I’ve just read a very thoughtful paper on professional practice as it relates to the early care of children. It wasn’t written by an American researcher. I can’t quite tell you why it is that much of what is written for the American academic market is bound up totally in theory — those who write appear to have rarely had any long term experience physically working in early care.
Having read this paper it reminded me of the grave concern I have about the training of teachers, at all levels. I was recently in the company of an elementary school teacher and her two children — there is something about her lack of compassion and the management of her own children that tells me that despite probably ten years of teaching experience she lacks a depth and philosophical substance to her work; reflected in ‘the missing puzzle pieces that I can’t quite put my finger on’ in her own children.
Teaching frequently requires plenty of documentation but not much compassion or warmth even in classes for the under-five’s. Those children are really still babies and will, for the most part, not have had time to actually be babies in the true sense of the word — ever — since they were mostly likely in care from the time they were just a few months old.
Now that I understand so well the nature of learning to talk and learning to be human and the factors which afford the best development to occur, I am frequently distressed at the impoverished nature of the care and teaching most young children receive during the five days a week they are in care.
Even the most well-meaning teacher training programme can’t turn out compassionate teachers — I suspect it’s not even one of their programme goals. How can you have a teacher training programme where a young person, mostly young women, spends four or more years in the academic world and does not get out into the classroom until their internship, right before they graduate!
One of the benefits of my own teacher training was the opportunity to be in schools virtually from the moment I started my course. Those days in classrooms were critical to my own personal development and I can now see that, and my own educational experiences, became the catalysts to my understanding, particularly of disadvantaged children.
When an American Montessori Society (AMS) teacher training programme lasts six weeks and when in my experience there is little to no supervision of a teacher once they start teaching, exactly what sort of teacher do you think will be the outcome? The quality I’ve observed is: poor to impoverished. On the other hand where an individual has taken the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI – the more traditional and much longer European Montessori two-year diploma course) there is a better result.
The last issue with developing quality teachers, particularly for the under-five’s, is the poor pay scale and lack of benefits, regardless of whether the teacher has a degree. The management of a private, unsubsidized pre-school/daycare precludes paying staff at a level commensurate with their abilities and thus there is a constant turnover of employees. Of course some responsibility rests with the management and people skills of the owner of any school as to how happy their staff is and whether or not they stay put.
Every child should have the benefit of having the same teachers for the first five years of their lives. I have lost count of the number of different teachers who passed through the facility where I worked for four years — it frankly horrified me and my conscience forced me to stay on in the job simply to provide at least the minimum of continuity of care recommended for all children under age five. According to my calculations, once I left the staff turnover percentage went over the 80% mark!
We need to come to terms with the tragedy of early childhood care — it simply isn’t working to provide children with the best possible start. Some compromises (probably parental!) are needed so that it isn’t the responsibility of the public school system to pick up the slack, financially and physically, of early childhood developmental neglect.
The time has come!