On the other hand, I have worked with teachers in cities such as Chicago, Milwaukee, Washington, DC, and others in which teachers are unable to take their children outside of the school to explore because the school is the only safe building in the neighborhood. Similarly, many teachers in such environments in a rich country like the United States cannot engage their children in close study of their natural environment, not only because of the dangers in the streets, but because nothing now grows in the neighborhood. I want to suggest four findings from recent research on the early years that suggest that what we do with and for children today is related to all of their tomorrows.
Early experience has lasting effects .
No one today with serious educational and social policy-making responsibility for a community or a country would now argue against the proposition that the experiences of the early years of life have a powerful influence on all later ones. Early childhood is the critical period of neurological development . All children come to us with lively minds . Children come to our early childhood programs with different amounts of exposure to books, stories, being read to, holding and using pencils, having their questions answered, encouragement to read signs, and other kinds of experiences that help them adapt and adjust to school and the academic exercises so typical of the classroom. Young children compelled by circumstances to cope with the risks and vagaries of the streets or neighborhood often develop powerful intellectual capacities to predict, hypothesize, and analyze the contingencies they face.