Childhood

Jean Piaget,(1896-1980) ,the Swiss philosopher and psychologist, spent much of his professional life listening to children, watching children and researching their development. He observed that children do not think like grownups, that they have thought processes with their own kind of order and their own special logic. Einstein called it a discovery "so simple that only a genius could have thought of it."

Childhood is universally acknowledged to be a unique and fundamental life time experience.
Understanding and appreciating the nature of a child's being is crucial for the development of meaningful content and method in educational practice. This involves far more than reciting psychologists' cognitive theories. Rather,we must learn as educators to enter into the child's developing conciousness in an almost meditative manner, deeply respectful and focused in the present moment.
When observing children at kindergarten age, we see them constantly in movement, at play, deeply involved in sensory, experiential hands-on learning, full of imagination, creativity, full of life itself. Yet how do we see educators meeting the needs of children? Increasingly, education is seen as a race, and the earlier you start, the sooner and the better you finish. What is the prize at the end of this "race"? There is a severe lack of evidence that this push for early academics produces any lasting advantage for children, or more contented, authentic adults who are able to "in and of themselves, impart meaning to their lives" (Steiner).
According to Piaget, development is caused by the accumulation of errors in understanding , an accumulation which eventually causes a state of disequilibrium , so that thought structures require reorganising. The race for the early intellectualisation of children is a tragic example of "error accumulation" and it is high time that the thoughts guiding these misplaced ambitions in education were "reorganised".

"We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it."
~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860.