Nursery education IS education CORINNE HUTT

& S. J. HUTT, U.K.

which gives priority to 'cases of need'. These are defined primarily by socio-economic factors. As matters stood, this was perhaps the fairest policy, but such well-intentioned efforts have tended to blur the educational aspects of nursery education. Concern has been more with the availability of nursery education and less with its content-that it is done rather than what is done and how. All the follow-up studies and evaluations of compensatory educational programmes in the United States would have told us that such programmes by themselves are of little effect in reducing the consequences of disadvantage and deprivation. If such programmes are to be effective, it is necessary to know precisely for what deficiencies they are supposed to be compensating so that they may be designed accordingly. In the absence of specific aims any efforts, wellintentioned though they may be, will be ad hoc and ineffectual. On the other hand, there are a number of reasons why nursery education should be taken seriously. For too long these schools have been considered the "baby-minding" service of the educational profession. Thus it is the educational objectives of nursery education which we wish to emphasise here. If we agree with R. S. Peters (1967) that education is concerned with the mastery of skills, the acquisition of knowledge, and the understanding of principles, then the preschool period becomes a very critical phase in the educational process. The third objective is unattainable unless it is preceded by the other two; knowledge in turn cannot be acquired without the mastery of elementary skills, many of which are learned during this period.

Since publication of the recent White Paper which allowed for the expansion of nursery education in Britain (HMSO, 1972) many cries of disquiet have been voiced regarding its necessity, its scope and its form. We believe that, not only are such anxieties unfounded, but that the White Paper, in respect of its nursery provision, was one of the most enlightened and significant educational documents in recent times. In fact we might argue that it does not go far enough - that the provision should have been for all four year-olds. After all, in France over 80 % of four yearolds are at school (Blackstone, 1973). There is no reason to expect that even a three year-old child faces any emotional or psychological hazards in the process of attending nursery school. Attachment bonds are firmly established by the age of two years and by three the child is ready to encounter new experiences, and social ones in particular, for a limited part of the day. In fact even a modicum of nursery school experience enhances a child's selfassurance. Hitherto there has been a tacit assumption amongst educationalists, both policymakers and practitioners, that nursery education is something which helps ameliorate the "deprivation" that certain children undergo. This assumption has been made explicit in the Educational Priority Area projects ('The Community School has a social rather than an academic aim'-Midwinter, 1972) and is implicit in the admission policy of nursery schools 65

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Thinking through action Between three and five years, the child learns a number of basic manual skills, like using a knife and fork, brushing his teeth, buttoning a shirt and so on. But he also lays down the foundations for a number of other cognitive skills through his manipulation of the materials around him. He acquires the principles of classification and he learns to disregard the immediate impressions of his senses and to attend to more salient cues. This latter skill is what the Piagetian school call conservation. The child under five does not conserve: he believes what he sees so that any distortion in the material substance (as when a ball of plasticine is flattened) ipso facto gives it a different identity. The classical example to illustrate this difficulty is the Water Jar problem: 2 bottles are filled to the same level with a liquid; one is emptied into a tall narrow jar and the other into a wide squat jar; the levels are now very different and the child maintains that the two quantities are different, despite the fact that he originally judged the quantities as equal and will do so again if the liquid is poured back into the bottles. In other words, the child under 5 is governed in his judgements by the visual impressions he has at that time. After 5 he becomes able to represent symbolically or internally the event and so discount the immediate visual cues. He is then able to reason that if nothing is added to or taken away from a quantity of material, that quantity remains the same, no matter what visual transformations take place. Piaget's point is that conservation is facilitated by the child's own active manipulations and experiences with his environment whereby he lays down the basis for the subsequent formulation of the principles of weight, volume, equality, numbers, orders and so on. The ability to conserve thus marks an important transition in the intellectual development of the child. Piaget also warns that linguistic com-

petence should not be equated with conthe ceptual competence - use of appropriate word does not imply possession of the concept. He cites as a salutary example (Piaget, 1956) the child able to count who is asked to place six egg-cups in a row and to place an egg in each of the cups; the eggs are then removed and placed in front of the cups and the child is asked whether the number of eggs and the number of cups are the same or different. If he responds correctly, the cups are spaced apart more widely and the eggs are pushed nearer to each other, thus making the two rows differ in length, whereupon the child when asked the original question, will insist that there are more cups than eggs. He will maintain this position while counting 6 eggs and 6 cups again. This child has no real concept of number but because he is able to use the appropriate verbal tags he may lead adults to think that he has. How true this is of the arithmetic tables! The danger therefore is that the parent or teacher may inadvertently and prematurely proceed to the next stage of numerical relationships. A more recent, but equally illuminating example of the preschool child's need to learn-through-action is provided by Sylvia Farnham-Diggory (1970) who has carried out some ingenious studies in Pittsburgh. She presented children with blocks arranged in the order shown in the figure. The dot cards were placed in scrambled order, face up, and the child was asked to 'put the cards with the blocks, the way they are supposed to go'. While five yearolds did this with ease, it proved to be a difficult task for four year-olds. They could well appreciate that one card had more dots than another and one block had more area than another, but they could not match the two: they could not see that a greaterthan or more-than relation in one dimension was equivalent to a greater-than relation in another dimension. Children were then rehearsed with verbal cues - to point and say "This is more than that" or "this ,is big

NURSERY EDUCATION

and this is little;' but, although they did this perfectly with each series individually, they were still unable to do the matching. What did help, however, was an acting out of these differences as when the children took a small step for the small block and a giant stride for the big block and similarly for the dots. This study elegantly exemplifies the reliance the four year-old places on action and doing in order to consolidate the bases for more abstract skills. It is important, therefore, that preschool experience be as varied and as stimulating as possible. This is ensured by nursery schools and many play groups, with their imaginative equipment and apparatus, which individual families cannot afford. Children also benefit from being able to daub and mess in an environment specifically designed for them. Furthermore, nursery schools in particular, provide trained personnel who are able to turn a repetitive play sequence into an instructive one, who are able to discern the opportune moment in the filling and emptying of water-cans when principles of quantity or volume might profitably be demonstrated. For if this infra-structure of elementary skills is weak it will severely constrain the nature of the edifice that can be erected subsequently. In other words, primary and

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secondary educational systems can only exploit earlier experiences and skills-they cannot create these anew. Similarly, the social skills of communication and co-operation are facilitated by the experiences of nursery, as are an understanding of the principles of reciprocity, of justice and sanctions, of exchange. Girls greater need for nursery education This formative period becomes even more significant when we consider it in relation to the rates of development of the two sexes. Girls develop more rapidly and hence reach a particular developmental phase earlier than boys (Hutt, 1972 a, b). Girls tend to crawl, stand, walk and talk earlier than boys. Moreover, once they have become proficient in it, language becomes their dominant mode of acquiring knowledge, whereas boys maintain active exploration for much longer. Thus, from three to five, girls are passing through a proportionately greater part of their formative period, and the lack of nursery school experience, in all its diversity, is a more severe deprivation for girls than it is for boys. Since many principles and notably those of number, are acquired early in life and chiefly non-linguistically, perhaps more systematic exposure of girls during this

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Figure 1: From S. Farnham-Diggory (1970)

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critical period to the materials whereby numerical and other relationships can be explored may well improve their subsequent skills in these respects. Until proved otherwise some of the adult female's poorer (than males) numerical and mathematical abilities must be attributed to this lack of early experience. If individual differences such as these are acknowledged, appropriate measures can be taken to redress the imbalance. For instance, the attenuation of the concrete operations period in girls makes it imperative that they are exposed to a variety of sensory and manipulatory experience in the course of it. In studies of children's exploration, we found that curiosity shown at the age of three and four was associated with a divergent and imaginative style of thinking in later childhood (Hutt & Bhavnani, 1972). This was true of boys but not of girls. One reason for this difference may well be the fact that girls shift to a linguistic mode of inquiry earlier than boys. The spontaneous questions of young children generally receive shut-down answers from adults, i.e. the information terminates the inquiry and the dialogue, and reciprocal questions or open-ended answers, designed to stimulate further enquiry and extend dialogue are infrequent even amongst nursery school teachers, as the preliminary results of an ongoing study illustrate. Thus the early curiosity of girls may be more readily thwarted. It may also be noted that girls spend up to 25 % of their nursery school day in social interactions, principally of a verbal nature (Brindley et a1., 1973), which again demonstrates the significance of the linguistic modality in the early development of girls. It is axiomatic that variations in the environment have their greatest impact upon a feature at its most rapid period of change. Intelligence, like height, shows rapid change initially and gradually flattens out. For measurable intelligence, this period of rapid growth is the first five years of life. This finding emerges from a number of

painstaking analyses carried out by Benjamin Bloom, Professor of Education at the University of Chicago, on data from several longitudinal studies (Bloom, 1964). Such studies have the advantage that the performance of the same individuals are measured at different periods in their life. Correlations, or the degree of association between two measures in such studies, therefore become indications of the amount of growth or development which has already taken place. Bloom finds that, of intelligence measured at seventeen years, 20% has developed by the age of one year, 50% by the age of four, 80% by eight and 92% by thirteen. Or, to put it another way, from conception to the age of 4 years an individual develops approximately 50% of his adult intelligence, from the age of 4 to 8 he develops another 30 % and thereafter only 20%. The preschool period thus becomes of vital importance in education terms. Any procedures carried out during this period are likely to be far more effective than comparable procedures later on. Bloom has estimated, for instance, that extreme environments (good or bad) in each of the first four years could affect the development of intelligence by 2.5 I.Q. points per year, whereas similarly extreme environments during eight to seventeen years may have an average effect of only 0.41 points per year. A recent study suggests that this is by no means a pessimistic estimate: children from working class and subsidised families who did not differ in 1.0. from their middle-class peers at the ages of eighteen and twenty-four months nevertheless scored betwen 9 and 23 LQ. points less than them at the age of three years (Golden et a1., 1971). This rapid growth of intelligence in early life is partly determined by the pattern of brain growth and development. Of all the organs and tissues in the body, the brain and head alone have their peak rate of growth in the first few years of life (Tanner, 1961). After six years this rate of

NURSERY EDUCATION

growth decreases considerably, the brain and head having at that point reached 85% of their adult proportions. Parental co-operation Aware that early influences are so much more effective than later experience, educationalists have become increasingly concerned with the conditions to which many children are exposed in early life. There is now some tentative evidence that even 6 months exposure to a rich and varied environment, as in the reception class of a primary school, has a measurably beneficial effect upon the I.Q. Hitherto, the teaching profession have endeavoured to mitigate some of the supposed deprivation resulting from home circumstances. But for satisfactory results in the long-term, parental co-operation is essential. Since 1968 five independent studies have demonstrated the significance of the mother's role in the child's development (Hess & Shipman, 1968; Klaus & Grey, 1968; Gordon, 1969; Karnes et al. 1970; Levenstein, 1970). When mothers had been instructed in the principles of child development and in the use of toys and other materials, their children showed a marked improvement in I.Q. In at least two of these studies the instructors worked only with the mothers but with such success that one reviewer observed "the home program showed equal effectiveness at far lower cost as well as allowing vertical diffusion to younger children in the family and horizontal diffusion through the neighbourhood". Although there have been a few attempts to initiate programmes of parent education, the idea and practice of parental involvement are relatively novel in this country. Playgroups have achieved this to some extent but playgroups are predominantly a middle-class phenomenon. The very cliche "parental involvement" assumes that parents want to be involved, and this is debatable. To achieve such involvement will require a sustained effort to enlighten rather than to instruct, subtly transmitted by example rather than by

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precept and by demonstration of the child's own enjoyment in mastery. 'Play' devalues children's activities In a curious way educationalists themselves have contributed to the lack of regard for the needs of the under-fives by their readiness to label every activity of the young child as "play". The commonest USe of the term "play" is in opposition to "work". By implication therefore, work is essential, play is dispensable. Tennis is work for the professional but play for the amateur. To the very same activity is attributed a quality of seriousness as well as one of levity, the distinction apparently deriving from the assumed intention of the actor. If such distinction is justified, it is a curious paradox then that all activities of children, notwithstanding their intent, have been designated as "play". In pre- Victorian times, presumably all activities which were not directed at achieving a product were considered irrelevant, and dispensable-in other words, play. When it was recognised that the activities of children, though not manifestly goal-oriented, nevertheless were of considerable significance, the word play was not abandoned but quite indiscriminately used to connote both the earnest and the frivolous aspects of children's behaviour. It is the lack of conceptual clarity in this respect that permitted a logically inconsistent declaration such as that of a recent specialist Commission: "play is a serious business". No doubt the Froebel and Montessori-trained teachers, brought up on the maxim that children learn through play, are well aware of the manifold activities the term comprises, as well as the significance of these. But lesser mortals have difficulty in regarding an activity as both playful as well as earnest and necessary. Children however, distinguish between play and their other activities far more logically than adults do. We were somewhat taken aback when our six year-old son, whom we were aiding in his first experiments with a new chemistry

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set said, "now can I go and play with it?" It was quite clear what play meant to him -an activity with no constraints. When children are playing they have mastery of the situation: they can follow or discard the rules as they please, they can determine the outcome as they wish. The constraints, if any, are of their own imposition. But much of their activity is not of this sort, and they are aware of the distinction; it is a distinction we ought to respect. The indiscriminate use of the term "play" has in fact devalued children's activities and obscured their significance. Barely twelve months ago, two and three year-old children in the ENT ward of a major teaching hospital were being reprimanded for being "naughty" (crying and not staying in bed) yet there was not one toy in the ward, nor did the nursing staff consider it necessary to amuse or distract the anxious children. The paediatric wards of many hospitals still consider the psychological well-being of their young charges to be outside their purview. The campus of Keele University houses around 200 children and has done so for several years but it is devoid of any outdoor play area or equipment. If the well-informed are capable of so readily dismissing, even implicitly, what

they regard as "play" we can hardly expect parents, with little specialised knowledge, to be more discerning. Children over the age of five become increasingly able to represent their ideas internally and to deal with concepts and relationships in a symbolic and abstract form. They are able to think. Children under five who have yet to develop these symbolic processes are only able to "think" through their actions. It makes nonsense therefore to expect a child of three or four to be inactive. Yet how often do we hear such children being exhorted to "be quiet" or to "keep still" - in waiting rooms, in trains, on buses, at home. An older child can comply by attending to or creating internal sources of stimulation; a young child cannot-he can only attend by doing, looking or listening, to external sources of stimulation. The lack of adequate stimulation is as unpleasant for a child as pain. The recent government publication on expansion of nursery education is thus twice welcome -- not only does it provide for the education of a majority of. children during a critical period but it also provides, for the first time, an opportunity on a large scale for the education of adults about children. It is a wholesome challenge.

References

H.M.S.a. Education: 1972. Aframework for expansion. Hess, R. D., and Shipman, V. C. 1968. Maternal influences upon early learning: The cognitive environments of urban preschool children. In: R. D. Hess andR. M. Baer (Eds.) Early Education, Chicago: Aldine. Hutt, C. 1972 (a). Males and Females. Penguin Books. Hutt, C. 1972 (b). Sex differences in human development. Human Development, 15; 153-170. Hutt, C., and Bhavnani, R. 1972. Predictions from play. Nature, 237, 171-172. Karnes, M. B., Teska, I. A., Hodgins, A. S., and Badger, E. D. 1970. Educational intervention at home by mothers of disadvantaged infants. Child Development, 41, 925-935. Klaus, R. A., and Gray, S. W. 1968. The educational training program for disadvantaged children: a report after 5 years. Monographs of the Society for Research In Child Development, 33 (4). Levenstein, P. 1970. Cognitive growth in preschoolers through verbal interaction with mothers. Amer. Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 40, 426-432.

Blackstone, T. 1973. Early Childhood Education, Trends in Education,HMSa Bloom, B. S. 1964. Stability and change in human characteristics. New York. Wiley. Brindley, C., Clarke, P., Hutt, c., Robinson, I., and Wethli, E. 1973. Sex differences in the activities and social interactions of nursery school children. In: R. P. Michael and J. H. Crook (Eds.) Comparative Ecology and Behaviour ofPrimates, Academic Press. Farnham-Diggory, S. 1970. Cognitive synthesis in Negro and white children, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 35, 2. Golden, M., Birns, B., Bridger, W., & Moss, A. 1971. Social class differentiation in cognitive development among black preschool children. Child Development, 42,37-45. Gordon, I. Early childhood stimulation through parent education. 1969.Final Report to the Children's Bureau for Development of Human Resources, University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla.

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Midwinter, E. 1972. Priority education. An account of the Liverpool project. Penguin Books. Peters, R. S. 1967. What is an educational process? In: R. S. Peters (Ed.) The concept of education. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Piaget, J. 1950. The psychology of intelligence. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Dr. C. Hutt is a lecturer and Dr. S. J. Hutt, Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Keele.

Depuis la publication du Livre blanc britannique autorisant Ie developpement de l'education prescolaire (Publications officielles:HMSO, 1972),de nombreuses voix se sont elevees pour contester la necessite, l'ampleur, la forme des mesures envisagees, Les auteurs de Particle trouvent ces critiques injustifiees, et ils considerent, en fait, que Ie Livre blanc, par ses dispositions prescolaires, constitue Pun des plus sages et des plus remarquables documents educatifs de notre epoque, Les auteurs trouvent meme qu'il ne va pas assez loin et que les dispositions auraient dfi etre etendues a tous les enfants de 4 ans. Par Ie passe, l'aspect social de I'education prescolaire, son souci essentiel d'effacer les handicaps socio-culturels, avaient tendu a repousser au second plan sa fonction proprement educatrice, Les chercheurs en psychologie ont clairement etabli Ie role fondamental des premieres annees sur le plan de I'apprentissage, Piaget, et d'autres pedagogues avec lui, soulignent l'importance de l'action, du "faire", commc bases de I'acquisition ulterieure des notions abstraites: et ils mettent egalernent en garde contre

l'idee que la connaissance d'un terme entraine la pleine comprehension du concept qu'il represente, Les auteurs font ressortir que, puisque initialement les filles se developpent plus vite que les garcons, I'education prescolaire leur sera plus profitable qu'a eux, et qu'inversement c'est a elles que Ie manque d'education prescolaire sera le plus dommageable, 11 ne fait maintenant plus de doute que, meme pour de breves periodes, la mise en contact de l'enfant avec un environnement riche et varie a un effet benefique, Pour rendre cet effet durable, une certaine participation des parents parait requise. Les auteurs (qui ont eux-memes participe a de rccents travaux de recherche sur le jeu et les activites de decouverte des enfants) estiment que les premiers pedagogues, en appelant un peu trop vite "jeu" un grand nombre d'activites de l'enfant, ont fait que la societe n'a pas pris au serieux I'education de la premiere enfance. 11 est temps de redefinir les concepts car ce n'est qu'en employant des termes c1airs qu'on parviendra a saisir la veritable portee des experiences de l'enfant.

Desde la publicacion del reciente Libro Rojo autorizando la ampliacion de la educacion de nifios en jardines infantiles en Gran Bretafia (HMSO, 1972), se han dejado oir muchas voces de inquietud respecto a su necesidad, su envergadura y su forma. Opinamos que, no solo carecen de fundamento las citadas inquietudes, sino que el Libro Rojo, en relacion con 10 que disponia acerca de la educacion infantil, es uno de los document os educativos mas inspirados y relevantes de la epoca actual. De hecho es posible arguir que su alcance no es suficientemente amplio y que dichas disposiciones debian haberse referido a todos los nifios de 4 afios de edad. En el pasado, el valor social de la educacion en jardines infantiles, concentrandose como 10 hace en el concepto de privacion, ha empafiado los aspectos educativos. La importancia critica de los primeros afios desde el punto de vista del aprendizaje ha sido repetidas vecessubrayada por los psicologos dedicados a la investigacion. Piaget y otros ponen de relieve la importancia de echar cirnientos para el conocimiento abstracto posterior, asi como el peligro de asumir

que la posesion de una etiqueta verbal signifique un conocimiento conceptual completo. Los autores insisten en el hecho de que. puesto que las nifias se desarrollan con mayor rapidez que los nifios, en los primeros afios, Ia educacion infantil les beneficiara mas y, ala inversa, su falta les supondra una privacion mayor. Existe hoy en dia suficiente evidencia para mostrar el efecto beneficioso de periodos, incluso breves, de apertura a un medio ambiente variado y rico. EI interes de los padres es esencial para conservar tales efectos. Los autores (que han contribuido a investigaciones recientes respecto al juego de los nifios frente a actividades explorativas) consideran que los educadores de nifios de corta edad, debido a su inclinacion a dar a muchas de las actividades infantiles el nombre dejuego, han sido responsables de una gran parte del descuido en que la sociedad ha tenido a estos primeros afios de la vida del nino. Ha llegado el momenta de lograr una absoluta c1aridad de conceptos, pues solo asl se podra apreciar la verdadera siznicacion de la experiencia de los nifios,

Tanner, J. M. 1961. Education and physical growth. London University Press.