Alberta, Marzo/March 2009
16
ALTERNATIVA Latinoamericana
ENGLISH SECTION
By Nora Fernández
Following the Revolution, the Cuban
government had two main educational goals, to
make education available to all and to link these
advances in education to socio-economic
development. The Great Literacy campaign of
1961 focused on teaching basic literacy skills to
citizens in the poorest and most remote areas of
the island and it was a success. Today Cuba
has a literacy rate close to 99% and, what was
learned from the process has been used in
literacy in other countries with similar success.
Right after the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991, Cuba faced great challenges but then it
also had the opportunity in 1992 to implement
early childhood education with support from
UNICEF. There is history to a focus on children
under six; already in 1981-1982 Cuba had a pilot
project in Santiago de Cuba in early education
that showed great promise. In 1984-85 a second
project implementing an early education
program to children in rural areas was very
successful; this project was sustained until
1993. These Cuban projects were the research
basis for a longer term project which counted
with support from UNICEF; it was a program that
would be called "Educate your child" (Educa a tu
hijo) which began precisely with the special
period in 1992 and it had great success.
It maybe the irony of things that, at the
same time that Cuba faced such challenges, it
also received support to implement a very
ambitious early childhood education program
that would prove beneficial and be the basis for
similar ones all over the world. And yet, when
early childhood education is discussed it is often
the case that the Cuban experience is not
mentioned. In 2001, Susan Miller, Professor
Emeritus in Elementary Education at Kutztown
University of Pennsylvania, led a delegation of 19
early childhood education delegates from the US
to Cuba through the People to People
Ambassador Program. She explains the four
levels of Cuban early childhood education as
from birth to age 1, age 2 to 3, age 3 to 4, and
age 5. In the baby group, she says, there are
usually two teachers and two assistants for 15
babies. By age 5, all Cuban children go to
school. In 2001, there were approximately 1,000
free, all-day, center-based child care programs
in Cuba, providing care for 184,000 children. All
centers followed the guidelines established in a
pamphlet titled "Educacion Preescolar",
prepared by the Cuban government and printed
with a UNICEF grant.
There are three types of child care centers
in Cuba: 17% of the nation's preschoolers attend
programs from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. five days a week
while their parents work, children with special
needs may attend a center for children with
disabilities, and children with social problems
may stay at a boarding school. As more and
more parents join the work force, the capacity of
these centers has become inadequate, Miller
said. A national maternity leave policy was
introduced in 1992: a mother receives paid
maternity leave 3 months prior to and 3 months
after the birth of her child, and additional 6
months unpaid leave may be taken so, mothers
are guaranteed the right to return to their jobs.
The emergence of Early Child
Development (ECD) is often connected to a
Conference organized in 1996 by the World
Bank (WB) on ECD in Atlanta, Geogia. At that
conference, the then Vice-President of the WB,
Armeane Choksi (today with a New York
investment firm focusing on India the Hudson
Fairfax Group), explained that more than 11
million children die from preventable diseases
and 130 million, mainly of girls, fail to attend
primary school. Economics is an issue, he said,
but we also know that children need more than
physical nourishment to develop. Children need
nutrition and sensory stimulation and nurturing.
That the WB, the same that has been
pushing neo-liberal economic policies and
strategies on countries policies that increase
the gap between rich and poor nations and
between the rich and the poor within nations,
could have played a role in early childhood
development seems preposterous. And yet,
such an approach to issues is quite prevalent in
a culture that favours conferences and
discussions but little action, implementation or
follow up. An organization like the WB that
implements policies that increase poverty,
hunger, inequality -denying access to citizens
everywhere could still advocate in favour of early
child education. For the WB there is value in
pursuing such contradictory behaviour as it can
protect the Bank in the future.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child
was not approved until 1989, to be implemented
in 1990. It gave children rights they did not have
before (at least in paper). However, as
knowledge about how early child development
relates to adults' later life outcomes and health,
we become increasingly aware of the criminal
implications of economic and social policies that
push masses of people into poverty and
deprivation. Policies like the ones the WB has
been pushing. It would not be surprising that the
WB is found liable in the future because of its
role; thus, establishing for the public record a
"caring" role regarding children may not be a bad
idea. Public trials for "crimes against humanity"
or law suits demanding compensation for "lives
lost to poverty and abuse" may not be
unthinkable in the future.
Brain & Early Development
What may seem obvious, that children
need basics resources (food, immunizations,
clean diapers) and nurturing care (touch, visual
stimulation, singing, rocking) to thrive has taken
science a while to prove. However, in the last
15-20 years research (mainly in neuroscience)
has come close to prove this challenging
assumptions about the brain and how the brain
develops, explaining some of the biological
mechanism involved and the connection to
stress, ability to cope and health. We are
increasingly aware that we are our brain, that
how our brains develop depends on a complex
interplay between our genes and the
experiences we have, and that the richer and
most positive these experiences are the better
for our brains and us.
We know that: early experiences (from
before birth to age 3) have a crucial impact on
brain development and on the nature and extent
of our capacities as adults; early interactions
affect directly how our brains are wired, and
brain development is not linear but involves
critical times at which we acquire knowledge
and skills. During these critical periods the brain
needs stimulation to develop properly. By the
age of 3 our brain has reached its most active
time twice as active as the brains of adults,
activity levels drop during adolescence.
Negative experiences during the first years
of life are devastating, as proved by the
Romanian orphanage story. Researchers have
found abnormal levels of cortisol in children who
lived in orphanages with minimal care and in
children who experienced traumatic events in
early life. Dr. Bruce Perry has studied children
and trauma extensively, providing evidence of
the devastating effect of trauma in children
(www.childtrauma.org).
Carol Bellamy established, in the "State of
the World's Children," childhood as a critical and
vulnerable stage in which poor socio-economic
circumstances have lasting effects. Early life
has crucial influence on subsequent mental and
physical health and development
(www.unicef.org).
The Early Years Studies
The Early Years Study (EYS), by Margaret
McCain and Fraser Mustard, made a case for
early child education arguing that ignoring the
importance of the early years was the greatest
brain drain ever. The EYS was made as
requested by the Ontario provincial government
and published in 1999 it was reviewed in 2002.
An even more complete report, the Early Years
Study 2 (EYS2) was published in
2007(
www.founders.net
).
According to EYS2, the main message of
EYS was: early experiences have far-reaching
effects on the development of children's brains
and behaviours. A child's capacity to learn in
school is strongly influenced by the neural wiring
that has taken place in the brain in the early
years of life. The greater the synchrony between
sub-cortical and prefrontal systems (cognitive
regulation of emotion) of the child's brain the
more the child will thrive in school. It is
not
enough to provide universal education from age
6; we now know now the crucial age for
children's brain development is before age 6.
We have to act on the huge body of evidence,
focus on pregnancy and on children from birth to
age 6 if we are to ensure they benefit fully from
school education.
Research shows the infant-caregiver dyad
involved from birth in reciprocal sensory
stimulation (gazing, vocalizations, touch and
smell) signalling positive affect. This early
stimulation drives the function of neural
pathways. The quality of this experience, with
adults and other children, in the very early years
of life has a major effect on neuron function and
brain development -the formation of neural
pathways for coping, language, and
understanding. Thus, early stimulation is the
foundation for the infant's signalling system.
Stimulation affects the sympathetic nervous
system and the LHPA (Limbic-Hypothalamus-
Pituitary-Adrenal) axis influencing the child's
subsequent mental and physical health.
Caregiver-infant exchanges play a crucial role in
the child's capacity to attend to and interact with
others. It influences neural pathways for
language and higher cognitive functions. It
enables the infant to build patterns that will take
on meaning, and lead to different levels of
organization of neural pathways underlying
emotional and intellectual function.
Poor caregiver-infant interactions
compromise the formation of neural circuits and
pathways. Over two decades studies have show
that neglect, abuse, or parenting compromised
by depression, other mental health or substance
abuse, influence the development of the child's
brain and biological pathways. The environment
matters. Exposure to maternal depression,
caregiver substance abuse, family violence,
physical, sexual or verbal abuse, are traumatic
experiences that can damage deep structures in
the brain affecting the quality of future social
interactions.
A recent study by Michael Meaney (McGill
University) in Nature Neuroscience in February,
2009, found that child abuse can alter genes in
its young victims leaving them less able to cope
with stress later in life. The chemical markers
found were methyl groups along the
glucocorticoid receptor of a gene involved in the
brain's stress response.
Nutrition, Stimulation, Justice
An estimated 40% of children under the age
of five in Third World countries have stunted
development. Nutrition is crucial. And yet,
nutrition alone is not enough. Nutrition and
stimulation are required.
Literacy is crucial; language skills are a
strong and early predictor of school success.
Literacy includes caregiver-infant everyday
interactions (talking, singing, telling stories,
drawing, painting) that favour abilities to derive
meaning from printed text. In 2004, The
Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) assessed literacy by
assessing capacity to understand prose,
documents and quantities. It established levels:
level 1 meant "limited ability to understand
written text unless explained verbally first"; level
2 meant "ability to comprehend and integrate
EDITORIAL:
Brain, Early Development, Justice