For me, I couldnt find much solid proof, but may be I am not understanding this. anyways this is interesting a read to help our critical thinking!!!
INTERVIEW WITH BRUER
What is the “myth of the first three years” that you talk about?
The myth of the first three years is an idea that draws on some well-established results in developmental neuroscience. [First], developmental neuroscientists have known for 20, 30, 40 years that there is a rapid increase in the number of connections in the human brain – and brains of other animals – after birth. [Second,] they’ve observed that there are critical periods in the development of things like vision and first language learning. [Third], other scientists have observed in rats, at least, that when these animals are put into a complex environment, there seem to be changes in the brain that signal more synaptic growth in the enriched or complex environment.
Those things are well known individually. What the myth does is to weave those three ideas together to try to make a very strong story that brain science tells us that the first three years of life are an absolutely critical period for brain development. But when you pick apart the three strands, you can’t make that strong of an argument. It’s a myth.
Really, though, what’s wrong with putting that forward?
If our intent is to use science and research to form policy, to guide educational practice and to give parents assistance, it’s incumbent on people putting forth those arguments to get the science right. If they choose not to get the science right, if they choose to misinterpret it or over-simplify, we just have another instance of political rhetoric. …
How would you characterize the 1994 campaign that Rob Reiner started on behalf of small children? You’ve used strong words to characterize those campaigns in your book.
The early campaigns really selectively chose very dated pieces of neuroscience and knit them together in a compelling way to sell a story. And the way that those campaigns were put together was pretty much in the same way we would put together an ad campaign or a publicity campaign for any other cause. There’s a place for that.
However, when people claim to be telling us their policy recommendations are based on science, we should be sure that they are. Maybe one of the most unfortunate things I think that developed in the campaigns – “I Am Your Child,” for one – is the suggestion that there’s a very close relationship between brain research and research on attachment theories – developing this affiliative bond between an infant and a caretaker. Attachment research is an important piece of research on child development. Brain science is a very important part of what we might be able to use to help children.
But to date, there is no research that links attachment with brain science. And frankly, many brain scientists are just puzzled by what attachment theory is about. So in that area, what needs to be done is for scientists of various disciplines to sit around the table, state what they believe, what they do know, and begin to ask, “Well, how can our science support your claims? How can yours support ours?” But we have to do the research. We just can’t speculate on these things. …
The “I Am Your Child” campaign raised billions of dollars for early childhood education. Witness the $700 million, at least, in California, from the tobacco tax. What could be wrong with that?
Well, yes, one would think that raising $700 million or whatever it is for early childhood programs couldn’t be a bad thing. And in many ways, it isn’t a bad thing. However, the real problem here is what are you going to do with that money? If the interventions that are going to be put forward are based on scientific arguments “I Am Your Child” put forward, we’re doomed to wasting $700 million. …
Bruer is president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis and the author of The Myth of the First Three Years: A New Understanding of Early Brain Development and Lifelong Learning. He argues that advocates of the “critical periods” theory of brain development have misinterpreted the research, resulting in a potentially disproportionate channeling of resources toward early childhood education.
The Carnegie Foundation report “Starting Points” was an attempt to mobilize public interest to get legislation for early Head Start going again. But the brain science was included in that policy statement almost by accident. And what’s puzzling about this whole story is “Starting Points”-- I believe it’s a 132-page document. There are two paragraphs on page 11 about the brain. But if you look at the press coverage that report received – and it’s press coverage the report should have received, because it’s an important piece of work – all the press talks about is the brain.
This simple popular news weekly magazine idea that adolescents are difficult because their frontal lobes aren’t mature is one we should be very cautious of.
Now, why is that? One hypothesis is that it was promoted that way. A second hypothesis is that we’re all just so fascinated about a brain-based or neural-based explanation for what we want to do, that somehow the brain data is more real. Even if it’s only two paragraphs out of 132 pages, that’s what we look at. …
You made some suppositions in your book about why the brain science part of this argument was so compelling, so seductive. What were those?
… It seems that, when it comes to policy or science or parenting or health, that somehow biology is real science and behavioral science is not. … What’s really unfortunate about that approach is that we have much more to learn from behavioral science about educating and raising our children than we do from brain science right now. …
What sort of things do you think we can learn from behavioral science?
Take for example, claims that we find in the myth literature that the ages from zero to three or zero to ten are the most crucial times for learning – a time when children learn more quickly and efficiently. What’s interesting in the myth literature is that people who make those claims have not looked at any specific cases of learning anything.
When you do look at children’s ability to remember what objects they’ve seen, to remember what places a toy is hidden in, you see that children’s ability to learn those kinds of things increases from the first years of life through adolescence in an inversely proportional way to the number of synapses they’re losing. So this idea that you learn best when you have the most synapses is patently false when you look at learning curves for various tasks.
Furthermore, what we do know about learning based on 25, 30 years or more of research in cognitive developmental psychology, is that you learn most easily and most quickly if you have a sound understanding prior. Your prior knowledge is the best predictor of how quickly and well you will learn. You can look at word learning, for example. The more words people know, the more quickly they’ll learn new ones. So this notion that rate of learning is so closely linked to the biological maturation of the brain isn’t a very useful one.
If we wanted to improve instruction for children, young children, what we should do is try to figure out what do they know before instruction; what do we want them to be able to do after instruction; and how working from what they know already can we design an instructional environment that will take them from where they are to where they want to be. …
continue reading it here as I cant post the whole thing, beyond character limit!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/interviews/bruer.html