on this period. In the past (more then, say, 50 years ago), children generally spent most of their time with their mother or a nanny before starting kindergarten. However, today many children spend half their waking hours in a pre-school or nursery. These are widely considered to be places to keep children safe so the parents may pursue their careers, but not generally considered to be part of the children's education.
Don't take this to mean that I want pre-school to look more like elementary school. On the contrary, the atmosphere of testing, stress, and obedience found in elementary and high schools rubs me the wrong way. I am arguing that parents should consider the nursery or pre-school as being more important in determining their child's future then elementary school. Most important is the atmosphere or spirit of the nursery. You should study the social interactions between toddlers in the nursery, between teachers or guardians and toddlers, and between guardians. An "ideal environment" for this period is difficult to define, but should be given much thought. My personal opinion of an ideal pre-school teacher is someone who is patient, nurturing, eager to talk, sing, tell stories, and answer elementary questions, and sensitive to the social interactions around them.