The Genesis of Formative Early Childhood Education

The title of this blog: "The Genesis of Formative Early Childhood Education," asserts the premise, that the sooner we get started injecting our children with a sense of personal identity and initiative, typically the less ominous the process of asserting their gifts and talents becomes later in life.

Have you ever taken a personality profile? Oh really? Think again. Included in this list of potential personality profiles that you have taken is the more scholarly; Myers-Briggs, Strengthfinders, Servants By Design, etc. In addition to these, are the, well... less scholarly magazine inventories, online assessments, facebook profiles, etc. So, now that we have established that almost everyone has completed, or has been curious enough to peruse a personality profile, let's consider what it would be like if by high school, we had a pretty strong idea of not only who we were, but had the inspiration to pursue our calling in life.

I have written in previous blogs that the 0-5 year old range of a child's life offers them the most opportune experiences for formative learning. The reason is that because our intrinsic motivation is at its prime response level. It is at this earliest stage that parents have the utmost responsibility to instill an internal model of functioning, where behavior expectations are rooted in an adequate assessment of personality, purposed in solid character development, and instilled with the greatest volume of truth. As we consider the early stages of the childhood experience, we typically gravitate one way or another as far as the impact of our parental influence. We either tarry toward complacency as we consider schooling to be the primary educational environment for children, and so we wait to foster our child's comprehension until they are five or six, and the "real" teachers take over. The opposite extreme is to believe that we are the end-all for our children, and if we don't prepare them prior to school, all of our work will be overthrown by under-performing school systems and inadequate teachers.

Dare I say that our calling to educate our children in the earliest years is of more importance than we could have ever known, and yet we need to fall in between the previously mentioned extremes. What we have come to realize in the Early Childhood and Child Therapy professions is that the success of children in their school careers is highly indicative of the attitude and success that they evoke coming into the school system at the very beginning. The field of educational research is showing this as the number of high school dropouts, the lack of success in many schools across the nation, and the overall lack of motivation that most students have has been tracked back to their comprehension at the pre-school level. This is why we must get a handle on the importance of early educational exposure and the value of the intrinsically-motivated child.

I believe the way we do this is through myriad strategies, but the most basic, as germane to the parental role, is to expose this information for what it is worth. There must be equal pressure and resources made available to parents and children of all socioeconomic backgrounds. We can not dumb down the truth of the matter, but rather, we must have systems of success that embrace the comprehensive education, exposing children to all sorts of meaningful learning experiences. Children need to have opportunities to explore and navigate their world with purposeful direction and discipline. We must understand the child's mind at appropriate developmental levels and enter their world at their level, while maintaining the influential role of disciple and educator. Most importantly, the Genesis of formative early childhood education begins with a paradigm shift of first, realizing that it is the all-important opportunity for children to experience a purposeful beginning that leads to a higher-quality end.