“To be sustainable you must be able to feed yourself, reproduce yourself and educate yourself” remarked Dr Didacus Jules, Registrar, Caribbean Examinations Council during an interview on Caribvision on July 29, 2008.
Sustainable development involves the building of supporting, enduring, long lasting relationships between and among people and between people and the environment. It involves economic and social development as well as environmental protection. Wikipedia describes sustainable development as “a pattern of resource use that aims to meet human needs (shelter, food, companionship, belonging) while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but in the indefinite future.” In order to meet human need, the ideal citizen of Montserrat must be capable of interacting respectfully with others and the environment for the benefit of everyone. There is a school of thought that claims “more information has been produced over the last 30 years, than was produced over the previous 5,000 years” (Barsby, 2008, p. 42). It is for this reason why the ideal citizen must be able to access information and ideas in order to critically analyze before making decisions in this ever-evolving, ever-changing Montserrat and the world. According to the Brundtland Report, “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 43).
According to the Oxford School Dictionary, education is “the process of training people’s minds and abilities so that they acquire knowledge and develop skills.” A closer examination of Dr Jules’ comments in light of the definition of education, lead to a position that requires a nation to first educate its citizens thereby gaining the ability to successfully feed and reproduce itself. It can then be argued that quality early childhood care and education is the foundation of Montserrat’s sustainable development. In order to support this statement, this paper is divided into four sections: Early Childhood Development, Early Childhood Care and Education, Ideal Quality Early Childhood Experience and the Benefits of Quality Early Childhood Care and Education. It begins by first examining the main terms including the stages of development which will be put into perspective using common examples to demonstrate how appropriate early childhood experiences build the foundation of Montserrat’s sustainable development.
Human development, which begins at fertilization with the fusion of the male sperm and female egg, is a pattern of physical and functional growth and change. The fertilized egg eventually becomes a fetus at about eight weeks and spends an average of nine months developing in the mother’s womb. During pregnancy, the prenatal phase, major body structures and organs are developed. The growth and maturation of an unborn child are affected by the health, emotions, nutrition and drug use practices of the mother.
From birth, human development is studied in four main areas: physical/biological, social, emotional/mental, and cognitive/intellectual.
Human development is influenced by age and maturation as well as biological and social environmental factors. Human growth and development occurs in spurts and has neither a regular speed nor rate – referred to as Asynchronous and Discontinuity of Growth. The pattern of development is predictable, and occurs parallel to chronological age; yet, age cannot independently determine development as there are individual and cultural differences. Most importantly, each individual has a unique pace and rate of development.
Research has identified some basic characteristics within age groups which we need to focus on when designing learning experiences. Human development theorists have further divided the first eight years of life, the early years, into two main categories: infants and early childhood, based on their physical, social, emotional or mental and cognitive or intellectual ability. During the first month, the first 30 days of life, a child is referred to as a newborn baby who is totally dependent on others. The newborn rapidly begins to grow and gains control of the “mouth, ears and eyes before he learns to grasp with his hands and he learns to grasp before he learns to crawl and walk” (Sahni, 1985, p. 2). This direction of growth is known as cephalo-caudal growth; in proximodistal growth development proceeds from the “axis of the body to the periphery” (p. 2). The infant child masters the whole hand before being able to control the fingers. It is also important to note that development moves from the simple to the complex, from the general to the specific – differentiation.
Rapid physical growth of large muscles continues during infancy from about a month to 12 months. At about one year a human being is beginning to walk unsteadily and is referred to as a toddler. Sometime from about 12 months up to the age of about 36 months, the child begins to develop speech. As the child advances more into early childhood between the ages of 3 years and 5 years greater mastery of movement is acquired and the child is able to “run, jump, climb and balance self” (Sahni, 1985, p. 44). It is also during this phase that the child achieves improved coordination of the muscles including control over the fine muscles, accelerated speed and increasing strength. “Coming first” becomes an obsession regardless of the activity. As the child further advances in the early childhood phase between the ages of 5 years and 8 years, there is continued improvement of muscle coordination in addition to a progression towards abstract logical reasoning.
Laying the foundation for emotional well being begins at birth where a newborn first develops trust for the mother or primary caregiver who responds to its cries for comfort, help and food. Self-confidence builds as the child eventually learns to manipulate his/her own environment and feels increasingly loved and respected by others. “Unconditional love during the first years of life helps the growth of positive emotions in much the same way as Vitamin D and calcium helps the growth of strong teeth and bones” (Baldwin, 1983, p. 143).
Socially the child eventually learns how to get along with others in the world around. The young child at first thinks it’s all about “me” and must gradually learn to share and accept the presence of others in the environment.
The support, guidance and purposeful training that enhance development and understanding during the first eight years of life is referred to as Early Childhood Care and Education. This occurs in homes by parents, other family members, friends and baby sitters, in addition to day care centres, nursery schools and in primary school classrooms grades Kindergarten to Two. According to Baldwin (1983) “It seems there is a ‘best’ time for learning, and this time is during the first years of life. Later learning can happen, but it is slow and very difficult” (p. 107). It can be inferred then that early childhood care and education is not just preparation for elementary school or secondary school but preparation for life. Dr Maureen Samms-Vaughan, an early childhood advocate from Jamaica, wrote:
I have listened keenly to the recent discussions about the performance of schools, and I put it to you, that while school administration and infrastructure do play their role in impacting on a child’s performance, the CXC (Caribbean Examination Council) outcome of the children involved in that study were determined more strongly by the events occurring in their lives long before they started high school. The impact of early childhood years does not end at primary school (2004, p. 27).
Early Childhood Care and Education is not an end in itself. Instead it is the foundation of learning for a lifetime, it is the beginning of a life’s journey, it is a period of readiness skills acquisition for life long learning. It is a period where the focus should be more on the learning of why and how and not merely what since knowledge is constantly evolving. As Pestalozzi advocated, the role of the educator is to focus on the children and not merely the subject matter. The focus should be more on the learning process than the end product … more of a slow dance than a sprint race.
Social constructivists believe that learning is more than passively acquiring knowledge but gaining an understanding after active participation with others or the environment. To the contrary many traditional education practices concentrate on the end product of accumulating knowledge and artificially promoting cognitive/intellectual development through passive didactic transmission while denying the fact that the various areas of development are interrelated. Social constructivists, however, like Pestalozzi and his protégé Froebel, emphasize the importance of unity, focusing on the whole person as a need for love and care can impede progress in cognitive and physical development. They also stressed the value of activities that unite man with nature in a respectful relationship. Although development is determined more by nature than nurture, early childhood philosophers, researchers, and practitioners such as Friedrich Froebel, Loris Malaguzzi, Maria Montessori, Vivian Paley, and Lev Vygotsky have concluded that development can be enhanced by access to appropriate stimulating environments and experiences (Baldwin, 1983; Paley, 2004; Malaguzzi, 1998; Vygotsky, 1986, Weikart, 1989). It is therefore incumbent on parents, family members and members of the community, and care providers who interact with children less than eight years, to create stimulating environments that are conducive to producing creative, critical and productive children and citizens. According to noted Education Psychologist Keith Stanovich, the Matthew Effect is evident in reading. He noted that children who had poor beginning reading ability got poorer while those rich in beginning reading ability got richer since instead of simply learning to read, after the fourth year in school children now have to “read to learn”. This seems to reiterate the point that there are some “critical periods” of development where learning some skills are more effective based on maturity: the point where development reaches a particular level of growth based on nature.
It is a fact that every human being goes through an early childhood stage and receives some measure of care and education. However, it is certain that not everyone receives appropriate quality care and education during their early childhood years. One reason for this may be a misconception as to the real motive for early childhood experiences which is to lay the foundation for future learning. It is no secret that individualized instruction especially at the early childhood level including Grades Kindergarten to Two is crucial to later learning which has benefits to society in the long term (Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 1999; Goodwin & Goodwin, 1996; Gross, 2006; Oberheumer, 2005; Weikart, 1989). Social constructivists believe learning occurs as a result of interaction with others and the environment. The importance of learning with others is demonstrated by Vygotsky in particular who explained that more experienced learners, whether a peer or an adult, helps the young child to master challenges to achieve a new level of independent understanding.
Quality can be described as adding value. Early childhood practitioners agree that young children learn best through the use of integrated experiences. Dewey is credited with highlighting the importance of making connections between new unfamiliar information and previous knowledge and experience. Froebel supported this by concluding that integrated activities make learning more realistic and meaningful. Quality early childhood education focuses on children learning through play, an excellent strategy for integrating knowledge content while at the same time promoting development in a variety of areas. Through play the young child can freely express his/her innermost being. Play theorists suggest that there is no clear demarcation between play and activities that require working, exploring, investigating and creating. Yet “most agree that to be considered as play, an activity should be intrinsically motivating, freely chosen, pleasurable, nonliteral, and actively engaging” (Burns 2007, p. 35). Play promotes creativity, critical thinking, respect, cooperation and collaboration: all skills necessary for the sustainability of Montserrat. Any quality early childhood care and education programme must include play as, according to Froebel, “one of the basic causes of defective childcare is the unsatisfactory consideration of the activity drive of the child” (1844).
Language development will be used to demonstrate what can be done to facilitate an ideal quality early childhood learning experience. Language development includes both oral and written forms of communication. The mastery of literacy which is basic reading and writing competencies is closely intertwined and cannot be separated from the mastery of listening and speaking which are the oral components of language. Some researches have concluded that the quality of literacy - reading and writing - is directly dependent on the quality of children’s oral experience. Children “who explain, explore, argue, and play with language and ideas were more likely to grow as better writers and readers than children who did not use language in those ways” (New, 2002, p. 249). Learning to read and write begins during pregnancy long before the child is exposed to written language if the fetus is read to and spoken to. Assistant Clinical Professor in Pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston wrote “Most parents can make their infants advanced in emotional, cognitive and language development by recognizing that the most crucial time of development of a child is from pre-natal to the first nine months of life” (www.brainy-child.com). Making a point of communicating to the young child, reading to, playing with, pointing out objects, places and parts of the body are ways of stimulating brain development and expanding vocabulary which are essential readiness skills for reading and creative writing.
During the sensorimotor stage, when the child is a toddler up to about three years old, children learn mostly through their senses of touch and taste. They also benefit from being in the company of others and being exposed to language. As the muscles continue to develop, babies should have an adequate amount of space both indoors and outdoors to exercise; there should be large sturdy objects to support them as they try to stand upright and explore their surroundings. While exploring the surroundings children usually demonstrate creativity and problem solving. If given access to large toys and objects including balls, infants will try to kick and throw them in order to develop balance, master coordination skills along with being able to control large and fine muscles which are prerequisite skills for holding books, crayons, pencils, pens and operating a computer mouse. It is also during this preoperational stage that the child is beginning to develop thinking skills in addition to using words, symbols and images to represent their thoughts.
The young child’s vocabulary expands more rapidly than his control of the fine motor skills. Most three-year-olds use an average of over 200 words and by five most children have a good command of the rules of grammar and often make complete sentences. “By the time the child is about five, half his intellectual growth is over. This seems as amazing as the fact that his brain is almost 90% of its adult weight. Many five year olds do not read or write” (Baldwin, 1985, p. 170). By the age of about seven years, when the child should have learned about “50% of the vocabulary of an eighteen-year old” (p. 128), the reading and writing skills of many are commendable.
Between the ages of five and seven years, during the concrete operational phase, the child is beginning to think in more logical ways but needs to be shown links as some “concepts are difficult: they have to be thought about quite hard. They include such things as numbers, colours, shapes, sizes, weights, measures, time, and space. The child learns these things, quite naturally, through play. At first, he gets them very muddled. He has many misconceptions about his world” (Baldwin, 1985, p. 116).
It is a difficult and unnatural task for the young child to distinguish Sunday from Monday, yesterday from last week and work from play as it is through acculturation that many adults are able to separate experiences. Using teaching strategies that focus on one-way passive knowledge transmission of information in meaningless chunks denies young children their innate abilities/capabilities while at the same time quelling the child’s creativity since most often approval depends on attaining an adult’s determined standard. The successful child in the traditional early childhood system has a vast knowledge store but very seldom exhibits creativity, flexibility, critical thinking and problem solving skills. Montserrat's sustainability depends on more than knowledge since knowledge of today may become obsolete tomorrow.
The making of a critical thinker and creative problem solver begins during the early childhood years. Adult care-givers must provide opportunities for infants to make simple non-life-threatening choices. For example, a child can be asked to choose between two sets of clothing to wear and then encouraged to give reasons for the choice. Children should be encouraged to ask and answer questions that have more than one correct answer. Children have opinions and must be given opportunities to share. A child can be permitted to use the crayon of choice to colour the banana. Instead of ridiculing a child for using a pink crayon, start a discussion about the colour used. The child will most certainly offer several creative reasons for the choice.
Quality early childhood education takes into account the young child’s interests, abilities and capabilities. In an ideal early childhood setting the young child is not expected to simply gather information but rather be actively engaged in creating, discovering and interpreting an awareness based on their experience. Success is indicated not by height of the knowledge heap but by how well the individual responds to an unfamiliar or novel task. This problem solving ability will be highly revered for the citizen living in an ever changing world.
Our philosophy, as early childhood care and education providers (parents, and community members included), should be rooted in the ideas of Dewey, Froebel, Paley, Pestalozzi, Piaget, and Vygotsky where the ideas, interests, and abilities of children, drive the curriculum. However, in practice, it appears that in a child-centred approach, adults control what encircles children. Adults create the centre and encircle children with what they think is appropriate, while ignoring the children’s interests and abilities. Teachers single-handedly decide the course of the daily operations: prepares extents, lesson plans, choose themes, activities including field trips and resource personnel. It can be concluded then that in such a classroom practice the focus is on the teacher. I am therefore proposing that a child-focused approach be adopted in our early childhood classrooms where children become not just a centre but a focus. By being the focus, activities will not only revolve around but rather the children will dictate what encircles them/their surroundings. The activities the teachers prepare beforehand will be flexible enough to be altered and changed depending on the children’s interests, mood, curiosity and ideas. In the ideal early childhood setting children are active rather than passive learners, who discover, interpret and make meaning for themselves. The setting will be a collaborative constructive learning community where the adult is both a learner and a teacher and the students are also teachers. The ideal early childhood setting is one of discovery, experimenting, exploration, problem solving, creativity and communication. In a quality early childhood environment, children’s opinions and ideas are validated, their progress is celebrated and they feel empowered by contributing to the decision making process (Burns, 2007).
Quality early childhood care and education must be seen as practice for assuming roles in a democratic society as it will generate individuals who become quality team members capable of celebrating the achievements of others, operate in small and large groups for the common good of the community while sharing control with fellow citizens. Opportunities to manipulate the environment during the early years help to develop creativity, critical thinking and problem solving skills, lead to a healthy sense of self, in addition to respect for the environment and others. The sustainability of Montserrat needs everyone to play their part. It will depend on the collaboration of all citizens.
Although early childhood care and education refers to education in the early stages of human development from birth to eight years, its contribution to sustainable development is crucial. According to Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, “recent studies on infant brain development show most of a person's neurons are formed from ages 0-8. If a young child doesn't receive sufficient nurturing, nutrition, parental/caregiver interaction, and stimulus during this crucial period, the child may be left with a developmental deficit that hampers his or her success in preschool, kindergarten, and beyond.”
In a seminal study that began with toddlers and spanned three decades, Dr David P Weikart “found that US $15,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars was spent on each child, while the savings to schools, welfare, prisons and potential crime victims exceeded US $145,000” (Martin, 2003). Quality early childhood care and education will equip today’s children, tomorrow’s leaders with an improved quality of life through the acquisition of traits such as responsible decision-making, innovation and critical thinking to be used as parents, voters, citizens and policy makers in order to secure the viability and sustainability of Montserrat.
It therefore seems prudent that quality early childhood care and education, from whence cometh the island’s academics, artists, doctors, economists, environmentalists, farmers, lawyers, scientists and sportsmen is the foundation of Montserrat’s sustainable development. The contribution of quality early childhood care and education to the sustainable development of Montserrat can be most eloquently eulogized in the following statement attributed to noted German early childhood educator and inventor of the Kindergarten system Friedrich Fröbel: “the present and future living conditions of men and women of all social classes rest on the careful consideration and rounded mental and physical care of early childhood” (Froebel 1844).
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