Dr. Lee on importance of Preschool education

Nov 3, 2006

Why Govt should support quality preschool education


By Lee Wei Ling

IT WOULD seem surprising to most people that a single, 51-year-old female who made a conscious decision not to take on the responsibility of bringing up children should be so concerned about preschool education/early intervention. Yet this is one of the subjects I feel most passionate about.

This is due to rational scientific evidence that, as a paediatric neurologist, I am acutely aware of.

The preschool age is a time when the child's mind is most ready to absorb languages and moral values. It is also the best time to stimulate creativity.

In Singapore, the Government legislates compulsory education from Primary1 to Secondary 4. To me, that misses the most crucial first six years of life. Two years of compulsory preschool education of guaranteed quality is worth more than four years of compulsory secondary education.

The Jesuits say: 'Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.'

However, looking after infants and toddlers is expensive and labour-intensive.

On the other hand, one-to-one mother-child interaction is a more stimulating environment than ordinary childcare centres.

Hence, it is not practical in most circumstances to have structured education in a group setting until at least the end of the third year of life.

However, between then and starting primary school, there is not enough high-quality affordable education/early intervention facilities.

In the Housing Board heartland, where more than 80 per cent of families live, the most easily available and affordable kindergartens are those run by the PAP Community Foundation (PCF).

The PCF kindergartens have, in the past, tended to emphasise literacy and numeracy by rote learning.

As a society, we emphasise rote learning too much; and the kindergartens offer what many parents want, although in recent years, there have been changes in the curriculum offered by PAP kindergartens.

Some have incorporated more free play into the curriculum.

I have visited typical PAP kindergartens as well as those with less rigidly structured teaching methods. They do not meet the quality I would demand for my own child.

I have, together with the help of two MPs, started a modified kindergarten programme in three PAP kindergartens, which emphasises learning through natural experiences, social interactions, daily activities, involvement of the family and society, as well as fun, games and outings.

The emphasis is on language acquisition and enrichment, as well as instilling social consciousness, empathy for others, interracial and inter-religious tolerance. Numeracy and literacy are also taught but again incorporated into fun and games or other daily activities.

Initially, parents of children attending these kindergartens were worried and asked: 'Why is my child not being taught ABCs and where are his worksheets?'

After a year, parents have been surprised at how much better behaved, confident and well-mannered their children had become.

The children had also kept pace with the literacy and numeracy standards of their counterparts in other PAP kindergartens.

The cost of such a specialised programme is obviously more because the teacher-to-pupils ratio is better and the teachers are better trained.

Such a programme cannot be offered by the PAP kindergartens with the existing fee and cost structure.

Some private kindergartens which charge much more also offer such programmes.

So it comes down to cost. But no price can be placed on the actual advantage children in the special programmes have over those who are not in such programmes.

Head Start is a preschool programme in the United States, meant to give extra stimulation to preschool children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

In an old study, children in this programme did better academically in Grade1 and Grade 2, compared to their counterparts in the same social economic background not enrolled in the Head Start and other preschool intervention programmes.

These programmes designed for disadvantaged children can provide an immediate boost in IQ equivalent to eight IQ points. This obviously improves academic performance.

But these effects decline in time and were negligible several years after children exited the programmes.

However, long-term follow-up studies of early intervention programmes, where children were followed up until age 20, showed that there was a statistically significant decrease in school dropouts, rate of committing crimes, juvenile arrest, violent arrest, and need for special education.

A cost analysis study done in the US shows that the benefits of the programme greatly exceed the cost.

This is true even if all benefits from reduction in crime and delinquency were totally omitted.

Extrapolating this to the Singapore context, introducing affordable quality preschool education especially to the children of the most socially disadvantaged families is the best way to level up.

The Government should spend money in this area and find a way of supporting and encouraging kindergartens to introduce quality education.

Without government support, the kindergartens themselves will not be able to provide the quality needed because the cost is high.

Better than the Progress Package, ComCare Fund, and the cost of the Gifted Education Programme (GEP), high-quality preschool education, in my opinion, should be the Government's responsibility.

Another related issue in education is the gifted programme.

This has been around for a long while, enough for those who entered the programme to have graduated from polytechnic or university.

The products of the gifted programme do well academically, often better than those not in the programme. But should that come as a surprise?

What I am worried about, however, are the social consequences of taking a small group of students at a very early age and telling them that they are superior to everyone else.

Through no fault of their own, these children will be encouraged to have a sense of superiority, which may not be justified and which may not be good for society.

Their problems can be accentuated by the fact that many of them are likely to be children of well-educated parents of higher socio-economic class.

There is a risk that some of them might live in their own world, speak in their own language, and not have enough empathy for the rest of the society.

That is why I read with some consternation in the newspapers recently that the number of children in the gifted programme may be increased from 1 per cent to 3 per cent.

It would be of interest to track the career course of the children who had been in the GEP and I would be interested to know their choice of career as well as their involvement in social work.

My concern is that a super elitist system may not necessarily be good for society as a whole.

Dr Lee is the director of the National Neuroscience Institute. The views expressed here are her own.