Benefits of early childhood education by Fung Lan Yong
Benefits
of early childhood education
By
Fung Lan Yong
Daily
Express Sabah Published on: Monday, March 02, 2015
In
his opening address of the 2009 Malaysian International ECEC Conference, Prime
Minister YAB Dato’ Sri Mohd Najib Tun Abdul Razak said, “Every child is
precious and children are assets to our society. They are the most valuable
resource of the nation. I believe that developing a nation and its people
begins with early childhood education. While it is the duty of parents to
ensure a child has the opportunities to develop, it is also the government’s
responsibility to help parents bring the potential to fruition. In developing a
child’s potential, we are in reality developing the human capital of the child
and of the nation.
In carrying out this task, we are enabling the child to grow holistically so that the child is equipped with the abilities, knowledge and skills to become a productive member of the nation.”
Snapping synapses in early childhood
Early childhood education plays an important role in the neurological development of young children.
Researchers believe that neurological development greatly depends on learning that occurs during the earliest years of life and that a young child’s brain needs certain types of stimulation to develop normally.
Such stimulation makes certain types of learning possible when the child begins school.
It also augments the child’s neural pathways that are responsible for social, emotional and intellectual development.
Early childhood education therefore capitalises on a vast array of kinaesthetic, tactile, auditory and olfactory activities that stimulate a child’s brain to develop to its full potential.
Growing need for quality child care
With more and more women entering the workplace, the number of children requiring early childhood education also increases.
As many women prefer to have an income nowadays, their children will have to spend their critical early years in day care. Early childhood education relieves working mothers by offering an appropriate learning environment for young children to enjoy a quality childcare experience that fulfils their developmental and socio-emotional needs.
Besides working mothers, the number of single parents in Malaysia is also increasing.
Children from single-parent families tend to be more vulnerable than those living with both parents as they may receive less parental attention and other positive, stimulating experiences.
Early childhood education will be particularly beneficial for children from single-parent families as it can increase the parents’ expectations of their children’s performance.
Further, children from single-parent families are at a greater risk of child neglect; early childhood education ensures that they will receive warm and sensitive care as well as a good start in life.
Many young children from rural and remote areas tend to live in impoverished environments characterised by poverty, inadequate healthcare, poor infrastructure and illiteracy.
Early childhood education can give children from disadvantaged backgrounds a head start by providing a developmentally appropriate learning environment that stimulates their cognitive, verbal and social development.
It also empowers the rural community by increasing parental knowledge and involvement in child development as well as providing support services related to parenting practices, job training and counselling.
Currently, many young children do not receive any professional childcare or preschool education because early childhood programs are either too costly or unavailable.
Moreover, families with limited income are less likely or unable to enrol their children in early childhood programs, while those who can afford it may find the services barely adequate or of low quality.
Additionally, many childcare facilities do not provide the kind of quality care needed to enhance children’s social competence and readiness for school as they tend to have large classes taught by teachers with limited early childhood qualifications.
At present, a majority of the early childhood teachers and childcare providers in Malaysia are SPM holders who still need pre-service training to improve their level of professionalism.
Fosters greater school readiness
Early childhood education equips young children with the fundamental knowledge and skills needed for successful school adjustment and adult competence later on.
It ensures that young children will enter school healthy and ready to succeed. Moreover, school-based assessment should be conducted as early as preschool in order to be comprehensive, valid and reliable.
Children who receive early childhood education will have greater readiness to learn in terms of physical wellbeing, psychomotor skills, social competence and language ability.
They will experience less stress and anxiety because early childhood education prepares them for the upcoming school year, ensuring a smooth transition to school life.
Further, it allows parents and teachers to find out the child’s expectations and specific challenges in order to prepare him or her for independent learning.
In brief, early childhood education serves as a window of opportunity for young children to learn to express their needs, become more proficient readers and establish more secure relationships with significant others.
Early childhood education strives to provide young children with quality age-appropriate experiences and care that have a positive impact on their school achievement and life.
Access to high quality childhood education ensures that young children’s intellectual, language and social needs are adequately met in order to increase their school readiness and maximize their learning potential.
Early childhood education capitalizes on the child’s crucial stage of life because physical and mental growth progresses very rapidly during this time.
Moreover, the learning capabilities of humans are more intense during the preschool years. Hence, this is a period when young children particularly need high quality personal care and learning experiences to boost their cognitive and psychosocial development.
Provides an individualised, responsive and stimulating environment
Early childhood education aims to provide an individualized, responsive and stimulating environment that accommodates to the learning style preferences and developmental needs of young children.
It provides many opportunities for children to interact with peers and adult figures (teachers and parents) without exerting too much pressure on them.
Further, it ensures that all learning activities are age-appropriate and interesting so that children are motivated to spend part of their day at school.
Children with special needs can benefit immensely from early childhood education as it enables those who are physically, emotionally or intellectual challenged to be tested and diagnosed early in order to receive appropriate instruction.
Through early childhood education, children with special needs will acquire the fundamental academic and social skills needed for school success; early childhood education increases their chances to attend regular classes later on while boosting their confidence and self-esteem.
Additionally, early childhood education makes parents more aware that they are the primary caregivers who have a tremendous influence on their child’s learning experience and education during the first few years.
Early childhood education encourages parents to show greater interest in their child’s learning by contributing to child-care arrangements, such as family babysitting or a parent-toddler group, which usually embed responsive and stimulating activities that can foster a positive relationship between parent and child.
Enhances speech, language and literacy
Speech is one of the most important aspects of childhood as it has a long-term impact on a child’s development.
Early childhood education strives to enhance young children’s language and literacy by providing a socially and culturally appropriate environment for young children to learn in progressive manner, beginning with the names of familiar people and objects around them, followed by action words; after that, they can proceed to learning the words that describe their world.
Early childhood education ensures that caregivers spend sufficient time communicating with or reading to each child in order to enhance his or her speech development.
Further, early childhood education incorporates culturally, socially and age-appropriate techniques to help young children develop their language and literacy skills by incorporating the presence, time, words, print and intention.
Language and literacy skills learning is a social endeavour for young children; hence, early childhood education ensures that young learners enjoy an array of meaningful interactions, experiences and activities that can augment their speaking, listening, reading and writing skills in a concurrent manner.
Finally, early childhood education ensures that language and literacy acquisition occurs naturally during play and simple everyday experiences as well as via planned instruction.
It also capitalises on the children’s home language and culture to foster language and literacy via memorable classroom experiences that accommodate language and cultural differences.
Incorporates functional, constructive and pretend play
Early childhood education employs functional play to enhance young children’s psychomotor skills through the use of educational toys and other objects.
Functional play encourages young children to use their sight, hearing, vision, taste and smell in order to learn about the world.
Young children tend to be fascinated by the bright colours of objects, the sounds they make, their feel and textures or their exotic smells.
Further, functional play often turns young children into happy learners as it produces the pure sensory delights that they can derive from simple objects.
Besides sensory stimulation, the repetitive activities of functional play promote pre-literacy, creativity, individuality, decision making and problem solving skills.
Besides functional play, early childhood education employs constructive play to help young children develop vocabulary skills through social interactions with caregivers and peers.
It provides opportunities for young children to make connections between spoken and written words, besides acquiring new vocabulary and applying it in different situations.
Besides vocabulary, constructive play enhances young children’s mathematics skills, including quantity, measurement, weight, height, size and other concepts that involve mathematical language and numeracy.
They also learn about shapes, sorting, matching, seriation and classification.
Further early childhood education uses pretend play (dramatic or imaginary) to encourage young children to experiment with various social and emotional roles. They learn how to take turns, share responsibility and engage in creative problem solving.
When they pretend to be different characters, they learn the moral concept of empathy or being in someone else’s shoes.
Further, pretend play promotes language and literacy as it enables young children to realise the power of language.
Additionally, they learn how to re-enact a story or organise a play, allowing them to see the relationship between spoken and written language.
Finally, pretend play provides young children with a variety of challenges, encouraging them to develop the cognitive, psychomotor and socio-emotional skills that are essential for academic achievement and personal growth.
Optimises the early years
The early years play a crucial role in children’s future physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development.
Optimizing the early years of children’s lives is an important investment that ensures future success of a country.
esearch indicates that much of what an individual needs for professional and personal success is established in the early years during which he or she develops the cognitive skills needed for reading, mathematics, science and academics.
It is also during this period that he or she develops character skills, gross-motor skills and executive functioning skills needed for a fulfilling adult life.
Early childhood education not only benefits the individual but also has significant socioeconomic impact on society.
By investing in young children, the government can save money in the long run, for instance, less expenditure will be incurred on solving academic and social problems as early childhood education promotes academic achievement, which in turn helps reduce dropout, unemployment and crime rates in the long run.
Further, early childhood education results in healthier lifestyles and greater work productivity in adult life as many health and work related attitudes are rooted in early childhood experiences.
By supporting early childhood education, the government is investing in the future, that is, young children who will become the country’s future agents of innovation and change who are capable of overcoming the nine challenges of Vision 2020.
Early childhood education in Malaysia should offer curricula that are designed to meet the needs of a multicultural society, characterised by diversity, integration and respect for different cultures. It should teach young children to honour diversity and to acknowledge it as desirable by encouraging them to work in mixed groupings and using materials that represent realistic linguistic, cultural and social practices of the community.
It should also inculcate greater awareness of the children’s own cultural identity and the cultures of others, which in turn boosts their self-esteem and makes them more appreciative of the concepts of unity in diversity, Vision 2020 and 1Malaysia.
Additionally, several critical issues in early childhood education in Malaysia need to be addressed. First, to become a global player with world-class status, the country needs to ensure that its citizens receive a multilingual and progressive education starting from early childhood; hence, it is important that early childhood providers are adequately trained and proficient in more than one language, especially English.
Second, many stakeholders in Malaysia tend to be academically-oriented; hence, they need to acknowledge that early childhood education does not attempt to produce super-kids or learning robots; instead, it usually integrates play and other extracurricular activities that promote discovery learning, critical thinking, creativity and innovative problem solving.
Finally, the government and private sector should work together in overcoming the challenges and constraints of early childhood education in Malaysia.
A proper plan of action is urgently needed to ensure that early childhood education will be accessible to as many children as possible as it provides a healthy foundation for their learning and nation-building. To become more progressive, the country needs to focus on the fundamentals of education first, one of which is equal access to early childhood education that reflects its cultural diversity and nationhood values.
Finally, the country also needs human capital, which calls for the development of competent citizens, starting from preschool.
Since early childhood education plays a crucial role in developing the human capital needed for the future success of the nation, the government and private sector should strive to implement early childhood programs that advocate for multiculturalism, equity and inclusion in order to develop a pool of human capital that is resilient and innovative.
In carrying out this task, we are enabling the child to grow holistically so that the child is equipped with the abilities, knowledge and skills to become a productive member of the nation.”
Snapping synapses in early childhood
Early childhood education plays an important role in the neurological development of young children.
Researchers believe that neurological development greatly depends on learning that occurs during the earliest years of life and that a young child’s brain needs certain types of stimulation to develop normally.
Such stimulation makes certain types of learning possible when the child begins school.
It also augments the child’s neural pathways that are responsible for social, emotional and intellectual development.
Early childhood education therefore capitalises on a vast array of kinaesthetic, tactile, auditory and olfactory activities that stimulate a child’s brain to develop to its full potential.
Growing need for quality child care
With more and more women entering the workplace, the number of children requiring early childhood education also increases.
As many women prefer to have an income nowadays, their children will have to spend their critical early years in day care. Early childhood education relieves working mothers by offering an appropriate learning environment for young children to enjoy a quality childcare experience that fulfils their developmental and socio-emotional needs.
Besides working mothers, the number of single parents in Malaysia is also increasing.
Children from single-parent families tend to be more vulnerable than those living with both parents as they may receive less parental attention and other positive, stimulating experiences.
Early childhood education will be particularly beneficial for children from single-parent families as it can increase the parents’ expectations of their children’s performance.
Further, children from single-parent families are at a greater risk of child neglect; early childhood education ensures that they will receive warm and sensitive care as well as a good start in life.
Many young children from rural and remote areas tend to live in impoverished environments characterised by poverty, inadequate healthcare, poor infrastructure and illiteracy.
Early childhood education can give children from disadvantaged backgrounds a head start by providing a developmentally appropriate learning environment that stimulates their cognitive, verbal and social development.
It also empowers the rural community by increasing parental knowledge and involvement in child development as well as providing support services related to parenting practices, job training and counselling.
Currently, many young children do not receive any professional childcare or preschool education because early childhood programs are either too costly or unavailable.
Moreover, families with limited income are less likely or unable to enrol their children in early childhood programs, while those who can afford it may find the services barely adequate or of low quality.
Additionally, many childcare facilities do not provide the kind of quality care needed to enhance children’s social competence and readiness for school as they tend to have large classes taught by teachers with limited early childhood qualifications.
At present, a majority of the early childhood teachers and childcare providers in Malaysia are SPM holders who still need pre-service training to improve their level of professionalism.
Fosters greater school readiness
Early childhood education equips young children with the fundamental knowledge and skills needed for successful school adjustment and adult competence later on.
It ensures that young children will enter school healthy and ready to succeed. Moreover, school-based assessment should be conducted as early as preschool in order to be comprehensive, valid and reliable.
Children who receive early childhood education will have greater readiness to learn in terms of physical wellbeing, psychomotor skills, social competence and language ability.
They will experience less stress and anxiety because early childhood education prepares them for the upcoming school year, ensuring a smooth transition to school life.
Further, it allows parents and teachers to find out the child’s expectations and specific challenges in order to prepare him or her for independent learning.
In brief, early childhood education serves as a window of opportunity for young children to learn to express their needs, become more proficient readers and establish more secure relationships with significant others.
Early childhood education strives to provide young children with quality age-appropriate experiences and care that have a positive impact on their school achievement and life.
Access to high quality childhood education ensures that young children’s intellectual, language and social needs are adequately met in order to increase their school readiness and maximize their learning potential.
Early childhood education capitalizes on the child’s crucial stage of life because physical and mental growth progresses very rapidly during this time.
Moreover, the learning capabilities of humans are more intense during the preschool years. Hence, this is a period when young children particularly need high quality personal care and learning experiences to boost their cognitive and psychosocial development.
Provides an individualised, responsive and stimulating environment
Early childhood education aims to provide an individualized, responsive and stimulating environment that accommodates to the learning style preferences and developmental needs of young children.
It provides many opportunities for children to interact with peers and adult figures (teachers and parents) without exerting too much pressure on them.
Further, it ensures that all learning activities are age-appropriate and interesting so that children are motivated to spend part of their day at school.
Children with special needs can benefit immensely from early childhood education as it enables those who are physically, emotionally or intellectual challenged to be tested and diagnosed early in order to receive appropriate instruction.
Through early childhood education, children with special needs will acquire the fundamental academic and social skills needed for school success; early childhood education increases their chances to attend regular classes later on while boosting their confidence and self-esteem.
Additionally, early childhood education makes parents more aware that they are the primary caregivers who have a tremendous influence on their child’s learning experience and education during the first few years.
Early childhood education encourages parents to show greater interest in their child’s learning by contributing to child-care arrangements, such as family babysitting or a parent-toddler group, which usually embed responsive and stimulating activities that can foster a positive relationship between parent and child.
Enhances speech, language and literacy
Speech is one of the most important aspects of childhood as it has a long-term impact on a child’s development.
Early childhood education strives to enhance young children’s language and literacy by providing a socially and culturally appropriate environment for young children to learn in progressive manner, beginning with the names of familiar people and objects around them, followed by action words; after that, they can proceed to learning the words that describe their world.
Early childhood education ensures that caregivers spend sufficient time communicating with or reading to each child in order to enhance his or her speech development.
Further, early childhood education incorporates culturally, socially and age-appropriate techniques to help young children develop their language and literacy skills by incorporating the presence, time, words, print and intention.
Language and literacy skills learning is a social endeavour for young children; hence, early childhood education ensures that young learners enjoy an array of meaningful interactions, experiences and activities that can augment their speaking, listening, reading and writing skills in a concurrent manner.
Finally, early childhood education ensures that language and literacy acquisition occurs naturally during play and simple everyday experiences as well as via planned instruction.
It also capitalises on the children’s home language and culture to foster language and literacy via memorable classroom experiences that accommodate language and cultural differences.
Incorporates functional, constructive and pretend play
Early childhood education employs functional play to enhance young children’s psychomotor skills through the use of educational toys and other objects.
Functional play encourages young children to use their sight, hearing, vision, taste and smell in order to learn about the world.
Young children tend to be fascinated by the bright colours of objects, the sounds they make, their feel and textures or their exotic smells.
Further, functional play often turns young children into happy learners as it produces the pure sensory delights that they can derive from simple objects.
Besides sensory stimulation, the repetitive activities of functional play promote pre-literacy, creativity, individuality, decision making and problem solving skills.
Besides functional play, early childhood education employs constructive play to help young children develop vocabulary skills through social interactions with caregivers and peers.
It provides opportunities for young children to make connections between spoken and written words, besides acquiring new vocabulary and applying it in different situations.
Besides vocabulary, constructive play enhances young children’s mathematics skills, including quantity, measurement, weight, height, size and other concepts that involve mathematical language and numeracy.
They also learn about shapes, sorting, matching, seriation and classification.
Further early childhood education uses pretend play (dramatic or imaginary) to encourage young children to experiment with various social and emotional roles. They learn how to take turns, share responsibility and engage in creative problem solving.
When they pretend to be different characters, they learn the moral concept of empathy or being in someone else’s shoes.
Further, pretend play promotes language and literacy as it enables young children to realise the power of language.
Additionally, they learn how to re-enact a story or organise a play, allowing them to see the relationship between spoken and written language.
Finally, pretend play provides young children with a variety of challenges, encouraging them to develop the cognitive, psychomotor and socio-emotional skills that are essential for academic achievement and personal growth.
Optimises the early years
The early years play a crucial role in children’s future physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development.
Optimizing the early years of children’s lives is an important investment that ensures future success of a country.
esearch indicates that much of what an individual needs for professional and personal success is established in the early years during which he or she develops the cognitive skills needed for reading, mathematics, science and academics.
It is also during this period that he or she develops character skills, gross-motor skills and executive functioning skills needed for a fulfilling adult life.
Early childhood education not only benefits the individual but also has significant socioeconomic impact on society.
By investing in young children, the government can save money in the long run, for instance, less expenditure will be incurred on solving academic and social problems as early childhood education promotes academic achievement, which in turn helps reduce dropout, unemployment and crime rates in the long run.
Further, early childhood education results in healthier lifestyles and greater work productivity in adult life as many health and work related attitudes are rooted in early childhood experiences.
By supporting early childhood education, the government is investing in the future, that is, young children who will become the country’s future agents of innovation and change who are capable of overcoming the nine challenges of Vision 2020.
Early childhood education in Malaysia should offer curricula that are designed to meet the needs of a multicultural society, characterised by diversity, integration and respect for different cultures. It should teach young children to honour diversity and to acknowledge it as desirable by encouraging them to work in mixed groupings and using materials that represent realistic linguistic, cultural and social practices of the community.
It should also inculcate greater awareness of the children’s own cultural identity and the cultures of others, which in turn boosts their self-esteem and makes them more appreciative of the concepts of unity in diversity, Vision 2020 and 1Malaysia.
Additionally, several critical issues in early childhood education in Malaysia need to be addressed. First, to become a global player with world-class status, the country needs to ensure that its citizens receive a multilingual and progressive education starting from early childhood; hence, it is important that early childhood providers are adequately trained and proficient in more than one language, especially English.
Second, many stakeholders in Malaysia tend to be academically-oriented; hence, they need to acknowledge that early childhood education does not attempt to produce super-kids or learning robots; instead, it usually integrates play and other extracurricular activities that promote discovery learning, critical thinking, creativity and innovative problem solving.
Finally, the government and private sector should work together in overcoming the challenges and constraints of early childhood education in Malaysia.
A proper plan of action is urgently needed to ensure that early childhood education will be accessible to as many children as possible as it provides a healthy foundation for their learning and nation-building. To become more progressive, the country needs to focus on the fundamentals of education first, one of which is equal access to early childhood education that reflects its cultural diversity and nationhood values.
Finally, the country also needs human capital, which calls for the development of competent citizens, starting from preschool.
Since early childhood education plays a crucial role in developing the human capital needed for the future success of the nation, the government and private sector should strive to implement early childhood programs that advocate for multiculturalism, equity and inclusion in order to develop a pool of human capital that is resilient and innovative.
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