When Fools Take Charge

Condemned to Perpetual Ignorance

A recent newspaper article profiled the latest fandango in early child education. It calls for a more thoroughgoing and radical commitment to treating children as adults from the very outset.

In what way, you ask?

Parents should be treating babies and toddlers with more respect, a visiting academic says, and that means talking to infants as if they are adults, never putting them in high chairs or leaving them in car seats, and steering clear of many popular toys.

From day one, early childhood expert Polly Elam says, parents should also consult their baby before picking them up, changing their nappy or taking them on outings. That means talking the baby through what you are about to do, before you do it – and waiting for their response.

If parents skip this consultation, they should later apologise to the baby and explain why they acted hastily.

The absurdity of such extremism is easily dismissed. But things get more sinister when we are told that this new "movement", Resources for Infant Educarers, are being used as the guiding light for over twenty-four new early childhood education centres in New Zealand. The approach is radically paedo-centric, which fits right in with the philosophic cant currently dominating the Ministry of Education. Here is a sample of this radical approach in action:

If the infant learns a new skill, such as picking up a toy they have dropped by themselves, the philosophy says parents should not praise them. Elam says: "We try not to praise the child for things that they would do naturally ... a little bit of struggle is what a child enjoys doing. When they have accomplished something, we want them to have the intrinsic feeling of, `I did it!', rather than looking for the external praise." Likewise, if an infant falls and hurts themselves, parents should not just shush them and tell them they are fine. "They're not fine – they're frightened, and so we'd rather say what happened: `You fell down the steps, and that was frightening for you'... We don't deny the child the feeling. We often want the child to stop crying because it makes us feel more secure, but we've got to allow them to go through the crying and come out the other side knowing `I can get hurt, I can cry but I can also come out'. That's a life-long lesson that we want them to learn."

Teachers as glorified pseudo-life-coaches. Stand back and let the child learn for itself, at its own pace, being the wonderful self-discovering, auto-creative being that it is. But the Education Review Office, which now conducts audits on pre-schools, is a running cheerleader for paedo-centric education.

Predictably, it gives this approach top marks. Education Review Office reports on centres using RIE or Pikler strategies emphasise how happy, independent and confident the children are.

Too true. And by the time the children get to be six or seven they will be so self-confident and uber-independent that they will be uneducable. Having become wise in their own eyes, through the incessant encouragement of their parents and their pre-school teachers, they forever will be consigned to live in a state of perpetual foolishness. Such is the benighted wisdom of our apostate age.