Dr. Bruce Perry of the ChildTrauma Academy has a graph that shows how the amount of money we spend on programs designed to “change the brain” is in almost direct opposition to the developing brain’s ability to change. We spend the majority of our money in increasing amounts at about age fourteen when our brain structure is already mostly set; we spend almost no money on children below the age of three when the brain has the highest capacity for change. This is a problem.
A long-time friend of our family is a college professor and for years he has said that we need to invert our system: college professors should be paid the least and Early Childhood Educations (ECE) should be paid the most. Dr. Perry’s graph supports the supposition that we would get the biggest bang for our buck if we did, indeed, re-prioritize where we spent our educational money.
The research clearly supports a move towards making sure that we spend more money on our 0-5 caretakers/educators. The current idea has been that we can achieve this change by requiring pre-K workers to have more formal education. The CARES program in California was based on this ideal—increase the standards by encouraging Early Childhood Educators (ECE) to get more education. Many ECE workers have jumped at this idea leading to a whole batch of people now finishing up varying levels of degrees. Great, right? The only flaw is that these people are being told that if they want better pay, benefits, and more professional respect, they should leave the ECE field.
But, let’s say that this changes. Let’s say we flip our priorities overnight and suddenly pre-K caretaker/educators now earn a modest average of, say, $40,000 a year. Doing this work would suddenly look a lot more attractive to a lot more people. Just the fact of earning a nice living wage would automatically increase the respect the field would be given. While all of the ECE workers that I know would agree that, if we put our money where we say our values are, we would be paying ECE caretaker/educators a whole lot more than $40,000 a year, I think most would also be happy with earning a comfortable living wage and some benefits. If more people are attracted to the field because the pay is good, then we can raise the professional standards. The way things are now, higher standards means higher formal education.
So my concern is—what will all of that higher education make of raising our children?
Here is my ECE Nightmare: A future where pre-K workers are highly educated technicians, dressed in stark uniforms, monitoring babies in a scientifically designed, structured, and controlled environment. There will be shelves of bins, each labeled with the developmentally appropriate age and the brain growth designed to be stimulated by the items in the bin. The ECE Specialist will check the notes on each baby or toddler and pull out the appropriate activity or place the child in the “correct” environment in order to make sure that their brains receive the right stimulation at the right time. All of the 0-3 babies would be together, separate from all of the pre-school children, separate from the elementary school children who would continue to be sub-divided into their respective age groups…
My ECE Nightmare is a monoculture world, where babies are raised in uniformity, and the lack of diversity weakens the whole.
I already see this in the work I do at the daycare. Specialists come to the daycare from time to time, to work with a specific child or to do an overall daycare assessment. They talk to the children in soft, patient tones, gently trying to convince the kids that it is best to use your words even as one kid bashes another over the head with a block. I don’t know about you, but when someone is trying to hit me in the head, I don’t try to reason with them by using my words. No, I first defend myself, often using verbal volubility and sometimes adding physical action if necessary to protect myself.
Don’t get me wrong, specialists are great. They do much needed work with children in ways that ECE caretakers/educators can’t because of the holistic nature of the work we do. We are with the children day-in and day-out. What they need to learn from us is how relationships work, how community works, and they learn that by example. The children need to see us get angry, frustrated, sad, silly, irritated, and so on. How else will they learn how to handle their own emotions? They need to see us as we relate to each other, as we relate to other children, and as we relate to them.
Children also need to see other children relating to each other. Older children dealing with younger children show the youngest where they are going, how to get there, and some of the things they will learn along the way. Age stratification of children disrupts this continuity. We already have too much age stratification in our society; The Continuum Concept by and the brain research done by Dr. Bruce Perry and others show that we need to start re-integrating our communities if we want to optimize the brain growth of our babies. So, my fear is that requiring ECE caretaker/educators to have higher academic degrees will lead to Specialists raising our children and, thus, to my monoculture nightmare.
Higher education, at least at this point in time, teaches us to follow instructions, fill in the proper blanks, and jump through all of the right hoops in order to be awarded a degree. Academia has become isolated from the real world, lost behind the scientific model. Objective observation and careful manipulation of variables is not anything like the real world. The scientific model is an amazingly useful tool and we owe much to this way of thinking; however, it is very important that we do not forget that it is but one tool among many in a world of amazing complexity and diversity.
Raising babies and toddlers is messy, chaotic work. You often have to follow your instincts in order to find the path that works for this particular child at this particular time with this particular issue. You have to be creative. You have to be willing to take risks. You have to be open to thinking outside the box.
Of course, you can only think outside of the box once you know what the box is and how it works. Because of this, 0-5 caretaker/educators should have a solid grounding in child development, basic psychology, general sociology, and some anthropology. They also should have experience with music and gardening, with dance and animals, with singing and art and other forms of creative innovation. I am not anti-education, I just think that ECE workers should have more than formal education as a professional base. ECE workers should be able to integrate both the emotional-creative-intuitive-right and the logical-linear-literal-left halves of their brains and bring those skills to the work they do with babies and young children.
Formal, higher education should only be one component in developing skilled 0-5 caretaker/educators. My monoculture nightmare would be greatly eased knowing that the path to becoming a professional pre-K caretaker/educator included flexibility, creativity, and diversity, in addition to formal education.
Resources:
The ChildTrauma Academy/Dr. Bruce Perry
A long-time friend of our family is a college professor and for years he has said that we need to invert our system: college professors should be paid the least and Early Childhood Educations (ECE) should be paid the most. Dr. Perry’s graph supports the supposition that we would get the biggest bang for our buck if we did, indeed, re-prioritize where we spent our educational money.
The research clearly supports a move towards making sure that we spend more money on our 0-5 caretakers/educators. The current idea has been that we can achieve this change by requiring pre-K workers to have more formal education. The CARES program in California was based on this ideal—increase the standards by encouraging Early Childhood Educators (ECE) to get more education. Many ECE workers have jumped at this idea leading to a whole batch of people now finishing up varying levels of degrees. Great, right? The only flaw is that these people are being told that if they want better pay, benefits, and more professional respect, they should leave the ECE field.
But, let’s say that this changes. Let’s say we flip our priorities overnight and suddenly pre-K caretaker/educators now earn a modest average of, say, $40,000 a year. Doing this work would suddenly look a lot more attractive to a lot more people. Just the fact of earning a nice living wage would automatically increase the respect the field would be given. While all of the ECE workers that I know would agree that, if we put our money where we say our values are, we would be paying ECE caretaker/educators a whole lot more than $40,000 a year, I think most would also be happy with earning a comfortable living wage and some benefits. If more people are attracted to the field because the pay is good, then we can raise the professional standards. The way things are now, higher standards means higher formal education.
So my concern is—what will all of that higher education make of raising our children?
Here is my ECE Nightmare: A future where pre-K workers are highly educated technicians, dressed in stark uniforms, monitoring babies in a scientifically designed, structured, and controlled environment. There will be shelves of bins, each labeled with the developmentally appropriate age and the brain growth designed to be stimulated by the items in the bin. The ECE Specialist will check the notes on each baby or toddler and pull out the appropriate activity or place the child in the “correct” environment in order to make sure that their brains receive the right stimulation at the right time. All of the 0-3 babies would be together, separate from all of the pre-school children, separate from the elementary school children who would continue to be sub-divided into their respective age groups…
My ECE Nightmare is a monoculture world, where babies are raised in uniformity, and the lack of diversity weakens the whole.
I already see this in the work I do at the daycare. Specialists come to the daycare from time to time, to work with a specific child or to do an overall daycare assessment. They talk to the children in soft, patient tones, gently trying to convince the kids that it is best to use your words even as one kid bashes another over the head with a block. I don’t know about you, but when someone is trying to hit me in the head, I don’t try to reason with them by using my words. No, I first defend myself, often using verbal volubility and sometimes adding physical action if necessary to protect myself.
Don’t get me wrong, specialists are great. They do much needed work with children in ways that ECE caretakers/educators can’t because of the holistic nature of the work we do. We are with the children day-in and day-out. What they need to learn from us is how relationships work, how community works, and they learn that by example. The children need to see us get angry, frustrated, sad, silly, irritated, and so on. How else will they learn how to handle their own emotions? They need to see us as we relate to each other, as we relate to other children, and as we relate to them.
Children also need to see other children relating to each other. Older children dealing with younger children show the youngest where they are going, how to get there, and some of the things they will learn along the way. Age stratification of children disrupts this continuity. We already have too much age stratification in our society; The Continuum Concept by and the brain research done by Dr. Bruce Perry and others show that we need to start re-integrating our communities if we want to optimize the brain growth of our babies. So, my fear is that requiring ECE caretaker/educators to have higher academic degrees will lead to Specialists raising our children and, thus, to my monoculture nightmare.
Higher education, at least at this point in time, teaches us to follow instructions, fill in the proper blanks, and jump through all of the right hoops in order to be awarded a degree. Academia has become isolated from the real world, lost behind the scientific model. Objective observation and careful manipulation of variables is not anything like the real world. The scientific model is an amazingly useful tool and we owe much to this way of thinking; however, it is very important that we do not forget that it is but one tool among many in a world of amazing complexity and diversity.
Raising babies and toddlers is messy, chaotic work. You often have to follow your instincts in order to find the path that works for this particular child at this particular time with this particular issue. You have to be creative. You have to be willing to take risks. You have to be open to thinking outside the box.
Of course, you can only think outside of the box once you know what the box is and how it works. Because of this, 0-5 caretaker/educators should have a solid grounding in child development, basic psychology, general sociology, and some anthropology. They also should have experience with music and gardening, with dance and animals, with singing and art and other forms of creative innovation. I am not anti-education, I just think that ECE workers should have more than formal education as a professional base. ECE workers should be able to integrate both the emotional-creative-intuitive-right and the logical-linear-literal-left halves of their brains and bring those skills to the work they do with babies and young children.
Formal, higher education should only be one component in developing skilled 0-5 caretaker/educators. My monoculture nightmare would be greatly eased knowing that the path to becoming a professional pre-K caretaker/educator included flexibility, creativity, and diversity, in addition to formal education.
Resources:
The ChildTrauma Academy/Dr. Bruce Perry
http://www.childtrauma.org/
The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff
The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff
