Does “Early Education” Come Way Too Late?

“Does “Early Education” Come Way Too Late?”, Season 5, Episode 42, August 5, 2016 @ 6:30pm by Freakonomics http://freakonomics.com/podcast/early-education-come-way-late/

The podcast conveys the important issue of educating child at home involving parents as  main educators. The title of the podcast questions the audience about early education period and gives opportunity to think about the terms of educating child. But it does not specify the environment and site, keeping a kind of mystery. A short description of the podcast raises several issues concerning the research studies done by a scholar (D. Suskind) and economists (P. Glewwe and A. Park). Further on, the podcast introduces the research studies and explains conclusions which I, being a parent myself, find them to be informative with a little persuasion in sense.

The podcast justifies the arguments with fruitful research evidences and facts which involved the case study in poor rural area, Gansu (China), high technology to record the details of parent – baby child communication at home.

 

The first issue the podcast addresses is supply and demand sides of acquisition in education. Educators (the supply side) are being well-prepared for giving the best knowledge at school in 3-4 hours a day. Parents, being an important educational resource for children in home environment, are non-actively involved in children’s education. Children (the demand side) are being struggling to perform better at school with parents’ weak help because illiterate parents have “less vocabulary and far less complex vocabulary”, i.e. make poor quality input of language.

The second thing the podcast strives to explain is that education starts from the infant ages. “When we talk about learning …, we think too much about cognitive skills and not too much about non-cognitive skills”. It means that emotional rapport and psychological approach should be taken into better consideration by educators and parents from early childhood.

 

It was interesting to listen to the podcast as it recollects that parent-child conversation is “highest perform of the language acquisition” and it is necessary to teach parents to communicate effectively with children in a critical period. I like the idea of the Parent Academy and 3T model (Tuning, Talking, Take Turns) for improving parent-child collaboration as well as saying “teacher-parent is the better mantra for education”.

In general, the podcast has impacted positively to my previous knowledge about parent involvement and warned me not to forget about non-cognitive approach in educating child. I would highly recommend to listen to this podcast as it brings the initial sense of educating children at home and understand that child’s academic success lies in good parent involvement, i.e. hard work and sacrifice from parents in early childhood. 

 

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