“HIGH-QUALITY PRESCHOOL” ? What Does that Mean Anyway ???

Recently our esteemed director of the National Department of Education admitted, following a conference in Europe about Early Education, that he was approached by many concerned persons who asked him why we seem to disregard really caring about our young children in America – and he agreed.

We appreciate your humility. But …

…This begs us to ask him, “what are you going to do about it”?  Is your phantom committee of experts still pretending to collaborate on researching “what works” for Early Education?

Let’s review some simple principles that have long been established and accepted by society, as well as Neuroscience.  Preschool is the “foundation for everything in life”.  So let’s start acting and believing as though it has a profound affect on everything we do in life, particularly, how we achieve, innovate and work as competent adults.  Is it so hard to see the correlations between how Europeans treat their very young children and how much better they tend to do in academic settings and tests?

You keep looking at the academic achievements of students in Finland, but yet you refuse to make this information transparent to Americans, or embark on any strategies to implement similar standards in our own education system.  For instance, Finnish preschool children get to spend their entire preschool stage with the same teacher.   Also, they are learning about the basics of everything through the means of natural knowledge and natural science.  Creativity is paramount. Why do we keep insisting in America that academic achievement can be mastered through the strict learning, execution and perfection of writing, understanding and reciting the  “a,b,c’s and 1,2,3’s” ???

If these supposed basic properties of knowledge were so valuable to the preschool brain – or served as the basis for innovative development – or prepared children for academic excellence — then why do our American children keep sliding down the scale of academic achievement — if preschool is indeed the foundation for EVERYTHING ?

What have you done for them lately?

It seems as though “High-quality-Preschool” is defined by what conveniences it serves for full-time working parents – – who can hardly be blamed for subscribing to this version of high-quality preschool, when the value of a preschool parent is so undermined, underestimated and undervalued in this country.  Parents have to make a living.  Many European countries literally pay their parent-citizens of young children to stay at home and raise their children.  This makes sense because a young child’s best teacher is his or her own parent.

Unfortunately too, here in the States, parents are poorly informed about early child development — in essence, understanding that child development is one in the same as child brain development.  Strategies and methods and philosophies about “parenting” have run amok with hardly any modifications about what early brain development actually is. Human brain development is Emotional brain development, and the human brain develops during the childhood years.  Therefore developing a child’s brain has to do with intelligently developing their emotions as the seeds of their abilities and creative learning potential.  The paradigm we need here is to change the definition of raising children from “parenting” to “childing”.

Yes, new words and terms feel awkward, but new words and their definitions give us new knowledge, information and perspectives about altering what we  profess to improve. How do we proclaim to be intent on improving our adult brains and making the best of our neuroplastic abilities if its only to do numbers and puzzles faster or better, but fails to include the most important aspect of our lives – our society – our nation — our children?

Get with the program Arne — do your job.  Stop succumbing to the pressure of parents telling you what they want from early education and start handing out information about what early brain development really entails — that is of course, if you actually know what that is.  Parents’ intentions are good, but it is your job to be the intelligent informer.  Yep, it’s a monumental task that requires a lot of reconfiguring, will undoubtedly draw friction, and oh, let’s never forget, will need funds because everything seems to be about money even though the rules of appropriate brain development have very little to do with the rules of the money game.

The clock is ticking !   Before you know it, today’s preschoolers will be 25 years old and we’ll be bemused and bewildered about our leadership roles in innovation.  You want innovation back in American society?  — Lose the literacy and numeracy requirements and replace them with Creative Learning.  Stop acting like it’s rocket science.  But if you make this change, you’ll have more rocket scientists and STEM professionals than you’ll know what to do with, unless of course, you create programs for them to work in when these youngsters are ready to wor

ARE WE REALLY ADULTS – or Are We Overgrown Under-nurtured Children ?

Practically everyday, we will be faced with another ad or advocacy for promoting yet another awareness campaign about becoming caring, capable, conscientious, compassionate individuals.  In particular there are those accounts and testimonies of folks who’ve decided to invest their lives’ worth, time, resources and efforts into organizing another, newer better program to help the world’s hungry, the lonely, the desolate, the oppressed, the bereaved, the forgotten and the abused, etc.

So, does the world’s most organized religion select from the famous and infamous among these individuals and mark them for canonization as saints?  Well, hardly, and obviously religious organizations have their own criteria for sainthood.  But in my opinion, these life-giving, hard-working souls are all modern day saints.

Every day, “new saints” rise to the occasion, establishing evermore countless organizations and programs to help those in need, but the “those-in-need” groups of people also keep arising, and in greater numbers. This would mean that as remedially wonderful that these saints and their organizations are, there’s something amiss – and that is that we ought to be considering ourselves as way too smart for mis-identifying what the root cause of our prolific problems are and the way they keep cropping up like weeds.  How do we finally eliminate the growth of these adverse human problems?

HUMAN PROGRESS on the surface looks like the innovative designing and developing of politics, sociology, philosophy, economics, technology and all other humanitarian efforts of civilization.  As such, all of these endeavors are effects that we define as “human progress”.  However, these ongoing systems of human progress are direct derivatives of our human brains’ creative capacity to design our existence; our survival techniques, how to explore knowledge, observe the universe and develop cultural arts — all of which are contingent upon the active progress, utilization and application of our brains’ (higher) potential.

Technically speaking — aside from the fact that humans are the only species born with underdeveloped brains that need 2 1/2 decades to reach full development, or what we’ve thought to be full development — 90% of that brain development that we will depend on, for a lifetime of intelligence and behavior strategies as well as our decision-making skills, will take place within the first 5 years of our lives, and most of that 90% takes place even sooner during those early years than most of us would like to admit.

Admittedly, this would actually mean that only 10% of our “selves” — of our brain development — is the “adult” part of our “selves”.  Overall, 90% of each of us is always and forevermore, a child.

Technically speaking then, “Human Progress” is really about “Child Brain Development”. Yet, if we honestly examine the strategies of “human progress”, we’d also have to admit that our strategy is failing to support real human progress when 90% of our humanitarian and societal efforts address the adult versions of improvement and development, which is the 10% part of our “selves”, while it seems as though only 10% of our efforts and resources go into supporting the 90% part of our selves, which is the “child” part of us all.  Human progress has to be addressed as a form of childhood development or at least, childhood re-development.  Mostly, it means that human progress needs to be restructured by understanding child brain development and how it can be fully nurtured to prepare the adults of the near and far-off future to fully utilize our human brains’ total potential.

In other words, “human progress” would become “childhood brain development”.

Clearly, without a doubt, as honorable and admirable as our efforts are to comfort adults in need, and as much as we need to continue to do that sort of work, if we really want to put an end to poverty, desolation, isolation, suffering, abuse and all other adverse events of the human condition that impinge on our higher efforts to support the diversification of human abilities and talents, then we need to re-direct and re-focus our efforts and resources into Childhood Development.  To do that would be to honestly say that we are using true human dignity and true human ingenuity to identify the root of our adverse challenges, thereby, putting more people into the glorious position of living beyond just “survival” and subsequently, utilizing their developed capabilities for innovation in all fields of human civilization and its cultures.

Reconciling that we are really overgrown children comes across as patronizing and even insulting, especially when we consider that we reach adulthood prepared to use a very short percentage of our total brain’s potential.  However, if our early development were structured to ensure 100% of our brain’s total potential – by the time we reach adulthood – I’m confident that very few of us would struggle, or have any reservations about being children of the universe, or at least children of our own galaxy.

We are creative beings.  Putting creativity back into early childhood brain development is one of the first steps in creating a worldwide culture of innovation that supports human prosperity — rather than “innovation” being more fully occupied to address the antithesis of human prosperity in the forms of hunger, war, poverty, miscommunication, counter-intuitive technology, and the downgrading of the human services industry  — all of which, contribute to the degradation of human relationships that are necessary for human brain development.

The human brain can solve and resolve any problems – if we let it – certainly human progress can be redesigned to quell and eliminate many more issues than we have compounded so far.  It’s up to us to acknowledge that human child brain development is the natural key and wise choice toward genuine human progress.

For the past several thousand years, we have been functioning on a 0.02 version of brain potential – or 20% of our brains’ potential.  The story of humankind has awaited the time that we can finally upgrade to a 1.0 brain version — or 100% of our brains’ potential.  This is the time.

This is a time to admit that perhaps we’ve progressed in some ways that are entirely wrong, and all we have to do is equally admit, that we have all we need to get it all entirely right from this point forward.  Essentially, this is the best way to eradicate our human debts — it is a living and working version of humanitarian forgiveness and higher development.

THE REAL MEANING OF “CHANGE”

Mental health is a hefty topic that few want to engage in debating, but it might actually be our reluctance to define it that makes it wage so heavily on our minds.  We mention it in passing as a matter of posterity, but we drop it almost as quickly and hope that it will just go away and take care of itself, or that someone will take care of it — virtually implying that it has nothing to do with the rest of us who feel comforted and relieved that we are devoid of suffering from mental health issues.  All mental health issues – and all issues of humanity – are unequivocally, CHILD BRAIN development issues, and they are issues that belong to all of us.  Yes, we have a world of adults that are in need, but unless we reverse our focal point of saving humanity in favor of saving child development, then the issues that we face as adults will just continue to crop up generation after generation.

Even for each individual adult, addressing self-improvement, as well as mental and emotional health issues, means addressing and revisiting the clues and keys to early childhood development.  In the course of tragic events, people might say, “but he had good parents and a good upbringing, a stable home, they were a nice family…”  But with a bare rate of approximately 20% of cognitive brain development that has been tapped across humanity for several thousand years without an upgrade, any of us could snap at any moment.  Cognition is a math process, like every other process and entity in the universe, and the math never lies.  80%, of the basic essentials we need for full brain development, are missing from the early cognitive stages, when 90% of our brains are developing.  This is math that we must stop ignoring.

‘Til now, humankind has explored nature and the universe so that we could discover and understand more about ourselves. But the time has come to reverse this order — to catapult human progress forward and understand more about our universe and our position in it, we must stop and take the time to understand ourselves — and the key to that is to understand child development, and in particular, to understand the under-nurtured child in ALL OF US.

It’s either our willingness or reluctance to change that either makes things change for better or worse – and change will certainly go for the worser version if we do nothing or if we keep things the same.  The key is in having a DEVICE and implementing it, and our best device is childhood brain development, which has opened up a world of possibilities with the advent and emergence of Neuroscience.  To understand human progress and human brain development is to understand child brain development.  Let’s make sure to take this opportunity by the horns, tackle it and never ever let it slip away.