Children education is a critical part of the child development process. It helps kids learn how to think for themselves and become more independent. It also teaches them how to interact with others.
Early childhood development teaches kids to understand and accept differences in people’s beliefs, culture, and ethnicity. This knowledge will help them become well-rounded members of society.
Learning at a young age
Children begin learning as soon as they are born. Their early thinking is insightful and complex, laying the foundations for more sophisticated forms of learning. However, they can become discouraged from attempting challenging tasks when their self-regulatory abilities are undermined. For example, when young children receive messages that intelligence is fixed, they are less likely to persevere through difficult academic tasks (Heyman and Dweck, 1992).
In recent years, research has documented how babies and young children develop incipient theories about people, other living things, objects, and numbers. Although these implicit theories are not taught, they play a central role in their daily lives and in their education.
Understanding how these implicit theories can support learning in different subject areas is important for early care and education professionals. It is also important to understand how subject-matter knowledge is acquired, as the process of acquisition differs between subjects. This chapter focuses on learning in two core subject areas: language and literacy, and mathematics.
Learning how to think for themselves
Children learn how to think for themselves through experience and exploration. They need to have a flexible mind that can flex between different concepts and ideas, and they need to be able to plan and execute goal-directed learning activities. This requires a number of cognitive control processes, including short-term and working memory, attention control and shifting, and inhibitory control (Smiley and Dweck, 1992).
Early investigations reveal that children, starting in infancy, are not just passive observers registering the superficial appearance of things but are building explanatory systems. These implicit theories organize their observations and help them predict, explain, and reason about the world around them. This research can inform educational strategies that avoid oversimplifying children’s understanding of subject-matter content. It can also help educators recognize that a child’s lay theory may influence the way they interpret evidence.
Learning about different cultures
During early childhood, children are absorbing culture, customs and practices from their parents and community. This is a powerful way to develop a sense of identity, and it also teaches children how to interact with different cultures. They learn that everyone is different and that racial or ethnic divisions can lead to misunderstandings and even violence. Exposing children to different cultures helps them to be more aware of their own cultural biases, and it encourages them to consider where these biases originate.
It’s important to teach children how to respect and value differences from an early age. They should be able to understand that all people are different and that this difference should be celebrated. This will help them become global citizens, and it will help them to understand that the world is interconnected. They will learn to embrace diversity and will be able to create a better future.
Learning how to interact with others
While subject-matter content knowledge and skills are important for children’s classroom success, they require and support other kinds of learning competencies. Heckman (2007) describes these as “noncognitive skills.” Examples include attention control (the ability to stay focused on the task at hand), attention shifting (the process of changing a mental set, e.g., when working on a word problem), and cognitive flexibility (the ability to shift between different concepts).
In addition, many studies show that social interaction supports learning more generally than non-interactive learning does. For example, in one study, nine-month-old babies learned to discriminate Chinese Mandarin sounds when in interactive interactions with a native speaker versus exposure to recordings of the same speakers.
In addition, the development of self-regulatory skills supports learning by enabling children to remain engaged in challenging tasks and develop persistence, focused attention, and the ability to delay gratification. These capacities are important for academic learning, but they also enable children to manage their emotions and participate in classroom activities productively.