1. Is early education as early as possible?
There is a trend in early education, that is, the earlier it starts, the better. As a result, advanced education and advanced intellectual development have emerged that are arbitrarily beyond children's age. Children begin to learn to read and calculate arithmetic soon after birth, so that four or five-year-old children can learn arithmetic and Chinese textbooks in primary schools. Some even advocate that the problems to be solved in primary schools should be advanced to three years old, such as "literacy at 0 years old, literacy at 3 years old" and so on. This is a typical quick success.
I always adhere to the understanding that children develop quite rapidly from 0 to 6 years old; But there are conditions to promote its development. Gesell, a famous American psychologist, believes that there are two factors that dominate children's psychological development, one is maturity and the other is learning. Of these two factors, he emphasized the importance of maturity. He believes that children's psychological development is a process in which children's behaviors (or psychological patterns) appear in a certain order under the influence of the environment. This order is closely related to maturity. He has a famous experiment, that is, the experiment of twins climbing stairs. In this experiment, one of the twins was asked to do 10 minutes of ladder climbing training every day from the 48th week for 6 weeks. By the 52nd week, he had been able to climb 5 stairs skillfully. During this period, the other twin started training at 53 weeks instead of climbing the stairs first, but two weeks later, the twin was able to climb to the top of the stairs without help from others. From this, gesell came to the conclusion that there is no way to learn when you are immature, and learning will only promote maturity. This experiment shows that children's growth is restricted by physiological and psychological maturity mechanisms. Manual training in advance is not necessarily necessary. Not only is it unnecessary, but it will also cause physical and psychological burden to children. If it is not good, it may also affect children's interest in learning and produce rebellious psychology.
Some parents educate and train their children in advance, hoping that their children can gain an advantage in the competition of learning after entering primary school. Early education and training may have some advantages in a certain period of time, but this advantage is not naturally formed, that is, there are some advantages, which are probably only temporary advantages and may not last forever. An experiment done by the University of North Carolina in the United States is very illustrative. Five children of 17 were divided into two groups, one group started early education from 3 months, and the other group did not. And then every 15 months. They found that the IQ of children who received early education was higher than 15 on average. However, it cannot be concluded that this advantage can be maintained all the time. Because some children with this advantage gradually lose this advantage when they enter the fourth grade of primary school, and another group of children who are educated step by step by their parents usually have caught up.
The above two experiments tell us that it is not necessarily a beneficial thing to carry out advanced education and training at will. People who carry out advanced education and training think that they produce talents early and produce high-level talents. In fact, this is just a good wish. This is a speculation, but it has not been scientifically confirmed. Regjes, a famous psychologist in the former Soviet Union, said: "The development of children beyond their own age cannot provide a reliable basis for judging the possibility of their future development, nor does it rule out the possibility of missing early development but leaping forward later."
Preschool stage is a critical period for children's physical and mental development, so we should carry out necessary education and training in time, but don't pay attention to being ahead of others. Higher education, from the short-term effect, may be exciting; But the final result may not be equally satisfactory. Rousseau, a French thinker and educator, said: "It is natural to hope that children will look like children before they reach adulthood. If we disturb this order, some fruits will be premature. They will not be full, nor sweet, and will soon rot. In other words, we will train some young doctors and older children. " I'm afraid no parents want their children to be "precocious fruits" that are neither full nor sweet!
Therefore, early education is not as early as possible, and early education should be gradual.
Second, early education and advanced intellectual development
The development of children and adolescents is a long-term process. In this process, early science education is necessary and important. However, this kind of scientific early education should be especially cautious, especially in the content of education, and we should not mistake early education for intellectual development, or even advanced intellectual development.
We should understand that people's qualities in all aspects are not isolated, and all aspects are interrelated, influenced, restricted, promoted and supplemented. Only by harmonious development can all aspects of quality achieve comprehensive and sustainable development. If we only pay attention to intellectual development in early education, only carry out this kind of "half-baked education", engage in "single-handedness" and "attack one point, not as good as the rest", if we force children to learn things beyond their age, especially to carry out special training prematurely; Then, this one-sided education and training will inevitably undermine the normal development of children's harmonious development. As a whole person, children are faced with all kinds of development problems. Artificially accelerating or strengthening the development process in one aspect can only be at the expense of sacrificing and losing the development in other aspects. In the long run, from the perspective of children's life development, it is definitely harmful. Ignoring the cultivation of children's all-round quality and blindly developing their advanced intelligence will lead to predatory intelligence development. There is an idiom in China called "Kill the goose that lays the golden egg", which means that we only covet short-term interests and neglect or even harm long-term interests. In real life, in order to get eggs early, people will kill chickens, which is a stupid thing that people generally don't do. However, in children's education, there are many similar phenomena of quick success and instant benefit. It is harmful to develop advanced intelligence at will and force children to learn and master knowledge that cannot be understood and accepted at this age, which must be corrected. Parents have the responsibility and obligation to create conditions to promote their children's physical and mental development, and also have the responsibility and obligation to care for their children's childlike innocence and interests and keep their children's "inherent things." This requires following the natural law of children's growth, so that children can grow up in free play and develop in a carefree life.
A person's success is a long process of development, and education at every stage is very important. A person's success depends on many factors, not one. Parents should not ignore any stage of their children's growth or any aspect of their quality, but should continue to educate their children and conduct comprehensive education.
Third, the origin and harm of advanced intelligence development
At present, this tendency to get quick success in advance is not accidental, but the product of certain objective environment. As early as the era of confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, in order to enhance their competitive strength, the United States and the Soviet Union carried out educational reforms as early as 30 years ago. The focus of their reform is to strengthen early education, carry out difficult education and intensive training in the pre-school stage, and advance the teaching content of many primary schools to the pre-school stage. The representative figure of the United States is Bloom, and in the former Soviet Union it was zankov. They believe that early education determines a person's life development level, even a person's life social achievements. However, after decades of reform experiments, they all summed up their experiences and lessons, and thought that the reform carried out according to this idea of "early educational determinism" was beneficial in the immediate effect, but unfavorable in the long run, because it disrupted the order of children's physical and mental development. Therefore, the United States and the Soviet Union have given up that kind of reform experiment.
Just when people gave up this reform experiment, the idea of "early educational determinism" spread to China, which catered to parents' desire to become Long Zhixin. Therefore, the advanced education for quick success and instant benefit is easily favored by some people. We should learn from the successful experience of foreign countries, and at the same time learn from the failure of foreign countries. Incredibly, what others have denied through experiments, we have to do it again.
The ideological trend of "early educational determinism" can prevail in China, on the one hand, because there are more and more only-child families, parents' expectations of their children are too high, and parents' educational quality (educational views, educational attitudes and methods, etc. ) is not high, which provides a hotbed for the survival of "early educational determinism"; On the other hand, some so-called "experts" who lack the conscience of scholars preach irresponsibly, greatly exaggerating the role of advanced education and advanced intellectual development and catering to parents who are eager for success. This is a very wrong direction.
The advanced education for quick success and instant benefit is also a reflection of the excessive utilitarianism of modern education. This kind of prejudice did not appear just now, but existed as early as the rise of capitalism. Russell, a great philosopher and educator, pointed out this bias decades ago. The utilitarian tendency of "emphasizing righteousness over profit" in modern education has brought the direct consequences of economic rise and moral decline, which is a common phenomenon in capitalist countries. The purpose of educating children is for further study and employment. As long as it is useful for further studies and employment, we should make great efforts to spend money and train as soon as possible. Those that are not directly beneficial to further studies and employment will be abandoned. In other words, people only consider cultivating children to be "mature" and pay little attention to educating children to be "adults". Not only abroad, but also in China in recent years. Imagine, if you can't "be a man", how can you become useful? In other words, he has a high level of education and rich professional knowledge. If he can't become a "person", society will not accept him at all. Then where can his cultural level and professional knowledge play a role?
The tendency of family education is too utilitarian, which is mainly reflected in two aspects: first, it only carries out "semi-education", that is, it emphasizes wisdom over morality, knowledge over ability, book knowledge over life knowledge, intellectual factors over non-intellectual factors, specialty cultivation over all-round development, and so on; The other is to educate and cultivate children beyond their physiological age at the expense of other aspects of their development.
We should clearly point out that premature professional training for children can not achieve the goal of improving children's overall quality, but it is not conducive to children's development and the improvement of the quality of our whole nation. For early education, we should take a positive and cautious attitude and not act blindly. It will be harmful to carry out advanced education at will.
Since ancient times, there have been different opinions about when the door of education will be opened to children. At present, in early education, there is an ideological tendency that "the more advanced the education, the better". In some places, "advanced" is put forward as a principle of family education. In early education, there is education beyond children's age at will, and behavioral ability training and intellectual development are all carried out "super early".