Some time ago, I was asked to give a lecture, and the title they gave me was, Building a Good Foundation. I thought about it and thought about it. And then I talked to my husband who was a civil engineer; his whole career was designing buildings. And I said, when you design the foundation what are some of the principles that you use? And so the first one he said was, “You have to find out everything you can about the soil you’re building on. Is it, how far do you have to go to get to the rock, is it sandy, slushy, slimy, wet?” and so on and so forth, he went on for about an hour. And then the second thing he said was you have to be very clear about what kind of structure you want to put on it. Is it going to be tall and thin or round or wide and so on and so forth. The third thing he said was, you have to also find out all about what forces will act on it, will there be hurricanes or tornados or earthquakes and so on and so forth, and finally he said, and I think it’s very appropriate for us, if you don’t get it right the first time, it can be very expensive to repair, and very dangerous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I’ve used that as a sort of analogy to frame my ideas about the early childhood as a foundation stage, and basically I think it means that you have to consider what goes in to a good foundation like, well, what experiences have the children had? What experiences have they not had that they should have had? Have they had opportunities to listen to stories and so on and so forth. So, if you’re the teacher of young children, you’ll want to take time as you get to know the to find out what they have had and what they haven’t had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other question is for all of us as professionals to come together on various occasions to talk about what kind of structure we want to build. And we usually speak in very vague terms, we want children to be curious and to be confident and have high self-esteem and things like that. That’s not very helpful. And so I’ve often given a lot of thought to what are the main aspects of development that we should think about when they’re young.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The third part, as I mentioned, is what forces impact on the children and we, in most parts of the world today, have to think a lot about for example, what’s the impact of constant television watching? Kids see it a lot. What impact does it have on their foundation building? And should we make adjustments or should we encourage parents to prevent children from spending so much time in that sort of passive role.
But also what kinds of experiences should be provided while they’re in the preschool and early education years of school and I agree with the principle that the engineers talk about, and that’s if you don’t get it right in the beginning it can be very expensive, in fact, some parts of it can’t be repaired.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Katz \u2013 building a strong foundation Some time ago, I was asked to give a lecture, and the title they gave me was, Building a Good Foundation. I thought about it and thought about it. And then I talked to my husband who was a civil engineer; his whole career was designing buildings. And I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-27","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/27\/revisions\/99"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}