Greenwood Farm Blog: The World’s Most Effective Educators

—have been sabotaged, sidelined and demeaned.

Education is the most effective remedy for poverty. Research increasingly proves this, highlighting that early success in learning most correlates with later success in society.

Lesser known is the power of parent as teacher. The key to rebuilding education in America is restoring the priority of parent and child as a learning pair, especially with very young children. The erosion of this vital relationship over the decades goes a long way in explaining our dysfunctional society with our rampant incarceration rates, poverty, greed, loss of the American dream, and life stress.

That learning relationship was stronger in the 1940's when my siblings and I were young. My parents and grandparents had been raised under their parents' and grandparents' tutelage. In this way, they learned who they were. The songs, games, stories and religious values of our heritage were internalized, not as head knowledge, but as heart knowledge. They were safe, and they belonged —two things so rare for young children today. When my parents imparted that knowledge to me, I was learning trust and courage through family bonding.

Learning was not yet separated out from real human bonding and placed behind a video screen. No one could have imagined back then how pervasive screen media would be in the life of today's children.

I remember as a boy, when my siblings and I first heard the new word "television." One of our friends told us about this magical invention that his family had obtained. That night, without parent permission, we sneaked over the crest of the hill after dark toward a flickering blue light coming from their window. We crept up to the window. We could barely make out the neighbor family with their backs to the window, gazing intently at a small flickering screen. On the screen were obvious faces moving and talking. We couldn't understand what they were saying, but the shock was etched in my memory. It was clear that somehow people had been transformed and stuck in a box. How could any child resist this powerful form of hypnotism! We shivered in the cool night and ran home to tell our parents we wanted one of those boxes.

It didn't happen. My father called it a work saver. My grandfather called it the devil's playground. Our church met and decided this worldly device could not be in any church members' homes. If allowed in, it would corrupt our lives and destroy our Salvation. I didn't understand then the importance of human feedback response to learn trust, respect of self and others, and the bond of family. I didn't know then the importance of learning to live with others for life success, and how that that learning starts at a very young age and its importance peaks at around 2 years old when a child is most easily attracted to the artificial pseudo-human feedback the screen media gives.

Since then, TV and other screen media have damaged the learning pair relationship of parent and child. It didn't happen because of poor programming. The very best Sesame Street can't stop the damage. It happened because the attraction of moving faces and bodies, gesturing for attention of toddlers, displaces the most crucial learning unit of education in America and around the world: parent with child—especially before age 3.

Enter into the Harlem Children's Zone. The New York City hotbed of crime and poverty in the 70's is now a national success story of poverty transformation. Crime is down. Streets are now dramatically safer for children. Alcohol and drug abuse are reduced. Children do not grow up to be incarcerated as before. It happened in Harlem because of an amazing story of parents and their young children pairing for learning for life. Parents were entrusted with their young children, not simply criticized for failing to parent and losing their child to the courts. Parent classes were not penalties for failure to parent properly. TV is set aside in favor of "Baby College," where children before age 3 learn to function in real human feedback paired with a parent.

Across the nation we need to turn back to the naturally occurring parent-child learning pair lost in the last century with the rise of industrialization, the screen media, and an economy that, for survival, daily separates parents from their young. More funding for social services, head start and home visiting educators cannot in itself be compensation for the loss of the world's most effective educators at each child's most powerful learning age. The most effective programs pay a parent to come to a specially designed weekly class paired with their pre-3 child. It's probably the most cost effective wages paid to teachers anywhere.

Education administrators and government officials in Big Horn County know the real tax dollar savings potentially available if parents could do better as their children's first teachers. Here we need one of those proven program that focuses on restoring the natural learning connections between our youngest children and their home caregivers, usually Mom. It's only through acknowledging and restoring parents as a child's first teacher that we can re-establish those early learning experiences vital for educational success in our world today. It's by far the biggest gap in our education system in Big Horn County, and goes a long way toward explaining our schooling difficulties. And we can do something about it.

Since the time of my first encounter with TV, this and other screen media have damaged the learning pair relationship of parent and child. It didn't happen because of poor programming. The very best Sesame Street can't stop the damage. It happened because the attraction of moving faces and bodies, gesturing for attention of toddlers, displaces the most crucial learning unit of education in America and around the world: parent with child—especially before age 3.

Enter into the Harlem Children's Zone. The New York City hotbed of crime and poverty in the 70's is now a national success story of poverty transformation. Crime is down. Streets are now dramatically safer for children. Alcohol and drug abuse are reduced. Children do not grow up to be incarcerated as before. It happened in Harlem because of an amazing story of parents and their young children pairing for learning for life. Parents were entrusted with their young children, not simply criticized for failing to parent and losing their child to the courts. Parent classes were not penalties for failure to parent properly. TV is set aside in favor of "Baby College," where children learn to function in real human feedback paired with a parent.

Other such programs with this priority have begun across the nation. A Waldorf School has begun just this year in Lakota country in South Dakota. Missouri in 1970 started a "Parents as Teachers" program that has spread westward, with some content in Montana. Oregon has a growing and well run poverty-alleviation program focusing on the learning pair of parent and young child. Even here in Big Horn County we have the "Family Support Network" pioneering parent involvement with children in school activities. Education administrators and city and county government officials have discovered real tax dollar savings by investing in paying parents to bring children to weekly classes facilitated by professionals in early child education and family dynamics, experienced in proven models expecting commitment to specific curricular content and family change.

There's room for much more here in Big Horn County. We need to examine successful programs such as in Oregon, New York, and South Dakota. We need to hire more professionals experienced in facilitating the learning pair of parent and young child. And we need learning materials to match the content pre-3's need.

http://seattletimes.com/html/jerrylarge/2019178227_jdl17.htmlA healthy life may require a good start

Early-life stress and trauma can harm American lives. Columnist Jerry Large says a new book convinced him that the country has to do more to help people when they are young, because stresses and traumas manifest in mental and physical ways later on.

Compassionate and based on the latest research, Scared Sick Childhood Trauma unveils a major public health crisis. Highlighting case studies and cutting-edge scientific findings, Karr- Morse shows how our innate fight-or-flight system can injure us if overworked in the early stages of life. Persistent stress can trigger diabetes, heart disease, obesity, depression, and addiction later on.

http://www.amazon.com/Scared-Sick-Childhood-Trauma-Disease/

It's written by Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith Wiley. In our youngest children, society sows the seeds of problems that it spends much time and money dealing with as people age. We know that now, and we can do something about it

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/opinion/sunday/can-great-teaching-overcome-the-effects-of-poverty.html?_r=2

"Are We Asking Too Much From Our Teachers?" By ALEX KOTLOWITZ Published: September 14, 2012

"It's been too easy to see this dispute (The Chicago teachers' strike) as one between two hotheaded personalities — Mr. Emanuel and Ms. Lewis, or as a play for respect. Rather, as I spoke with teachers on the picket lines last week, it became clear that it was about something much more fundamental, and something worth our attention: top-notch teaching can't by itself become our nation's answer to a poverty rate that, as we learned the other day, remains stubbornly high: one of every five children in America live below the poverty level."

Paul Tough, How Children Succeed (Houghton Mifflin, Sept. 2012)

Why do some children succeed while others fail?

The following is adapted from Amazon's description:

The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs.

But in How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues that the qualities that matter most have more to do with character: skills like perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control.

How Children Succeed introduces us to a new generation of researchers and educators who, for the first time, are using the tools of science to peel back the mysteries of character. Through their stories—and the stories of the children they are trying to help—Tough traces the links between childhood stress and life success. He uncovers the surprising ways in which parents do—and do not—prepare their children for adulthood. And he provides us with new insights into how to help children growing up in poverty. The role of economics necessitating both parents finding work away from their children is not explored in this book. How would children benefit from the simple economic reform of a living wage law? This book implicitly points in this direction. Too bad it does not

The Death and Life of the Great American School System, by Diane Ravitch (Perseus Books, 2010)

Loads of information with documented official proceedings surrounding changes in education policy. Actual events with details in sequence paint a reliable picture that damns and exonerates both sides in the public school controversy continuing to rage the nation. As such, this is a valuable contribution to anyone who would deal with issues such as school choice, testing, merit pay, class size, segregation, the role of the arts, student health, violence and bullying, nutrition, curriculum, teacher education and internships, religious concerns, and probably all the major facets of education controversy that continue to this day. I recommend this as a realistic, honest analysis, relayed without political bias. This book can be borrowed at Greenwood Farm.

A list of web sites and other sources focusing on parents and their children learning together:

http://hcz.org/images/stories/pdfs/ali_summerfall2002.pdf

http://mnwaldorf.org/parent-tot-classes/

http://www.childrensfarm.org/parent_child.html

http://www.quickenloans.com/blog/parentchild-classes-rock

http://ici.umn.edu/products/impact/152/prof4.html

http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeadult/download/pdf/FamLitProgModelAdapted.pdf

http://www.linnbenton.edu/index.cfm?objectId=64979B60-ED41-11E1-A279001B21BA1DA1

http://www.thelittlegym.com/Pages/parent-child.aspx

http://www.pacthawaii.org/early_head_start-oahu.html

http://www.columbusschoolforgirls.org/program-for-young-children/parents-and-children-together-pact/index.aspx

http://www.nova.edu/humandevelopment/earlylearning/pplace/parentchild.html