The quality of our children’s education

By Feny de los Angeles-Bautista

Who is the child? What are the child’s needs, abilities, interests at various
stages from infancy through early childhood through the middle years and
on to adolescence? How do children learn? How can teachers teach so
every child can truly learn and will want to learn for a lifetime? What
competencies do children need in order to succeed at every stage of their
schooling and to lead full real lives? What and how do we effectively teach
them to help them fulfil their full potential as human beings, to become
responsible, compassionate, productive citizens? These are the essential,
crucial questions in the quality of education debate.

Our core understanding of how children grow, develop and learn and our
commitment to achieving the goals of equity and excellence in education
must always be inextricably linked. A human rights framework for
educational policies and legislation has as its central concern: equity.
Equity is about increasing equality and ensuring quality not just in terms of
access but also in learning outcomes. This aspiration is anchored on the
belief that ALL children can develop essential physical, cognitive,
psychosocial, emotional skills and abilities GIVEN the appropriate and
conducive learning environment.

But the fact that many who do go to school fail to develop these skills is due
in part to a deficiency in education quality. In the Global Monitoring Report
(2003) on Education for All, UNESCO affirms that “recent analyses confirm
that poverty, rural residence and gender inequality persist as the strongest
inverse correlates of school attendance and performance and that poor
instruction is a significant source of this inequality. ” And poor instruction is
in large measure due to the lack of understanding about child development,
the principles of learning and effective teaching practices. Many students of
teacher training institutions spend most of their pre-service education
learning more about the subjects they will teach rather than about the
learners they will work with in their classrooms and schools. They spend
more time memorizing content that is bound to be irrelevant or obsolete
within a few years of their graduation than they do understanding and
practicing applications of basic principles of learning and effective teaching
designed for learners of various developmental stages, diverse needs,
abilities and socio-cultural contexts.

Curriculum for children especially from the early childhood years through the
elementary grades should establish a solid foundation for the physical,
cognitive, language and socio-emotional skills that all children need to not
just to succeed in school but to cope with the challenges of day to day life
and to participate actively in their own communities. There is a need to
improve the curriculum and standards which should all be aligned across
developmental stages, age and grade levels so that these will be consistent
with how children develop and learn. Preschool cannot and should not be a
“watered-down version” or rehearsal for tests in Grade One. The curriculum
for Grades One to Three still include inappropriate as well as superficial
learning objectives that either underestimate young children’s competence
and at other times require them to understand and do tasks that are simply
beyond their grasp. In the Philippine Elementary Learning Competencies
(PELC) the absence of Science as a subject in Grades One and Two is a
glaring omission. However, there is one “learning outcome” for English in
Grade One: “Tells the natural sequence of events: plant growth, life stages
of animals. “

While multilingual instruction - that includes early learning in children’s

mother tongue / home language - is now being promoted by the DepED,
most assessments of children’s knowledge in core subjects like Mathematics
are still done in English which is a second or third language for many Filipino
children. Both public and private preschool and elementary school curricula
and standards today can be considered overloaded and thus overwhelming
to children and teachers alike. They often lead to inappropriate and
problematic teaching practices like over-reliance on whole-group chalk and
talk sessions, workbooks for “drill and dull” practice, fragmented teaching,
rigid tightly- paced schedules, little or no opportunities for rich play, arts,
music, outdoor and physical activities, problem solving, collaboration and
interaction with peers all of which have been demonstrated as critical to
developing children’s competence, self-worth and love for learning.

Numerous studies have shown the devastating effects on intelligence and

brain development of a lack of basic nutrients, affection and stimulation in
the prenatal period, in infancy and in early childhood. Evidence from the last
three decades of neuroscience research and from longitudinal studies of
children born in poverty who participated in highly effective early childhood
development programs has made it very clear that: “what a child
experiences in the first years of life profoundly influences how his brain will
develop and how he will interact with the world throughout his life. Parents
play the most important role in providing the nurturing and stimulation that
children require, but they need information and support to develop good
parenting skills.” Dr. Fraser Mustard explains that “Experience-based brain
development in the early years (conception to age 6) sets pathways in brain
development that affect learning, health, and behaviour throughout the life
cycle. Basic literacy skills and understanding are set during this period of
development.”
By now, there should be clarity about the fact that from birth through
adolescence there are dramatic growth spurts - for bodies and brains -
that correspond to critical transition periods that in turn pose special
challenges for children as learners. All these bear implications for
developmentally-appropriate practices, curriculum and program design from
the early childhood years through adolescence. But the most critical period
is from birth through age six and eight when the so-called “windows of
opportunity” for language, cognitive, psycho-social development are wide
open. “Eight is too late!” was the mantra that we in the Consultative Group
for ECCD promoted during the end of the Decade of Education for All in
Dakar 2000. Indeed, the fact the alarming higher drop-out rates from
Grades One to Three in the past three to five years amplifies this point made
a decade ago.

Ellen Gallinsky, family life and child development expert, prolific researcher
and author, (most recently of “Mind in the Making”) revisited the three
most highly regarded early childhood development programs in the U.S. for
children and families living in difficult circumstances and summarized what
they had in common : 1) The children were viewed and treated as active
learners. 2) The program creators did not subscribe to the ‘tabula rasa”
(blank slate) nor banking models of learning, where knowledge is written or
deposited into a child instead they assumed that children have a drive to
learn and explore and educators must build on this drive. 3) Children were
expected to take responsibility for their learning in an environment designed
as “activity/interest areas” e.g. a science area, a reading area, block play,
dramatic play so the children could choose, set goals, plan and carry out
these plans, regroup and review their activities upon arrival through the end
of each day. Each program expected children to be increasingly responsible
for their own learning. Gallinsky noted that the program creators viewed
goal-setting as critical to helping children develop the all-important lifetime
habits of “engaged learning”.

In study after study on parenting and on early education conducted by

Gallinsky and the Work and Family Institute (New York) they arrived at
similar findings: “adults who continue to learn about children - about
parenting them and teaching them – make the best parents and the best
teachers.” The most successful early childhood programs worked because
their creators were learning, the teachers were learning, the parents were
learning – and thus the children were learning. Each program was a learning
community. These are the also among the “best practices” identified in a
ten-country study called the “Effectiveness Initiative” that looked into
successful Early Childhood Care and Development programs in Latin
America, Africa, Europe and Asia (including one in the Philippines)

There are also clear predictors of success that are directly linked to these
effective characteristics of QUALITY early childhood education programs:
first, language learning and early literacy are best supported through
proactive vocabulary building built-in daily through sustained and rich
conversations between and among children and adults, frequent storytelling
in small groups and related language enrichment activities. Second,
mathematics concepts taught through a robust curriculum that emphasizes
play and interactive, hands-on learning experiences. Third, emotional
competence is very closely linked to both enhanced cognitive performance
and academic achievement. Independence, responsibility, self-regulation,
and cooperation are among the factors in the social-emotional domain that
are significant predictors of how well children make the transition to school
and how they fare in the early grades

Kurt Fischer of Harvard University says: “One of the most beneficial things
that brain research has done is it’s made it very hard for us to split cognition
from emotion. For example, the areas of the brain most involved in memory
– the quintessential cognitive function – are strongly tied to the emotion
areas.” The National Council on the Developing Child, a multidisciplinary
collaboration of scientists and scholars from universities across the US and
Canada designed to bring the science of early learning to bear on public
policy decision-making concluded: “Cognitive, emotional and social
capacities are inextricably intertwined throughout the life course.” Thus,
the so-called “gold-standard” early childhood programs and multi-faceted
community development programs emphasize all kinds of learning, not just
so-called academic or cognitive learning. Close to three decades now,
Howard Gardner and many others have pointed us in the direction of
multiple intelligences and how important it is to recognize that children learn
in different ways and are good at different things and that all these need to
be promoted.

Given all the evidence from the biological and neuro-sciences, detailed
documentation of highly quality and effective early childhood programs in
different countries that are designed for children in difficult life
circumstances , at this point there should be no room for reluctance nor
ambiguity about public policy in regard to quality early childhood
development programs and learner-centered, child-friendly schools that
support children’s overall development and well-being.