Early childhood education...my take

In our Kenyan setting, Early Childhood Education is still on shaky grounds. Educators claim to be working toward making our children literate. However I feel strongly that we are going about it in the wrong way. What they end up doing is forced speech and alphabetization with no regard to the child’s background.

When a child is born, the home is the first school he/she attends. The child learns to walk and talk to themselves and others. They develop self confidence and gain curiosity about their environment. The child’s caretaker acts as their first teacher. This young learner gains confidence and becomes fluent in their mother tongue. They are able to identify in their mother tongue ‘mother’ ‘father’, ‘chair’, ‘tree’, ‘fruit’ among other things in their environment. They are taught how to read and write their names in English with their mother tongue being used as the language of instruction. This child is literate!

Then the child is taken to nursery school and is reduced to dumbness, by being addressed to and forced to speak in an alien language, in our case English. For a four year old child the move from home to school is stressful enough. You cannot begin to imagine what that child is going through when they can no longer communicate. They are reduced to ‘infants’ whose only recourse is to cry when in need. This is traumatizing for the young learner. A once bubbly and bright child becomes dull and withdrawn. They are forced to relearn ‘mother’ ’father’ ’fruit’ ’chair’ and everything they knew about  their environment in English.

Clearly there is need for a re-birth of methodology and our approach to Early Childhood Education in our country.