About Our Words: Education Begins In The Womb
John Watson from Bridgetown, Western Australia, cimments on an article by Marsh Kaminsky entitled Education Begins In The Womb.
My passion is in understanding behaviours as they are underpinned by evolutionary pressures.
This article stresses the importance of early childhood stimulation. The author is, of course, correct. The thing he doesn't seem to realise is that the process he describes is in fact driven by evolutionary pressures. For many hundreds of thousands of years we were nomads, hunter-gatherers. We would have existed in small groups and the position of each member of the group would, by necessity have been extremely tenuous. Survival in a hostile environment would have meant that all members of the group would need to have well honed skill sets that would support the position they held. The luxury of beginning a child's education at the age of five, as it is in a modern society, would have been unthinkable.
The child's education would begin at birth. Nature has equipped the child at a very early age, not only with the ability to assimilate huge amounts of information, but also to assimilate without question as to the appropriateness of the material they are being taught. That skill comes later, the knowledge of this highlights the huge responsibility being assumed by the educator. This is a skill that has not gone unnoticed by teachers who may be unscrupulous enough to fill a child's mind with arrant nonsense. So take care, unless of course you have a comprehensive understanding of cause and effect.
Kind Regards,
http://www.openwriting.com/archives/2009/01/education_begin.php
