Mustard – why invest in early development

An important question for this century, with the increasing population growth and age distribution of populations in different countries, is how do we ensure that the quality of the next generation, in terms of health and competence, is at the very best that we can achieve? The challenge is, if you really want to set that goal, and if you want to create democratic, stable, pluralistic, prosperous societies you have to do this. The only way that you can get reasonable assurance that your next generations will have greater equity in health and competence is by investing in early child development. So if you look at countries that do this, the Scandinavian countries, they have better equity in literacy and language competence than we do in English-speaking countries like Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the United States. If you just think of that simple statistic, that says well how do you improve the language and literacy competence of populations. Despite the claims of education that it can solve the problem it can’t. Capacity and language and literacy are set by the age of three and hugely set in the first year of life. Children exposed to, in their infancy up to seven months of age, to two different languages, say Japanese and English will speak both languages fluently as adults with no accent and they’ll also be able to learn third and fourth languages easily we know the structures of the brain that are part of that process. Now just think of the United Nations problem of getting people to understand the significance of global warming. Fifty percent of the US population is at levels one and two in the adult population on the literacy assessments. Levels one and two have problems understanding how to take medicine on an empty stomach, they’ll have problems understanding a consent form in the hospital. No wonder they will have problems understanding the significance of the scientific evidence about the nature of what’s causing global warming. It’s a huge problem. And so that you want to get the language skills and whatnot of your population up to high performance to be able to deal globally with the complex issue that we face as a species. That’s one issue.