Great media prominence is being given to the Government's early childhood policy, with Penelope Leach's and Oxford University's recent research finding that, all other factors being equal, young children will develop most healthily when raised in a stable, unhurried way by their own parents in a loving family environment (News, 6 October). Critics of the fashionable policy of driving mothers back into the workforce at any cost have argued for years that there is a direct causal relationship between the Government's early education policies and the behavioural and social malaise that is rapidly becoming the norm in today's schooling system.
Great media prominence is being given to the Government's early childhood policy, with Penelope Leach's and Oxford University's recent research finding that, all other factors being equal, young children will develop most healthily when raised in a stable, unhurried way by their own parents in a loving family environment (News, 6 October).
Critics of the fashionable policy of driving mothers back into the workforce at any cost have argued for years that there is a direct causal relationship between the Government's early education policies and the behavioural and social malaise that is rapidly becoming the norm in today's schooling system.
Steiner and Montessori educational approaches, by contrast, produce excellent behavioural and social outcomes, with strong foundations for formal learning -and with little, if any, of the drawbacks of premature, over-formalised and cognitively one-sided mainstream education. They do so in large part because they are faithful to the common-sense findings of this research.
Those committed to the well-being of the nation's children wait to see if the Government takes any notice.
Dr Richard House, Research Centre for Therapeutic Education, Roehampton University
