Early childhood education

“ The time is coming when the human mother will recognize the educative possibilities of early childhood, learn that the ability to rightly teach little children is rare and precious, and be proud and glad to avail themselves of it. ”

“ That this subject of early training is a vitally interesting one to thinking people cannot be denied. The kindergarten has become the fashion, you say, cynically. This is scarcely true; but it is a fact that the upper, the middle, and the lower classes among us begin to recognize the existence of children under six years of age, and realize that far from being nonentities in life, or unknown quantities, they are very lively units in the sum of progressive education. ”

“ There should be sequence, orderly progression, and one continuous purpose throughout the entire scheme of education, from kindergarten to university.
Education should be conducted according to nature, and should be a free, spontaneous growth,—a development from within, never a prescription from without.
The training of the child should be conducted by means of the activities, needs, desires, and delights, which are the common heritage of childhood. ”

“ If the general principle of adapting the early education of our children to the profession we expect them to follow—to the situations and circumstances in which we think it likely they will be placed—be correct in every case, where boys are concerned; why, in the name of common sense, should it be incorrect in regard to girls? Are they alone to be trained for one thing, while they are probably destined for another? ”

“ How is it, then, that the "harp of a thousand strings"—which God puts into the hands of every mother, in perfect tune—is so recklessly committed, first to ignorant girl-nurses, and then to the least educated teachers? Looking at children's first schools, it would seem that anybody is thought skilful enough to begin a child's education! ”

“ The more different kinds of things a child thus gets to know by treating and handling them, the more confident grows his sense of kinship with the world in which he lives. An unsympathetic adult will wonder at the fascinated hours which a child will spend in putting his blocks together and rearranging them. But the wise education takes the tide at the flood, and from the kindergarten upward devotes the first years of education to training in construction and to object-teaching. ”

“ There is more to do. We need to prepare our children to read and succeed in school with improved Head Start and early childhood development programs. ”

“ The need of practical activity, which for long ages constituted the entire education of mankind, is at last recognized by the elementary school. It has been introduced in many places and already results have been attained which demonstrate that it is possible to introduce practical activity in such a way as to afford the child a sound development—physically, intellectually, and morally—and at the same time equip him for efficient social service. ”

“ For this reason, and because of the difference in value of experiences themselves, it is further evident that man should participate in those experiences which are most effective in facilitating desired adjustments or in directing right conduct. It is found, moreover, that this participation can be effected by bringing the child's experiencing during his early years directly under control. It is held by some, indeed, that the whole aim of education is to reconstruct and enrich the experiences of the child and thereby add to his social efficiency. ”

“ Now the practical educational question of our day is just this, Can he help it? or, Can his parents help it? or, Must the child sit down for life with whatever twist he has inherited? The fact is, many of us, professional teachers, have been taking aim rather beside the mark; we talk as if the development of certain faculties were the chief object of education; and we point to our results, intellectual, moral, æsthetic, physical, with a—“See there, what culture can effect!” But we forget that the child has inborn cravings after all we have given him. ”

“ As there are many classes and varieties of children, whose needs must be studied, while bodily strength and mental faculty differ with the age and surrounding, "child study must be a matter of primary interest to the teacher and others engaged in the care of children as affording a basis for the methods of education; giving a source of perpetual interest to work in school, an interest in the individual child, and a means of working out, in practice, the best that can be done with the child in various phases of life. ”

“ CHAPTER IX THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS Change from childish to adult friends—Influence of favorite teachers—What children wish or plan to do or be—Property and the money sense—Social judgments—The only child—First social organizations—Student life—Associations for youth, controlled by adults.
In a few aspects we are already able to trace the normal psychic outgrowing of the home of childhood as its interests irradiate into an ever enlarging environment. Almost the only duty of small children is habitual and prompt obedience. ”

“ To expand on the important work that parents do, my Administration has taken significant steps to help give our children greater opportunities to learn. By improving our education system and encouraging early reading and language skills, we give our children the tools they will need to succeed in the world they will inherit from us. Children also benefit from the immeasurable care and support of their teachers, and are inspired by the model they set. ”

“ The more we learn about our children, the more we realize the importance of good parenting. As we learned at the recent White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning the first few years of life are crucial to a child's emotional, social, and intellectual development. As their children's first and most influential teachers, parents play an immeasurably important role in helping their sons and daughters grow into happy and healthy adulthood. ”

“ For the well-born, normal-minded, healthy-bodied child, who has wise and careful guardians or parents to assist in his mental guidance, the public school forms a good basis on which to build an education. ”

“ But, when the infant leaves the lap of its mother, and other duties divide her care, it is then necessary that a teacher, equally affectionate and equally efficient, be provided; for children seek, and will find, teachers of good or of evil in every scene, and in every playmate. It is now that the Infant School must mature the education which the mother has, or ought to have, begun. ”

“ My own favorite mode of education would be to send children to school after they have been well trained in imagination and self control at home, at the age when the social feeling seeks variety, and can receive least injury from indiscriminate contact ”

“ You’ve got to start off and focus on the nurturing and education of children when they’re very young, particularly children from disadvantaged families. You’ve got to invest in starting kids in preschool at age four. ”

“ For, as psychologists are insisting more and more emphatically, the health, happiness, and efficiency of adult life depend preponderantly on the home influences of early childhood; and, obviously, in a home where the parental attention can be concentrated on a single child, better results should be attained than when the work of training involves a division of the attention among several children. ”

“ We are waking up to our duties and in proportion as mothers become more highly educated and efficient, they will doubtless feel the more strongly that the education of their children during the first six years of life is an undertaking hardly to be entrusted to any hands but their own. ”

“ So long as we so underrate the importance of childhood,—and that in proportion to the youth of the child,—those persons who should benefit our babies by their presence will not do so. Very great and learned men are proud to teach youths of eighteen and twenty in colleges ”

“ So to live that their children shall be strong and happy is a motive that a child can appreciate, and it can become the most powerful incentive for hygienic living, for industry, education, for social purity that is positive—noble in thought as well as restrictive in action. Trained thus through childhood, boys and girls will be prepared to meet with high-mindedness and moral stamina the storm and stress of adolescence ”

“ Formerly too, the most attentive and patient observation of the progressive development of the mental faculties of a child were necessary to enable a parent to adapt his education to the sphere of life in which nature had destined him to move. ”

“ It is by means of this principle, that the infant mind, with all its imbecility and want of developement, acquires and retains more real knowledge in the course of a few months, than is sometimes received at school afterwards during as many years.—Few things are more cheering in prospect than the knowledge of this fact; for what may we not expect from the man, when his education while a child shall have been improved, and approximated to that of Nature! ”

“ To support local efforts to enhance the early language, literacy, and prereading development of preschool age children, particularly those from low-income families, through strategies and professional development that are based on scientifically based reading research. `` (2) To provide preschool age children with cognitive learning opportunities in high-quality language and literature-rich environments, so that the children can attain the fundamental knowledge and skills necessary for optimal reading development in kindergarten and beyond. ”

“ For instance, does the education of the parents influence the mental powers of their children at any age, either at a very early or somewhat more advanced stage? This could perhaps be learned by schoolmasters and mistresses if a large number of children were first classed according to age and their mental attainments, and afterwards in accordance with the education of their parents, as far as this could be discovered. ”

“ In the education of a young child, it is better to instruct him by illustration, by pictures, and by encouraging observation on things around and about him, than by books. It is surprising how much, without endangering his health, may be taught in this way. In educating your child, be careful to instil and to form good habits—they will then stick to him for life. ”

“ Develop the social consciousness in the child as early as possible. Make him realize that, for the general welfare of the whole school, it is worth his while to forego satisfying his need immediately. ”

“ Since what a child becomes is determined so largely by its inborn capacities, it is of the utmost importance that teachers and parents realize something of the nature of such aptitudes before they begin to awaken them. For education consists in large measure in supplying the stimuli necessary to set going these potentialities and of affording opportunity for their expression. ”

“ The children that find it harder than most of their age and station to grow up to full enjoyment and use of life's opportunities, because of some weight of affliction, are, we now know, entitled to all the training that the normal child receives and whatever else of special education their condition requires. The children that can never grow up to mental maturity, even with all that educational ingenuity can offer, are the permanent members of Society's Infant Class. ”

“ The parents or other guardians of minors shall adopt a fine philosophy of family education, take the initiative to study the knowledge of family education, and conduct learning targeted at important periods such as pregnancy, and the minors' entrance to infant and toddler care institutions, kindergartens, primary and secondary schools, so as to master science-based family education methods and improve the family education ability. ”

“ The first two years of a child's schooling may be passed profitably in an infant school; at any rate, if the child enters as early as six years of age. Indeed, we think the variety embodied in the infant-school system is one of its most pleasing and useful features. ”

“ The educator wants the child to be finished at once, and perfect. He forces upon the child an unnatural degree of self-mastery, a devotion to duty, a sense of honour, habits that adults get out of with astonishing rapidity. Where the faults of children are concerned, at home and in school, we strain at gnats, while children daily are obliged to swallow the camels of grown people. ”

“ In Infancy, up to the fifth or sixth year, the purely physical development takes the precedence; Childhood is the time of learning, in a proper sense, an act by which the child gains for himself the picture of the world such as mature minds, through experience and insight, have painted it; and, finally, Youth is the transition period to practical activity, to which the self-determination of the will must give the first impulse. ”

“ They have the means, too, of availing themselves of all improvements in education, of engaging the most intelligent and efficient instructors, and of frequently changing the scene for their children, and consequently the objects which come under their observation. Which, I ask, is the more honourable course,—to object, as some do, to the education of the infant poor, lest they should learn too much, or to improve, then, the opportunities they have, by which they and their children they surpass all others? ”

“ He is not a purely latent being whom the adult has to approach with great caution and skill in order gradually to draw out some hidden germ of activity. The child is already intensely active, and the question of education is the question of taking hold of his activities, of giving them direction. ”