The Day of Elementary Education takes place on January 24th – many kindergartens in Austria are closed on this day. The educators use this day not only for further training, they also point out the great need to catch up in this area of the education system: Smaller groups, more educators and an overall upgrading of the kindergarten as an educational institution are needed. This is supported by results from developmental psychology, educational research and the neurosciences. Because whether children learn well and enjoy learning is not decided at school.
Learning is learned early on
The ability to learn is not inherited, it is acquired. At every age there are different forms of learning that challenge the human brain in a suitable way and prepare it for further learning steps. While sensorimotor learning and body memory are important at the beginning of life, social learning is the focus at kindergarten age, says the neurobiologist Isabella Sarto-Jackson. “It’s regarding learning in a social context, that is, through observation, through imitation, through social referencing, shared attention, etc.,” says Sarto-Jackson.
Here, the focus is on interaction during learning, says the neurobiologist, between the caregivers, i.e. the teachers, and the children, the learners. As part of this social learning, children develop skills that are important later in school for “classic” learning, for acquiring knowledge: being able to regulate stress, not being afraid in exam situations, impulse control, attention, self-discipline and frustration tolerance.
Kindergarten can close gaps
Sarto-Jackson says that elementary education can close gaps in vocabulary that arise because of a family’s social or linguistic background. Some children have an active vocabulary of 1,200 words when they start kindergarten, while other children have a vocabulary that is only half that size. “You can carry this gap with you throughout your life, the same applies to the passive vocabulary,” says Sarto-Jackson. In this context, there is also talk of the “million word gap”, i.e. a gap of millions of words between adults, which then remains for a lifetime.
Isabella Sarto-Jackson speaks on January 25 at the Symposium Elementarpädagogik at the Vienna University of Education in a lecture on the importance of elementary education from the perspective of brain research.
Elementary education can compensate for such initial advantages and injustices and contribute to a fairer education system. One Study from Canada, for example, was able to show that early childhood education and the number of years in the education system have an impact on the brain and its development. Anyone who learns longer in childhood or adolescence has a better working memory as an adult, meaning they can process information more quickly than people who have fewer years of education.
Early childhood education shows up in the brain
Another Study from Germany recently showed that the ability to think scientifically is already established in childhood. 150 children were accompanied from kindergarten to the end of elementary school and tested once more and once more whether they were interested in unknown phenomena, made discoveries, made assumptions and then tried to check them. There were already big differences in kindergarten age, depending on the educational level of the parents.
Here, too, the kindergarten can have a balancing effect as an educational institution, as long as early childhood support is possible there, says Sarto-Jackson. Smaller groups of children in kindergarten and more well-trained specialists are needed. Interdisciplinary teams or at least developmental psychologists, social pedagogues or speech therapists who can be consulted if necessary would be ideal. This is not the case in Austria, spending on kindergarten is below the OECD average.
