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What
you need to know:
The issue: Education
Our
view: We urge the Education Policy
Review Commission to mull over what the experts on early children development
made known last week.
Last
week, the Education Policy Review Commission heard that children are missing
out on structured learning and development opportunities in the first few years
due to poor regulation and much more. Experts in early children development
told the commission that children will as a result struggle to recover from
this blow not least because their experiences from conception through their
first five years invariably shape their next 50.
It
is deeply disturbing that the action and inaction of nursery owners in Uganda
are destined to unwittingly ensure that brains of children in their care remain
severely stunted. The weight of evidence indicates that starving children of
play-based learning will disintegrate with catastrophic results.
Since
the nursery sector has been targeted by private equity, most of the
private-equity owners have perpetuated a dangerous and pervasive preschool
curriculum. The commission, for instance, heard last week that nurseries are
bogging down preschoolers with “calculations and arithmetic.” The sheer size of
schoolwork taken home serves to only aggravate the situation.
Experts
in their pure relentlessness of perfectionism much prefer the right mix of
teaching fine motor skills, listening skills, social needs, unstructured play
and basic needs.
The
current system is also stacked in favour of imprinting reading skills on
preschoolers through the narrow prism of phonics. Experts, however, insist that
early years settings should make it their business to teach children how to
read and to make sense of texts. This, the experts insist, ultimately proves
crucial to improving the life chances of the aforesaid children.
There
has been a mushrooming of nurseries under the stewardship of private-equity
owners with little or no training in early childhood development.
Such
nurseries tend to use poorly paid, undervalued and low-qualified staff. We
believe this is a recipe for disaster, and share the existential panic that the
experts that met the commission last week were caught in.
It
is our fervent hope that the commission captures the scale and gravity of this
growing concern. They shouldn’t stop at this. To compound matters, private-equity
owners of nurseries have contrived to ensure that childcare costs remain
prohibitively high. This has crippled many parents who cannot with blanket
certainty guarantee that the brains of their children aren’t stunted during
what is—at any rate—a make-or-break stage.
We
urge the Education Policy Review Commission to mull over what the experts on
early children development made known last week. Strong recommendations will be
of the essence to ensure that things get back on the rails. The commission
should cover all the bases and make certain that not even a smidgen of blaming
creeps in when this pertinent issue is put to bed. We owe it to our children
because—as an old adage states—they are the future.