Hot stuff on little kids - Dr Mustard adds spice to the reading wars

It is because these three aspects of human life are linked that we can safely predict that those individuals who can read and write (and numerically calculate) are most likely to be long-lived (healthy) individuals who will enjoy a good life on this planet and contribute positively to society.

So making sure that everyone has the best possible chance to learn to read well is an intervention point, and has to be a major goal for social reformers of any and every ideological stripe and colour.

(A teaching method that systematically generates reading failure in over a third of the population is therefore due for major overhaul. Yet those who have proposed reform have been met with entrenched hostility and resistance from … teachers!)

Practical strategies to give your child a good start

If we explore the idea that getting your child off to a good start in life is to ensure that the better proportion of that child’s life’s battles are won, what practical decisions are involved for an Australian parent in 2007?

Child care.
Well, if one needs to get help with child care, one needs to tread very carefully. The idea that our present child care facilities are an adequate way of meeting a new human’s emotional, intellectual or any other needs is seriously misguided.

Fraser Mustard, as others before him, including the present author, cites the Romanian orphans as an extreme example of the emotional and intellectual deprivation deriving from institutionalisation, and he points out that we are working with a gradient in which our present child care arrangements may fall closer to the less damaging end of the spectrum, but nevertheless still register on the gradient of deprivation. Anne Manne’s recent book on motherhood has an excellent discursive treatment of this issue also.

Parent involvement.
Then we need to recognise that the greater the level of parent involvement in quality child care initiatives the better. Young children long to be with, and incidentally to learn from, their parents and family members. These rate far better than either non-family adults or non-family age-mate friends, for at least all the early years.

Forays into non-family friendships might begin seriously after the fourth birthday, but don’t take off till a good while after that, and even then ideally without losing the family base. Social interventions in the child care arena therefore have greatest chance of beneficial outcomes if they reach the child through the parent (not by by-passing the parent with apparently well-credentialled experts who can never be adequate parent substitutes).

Academic education and the early start strategy.
So what about education? If as a parent we want to have well-educated children, the next thing to be very careful about is NOT to leave the acquisition of language or language skills, or familiarity with numbers and the quantities they represent, and some basic manoeuvres in addition, subtraction, division and multiplication until the years of formal schooling.

If we do, we find that the relevant “windows of opportunity” for maximal grasp of foundational concepts has almost closed. The language skills area includes second languages. If you want your child to be bi-lingual, then exposure to the sounds of both languages ideally occurs between birth and seven months. Auditory pathways are established which can later be built upon with further levels of sophistication.

Fraser Mustard uses a chart to bring home the significance of the early years for the establishment of foundational neural pathways (synapses) in the years before school begins. It is here that we find an explanation for John Stuart Mill successfully learning Greek and Latin before he was five - his father began teaching him when he was three.

This is why Oprah Winfrey has had such a successful life - her grandmother taught her to read when she was three-years-old.