TOO MUCH TOO SOON
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TOO MUCH TOO SOON
Throughout the world the Early Years is now recognized as a time of enormous importance for the nurturing of an innately human love of learning. Young children really want to explore their environments and to make sense of their worlds and each child is unique in his or her way of going about this. We are naturally joyful, questing investigators with challenge, risk and flow essential elements of how we grow and develop.
This natural disposition to learn and understand is, however, now being profoundly threatened by the increasing downward pressure from policy-makers seeking to ensure ‘measurable targets and outcomes’ linked to later academic performance. The rigid acquisition of knowledge is now becoming everything with little or no reference to the importance of understanding that knowledge or the more fluid concept of putting it into the context of each child’s own developmental needs.
Young children learn most naturally and effectively through a subtle balance of free play, movement, rhythm, repetition and imitation. An overly formal and cognitively biased ‘curriculum’ distorts this learning experience and is increasingly linked to unforeseen difficulties later on – including the lack of the disposition to actually want to learn. With enough pressure we can all be taught to read and write early, but, as evidenced by some country's dismal literacy results, at the cost of later wanting to.
We believe that young children have a right to be joyful natural learners and that anything that erodes this disposition is doing a profound disservice to the health and wellbeing of our societies. Research increasingly suggests that prescriptive intrusion by governments into education does not necessarily improve standards to any marked extent, and may, instead, be narrowing and over-mechanising children’s learning experiences to the detriment of all concerned.
We therefore call upon policy-makers around the world to urgently address their approaches to the early years in recognition of the fact that this is a unique and highly important period of life that should not be compromised by being treated as a preparation for later schooling. We also call upon them to acknowledge that the old and misinformed ‘schoolification’ model is simply not serving the drastically different needs of the 21st century learner.
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