EARLY CHILD EDUCATION

EARLY CHILD EDUCATION
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(18th April, 2012)
Early Child Education
Although basic education is considered the work of the school, the family`s role in this process has also come to be appreciated. For success in the upbringing of children to be realized, the essential family-school partnerships will have to be formed. The strength of school family partnerships is in large part determined by both structural and psychological variables. (Structure refers not only to how well the roads leading families into schools are paved e.g. frequency and quality of interactions or roles for families in schools, but also macro systematic influences exerting pressure on schools, families and communities) (Blake & Izumi-Taylor, 2010).
With the current emergence of a variety of approaches to early childhood education programs, some of which take place outside the formal classroom setting, public school people are now faced with a new set of issues concerning their roles and responsibilities. They have always recognized that non-public agencies such as church related and private schools are centers for education. However, they have never been faced before at least to the extent that they currently are with rival public and semi public agencies heavily engaged in the business of education (Feinstein, et al. 2008).
"School people" used to assume that the years before 5 did not belong to them and therefore worried little about private or welfare-type day care or nursery schools. Now however, early childhood education is recognized as being a significant time to begin formal instruction and to provide comprehensive services to children whose families are economically unable to do so. as a result, parents not only seek for earlier education for their children but also some responsible, organized, institutional role in such education. This comes sharply into focus in the individual public school. Consequently, the principal is faced with the dilemma: whom does he serve? What is his constituency? How does he respond to the pressure of early childhood education? (Feinstein, et al. 2008).
Until as recently as half a dozen years ago, administrators teachers and professors of education, held the commonly accepted view that the role of the parents in public education was: 1) to drop their children at the door o the school, and 2) to vote for the bond issue. Parents were of course welcome to observe or become active in the PTA or even on occasion serve as chaperons on a field trip. No one argued seriously that parents or parent organizations connected to individual schools had any decision-making role to play except to be voters in those places where boards are elected or to be clients. Yet, in the nursery school movement reaching back as far as the 1930`s, if not before, consistent and well organized efforts had been made to develop cooperative nursery schools in which parents performed many critical roles as decision makers, staff volunteers, and learners about child development. The abrupt shift came about when the child entered public school.
For most parents however, no pre-school education of any sort was available, so that their only role was that of a silent partner. They were told rather emphatically by school people that it was neither wise nor desirable for them to attempt to teach their own children. Teaching belonged to the teacher and it was separate and distinct from child rearing. Woe to the parent who proudly told the first grade teacher that she had taught her child to read (Patrikakou, 2005).
This separation of home and school, child rearing and education, was to some degree a natural outgrowth of the old theory of learning and development that placed heavy emphasis on maturation and innate biology of the child, on a fixed view of intelligence and development, rather than the current view of both cognitive and emotional development. This current view recognizes the significance and importance of experience in the home as well as in the neighborhood as being effective pre-cursors of formal schooling. Formerly, teachers were well aware that children came into their classrooms with different expressed capabilities to learn and were also well aware that home conditions often influenced the child`s attitude towards learning. Nevertheless, the prevailing attitude was that education should take place within the school, under the direction and control of the professional (Little, & Brigham, 1973).
With Head Start, (a program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services) life began to change. Our concerns for "compensatory education," beginning about 1964, emphasized our changing understanding about the nature of learning and development. It also presented to the general public the work of such key psychologists as Hunt, Bruner, Bloom, and Piaget, who indicated how important the early years were for intellectual growth. Head start and other compensatory education programs began to concern themselves with family involvement as soon as it became understood that the home was a potent influence on the child (Patrikakou, 2005).
These early attempts to involve the family in childhood education were based on the idea that if the child were doing poorly, the fault lay at home. Thus we have the interesting paradox that up until the 1960`s, "school people" had said to parents, both rich and poor, that responsibility for education rested on the professional in the classroom (Feinstein, et al. 2008). As it became clear that many children were not learning, particularly the children of the poor and the minority groups, responsibility was shifted, and blame was assigned to the years before school and to the home as an inadequate learning environment. Parent involvement and parent education were designed to educate parents to deal with their children in a way that professionals thought would enhance growth. These efforts were based on a deprivation theory in which the home was seen as inadequate either because of emotional instability, lack of consistent treatment, lack of materials or lack of teaching skill on the part of the family and in particular, the parents, all of which limit the children in reaching their potential (Gordon, 1972).
As professionals began to interact with parents in Head Start, Follow Through, and various research projects, educators realized that while these homes did indeed lack the characteristics associated with good learning environments, so did the schools. It was discovered that in order to create an effective learning environment, a new alignment and a new relationship had to bring about between the home and the school-one in which each would move toward recognizing the strengths as well as the weaknesses of the other. This new relationship would replace the assignment of blame to one institution or the other and bri...