Geof Brown
IF I was building a palatial house and told the architects and engineers not to waste time on the foundations but just give me a strong, handsome superstructure, you would call me a mad-man. Rightly so.
But here we are, building a nation, paying slap-dash, and belated attention to the foundation but gilding the superstructure while distracted by the crumbling here and there as we try to shore up. We are mad.
Last week in Ocho Rios, the Third Caribbean Early Child-hood Conference received a strong wake-up dose of empirical reality re the significance of the Early Childhood foundation in nation-building. It was not the conference members who needed the call. It is all of us. The conferees represented a wide cross-section of Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) from across the Caribbean. Jamaica, Grenada, Barbados, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Belize, Netherlands Antilles, Guyana, Antigua, Montserrat, St. Lucia (in no particular order of ranking). But Canada was there too and it was a Canadian, Dr. J. Fraser Mustard of Toronto whose keynote address gave punch and point to the wake-up call. More of this later.
Efforts
Although our own Minister of Education, Hon. Burchell White-man, was strongly involved in the conference and of course our indefatigable Special Envoy for Children Ambassador Marjorie Taylor, there were only two other ministers from the Caribbean despite the excellent efforts of the organising committee. One wonders if our political leaders in the Caribbean understand what real foundation-building is about. Never mind that CARICOM is committed to the ECCO concept and mandated the gathering.
Professor J. Fraser Mustard enlightened not with fine rhetoric (excellent speaker though he was) but with solid research evidence linking the wealth and prosperity of nations to the care and development of the early childhood years. In short, he made the case based on extensive multi-disciplinary research, that economic wealth is directly linked to the quality of Early Childhood Care and Development. From this wealth of research in Social, Biological and Educa-tional dynamics, a clear picture emerges.
In his preface to the book "Developmental Health and the Wealth of Nations" an edited collection of the relevant research, Professor Mus-tard observes "that the work of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR) "establishes that the gradients in health behaviour and cognitive functions such as mathematics and literacy are largely set in early life... and that the conditions of early life influencing brain development... set coping skills for life." Dr. Mustard quotes Nobel Prize winner, Robert Fogel, an economic historian who "emphasised that the conditions of early childhood set health risks for adult life and have a major effect on economic growth" when he gave the Nobel Prize lecture.
And yet as nations we set great store by fiddling with the economic super-structure like mad men, ignoring the importance of the human resource foundation in the quality of our ECCD. As Professor Mustard put it, "the quality of a population including its psychological well-being and its capacity for production and intelligent consumerism, is an important factor in economic growth. "Often," he continues, "the narrowly based theories of economists do not embrace the reciprocating effects of economies on the social environment, and in turn, those ... effects on human development over the life cycle."
It is what happens at the beginning of the life cycle in brain development and learning pathways which the research collected demonstrates "sets coping skills for life.." What is significant is that this early development of coping skills is not simply a function of poverty or wealth of individuals. A parallel development study of monkeys showed that monkeys that were licked more often (equal more loving care) were "better adjusted" than those who were licked less often. In the case of humans, longitudinal studies such as the famous High Scope study tracing children's progress from childhood to adulthood, revealed clear correlations between the quality of early childhood care and later anti-social, criminal and violent behaviour.
Quality
We can hardly take consolation in this society as we see all around us the extent of crime and violence especially being committed by our young adults and reflect on the long neglect of the foundation while we fiddled with the superstructure (and still do to a great extent). Fortunately both the Government and the Opposition are united in their appreciation of the need for drastically improving the quality of Early Childhood Development. But that is not enough. Minister Whiteman promised greater emphasis in this area at the conference. His Green Paper had not been too assuring re ECCD: the White Paper will need to make amends.
Readers will appreciate that an article such as this is not even an introduction to the subject: We need to inform ourselves properly, The Jamaica Early Childhood Association under chair Keith Brown, which hosted the Conference, the Caribbean Child Development Centre of UWI whose head Janet Brown was Programme Chair, the Ministry of Education whose Chief Education Officer was chairman of the organising committee, Mrs Haseley-Allen, Ministry of Education ECCD head, Margaret St. Juste and her team who conducted this exercise and UNICEF which is signal in ECCD, are all sources for our further information.
The Plan of Action which emerged from the Conference should be required reading for all who can think. Last word: the World Bank has now made ECCD a priority for funding third world development. That bespeaks!
Geof Brown is an HRD consultant who lectures part-time at the UWI, Mona.
