On Becoming Human

Dr Pam Jarvis

Being and becoming through free play • Free play provides essential practice experience for

young animals. • It is observed in young animals across the range of

mammalian species. • In human beings, physical styles of free play that can also

be observed in non-human animals are enhanced with linguistic communication that develops into narrative (e.g., rough and tumble)

• Free play develops skills that human beings use to become  more  competent,  confident  children  in  the  ‘now’  and subsequently build upon to become skilled adults in the future

• The more complex the adult society, the longer animals spend in their developmental period, and the more complex the free play activities in which they engage.

• The most complex societies on earth are those created by human beings.

The biocultural model of the person • Human beings are born with

a basic neuronal architecture which is highly plastic, and subsequently undergoes a huge amount of development in interaction with the environment: “Nature  via  nurture”.  

• In common with other, albeit less plastic mammals, young children principally achieve such development through play activity in spontaneous exchanges with adults and other children

So how do human beings learn to make meaning?

http://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/506084

A jazz duet... the two partners are not dancing  to  someone  else’s  tune  but  are  creating one of their own (Zeedyk 2006)

Human life across the centuries..

‘Children grew up in a play culture which paralleled the larger culture in which it was embedded….  ‘(Gray  2011,  pp.362-363)

A highly evolved, linguistic primate

The  human  ‘storying animal’ Lyle (2000) proposes that human

beings are a  ‘storying animal’  making sense of thoughts and events via narratives initially learned in early childhood, for example to be kind or unkind; to co-operate or not co-operate.

The only way that we can absorb these human narratives is to spontaneously engage with them, from our very earliest experiences.

Making meaning together

And there is a lot to learn, because adult communication is complex..

My  blackberry  isn’t  working....

And now, the whole world communicates....

Developmental Environments So how do we currently intend to prepare

children to learn the skills that they need for such complex communication?

• ‘Listen[ing] to a teacher, learn[ing] to respect an instruction [through] activities which [a] teacher is clearly leading...’  (Elizabeth  Truss,  Children’s  Minister  in  the  Telegraph, September 2013)

• ‘Gove's  staff….  said  allowing  children  to  play instead of learn was an "excuse for not teaching  poor  children  how  to  add  up"’  (The Guardian September 2013)

• Chief OFSTED Inspector Michael Wilshaw proposes that  the  nation  should  ‘focus  on  evaluating whether children are being adequately prepared for the start of their statutory schooling.‘  (Nursery  World,  March  2014)

The current situation... • In 2007, a UNICEF survey comparing self reports from

children in western nations relating to their feelings of ‘well-being’  indicated  that  the UK produces the unhappiest children in the western world

• In a 2013 update, UNICEF found the UK still well behind other European nations. One reason they suggest for this  is  a  narrowly  focused  ‘transmit  and  test’  education  system, creating winners and losers at very young ages

• But is this system working in the educational sense? Well...

• The OECD found that literacy proficiency in particular has stagnated over the past half-century in the UK

• The UK is among the three highest-performing countries in literacy when comparing 55-65 year-olds; but among the bottom three countries when comparing literacy proficiency among 16-24 year-olds.

In the beginning.... • Mass state schooling is a relatively

recent development, less than 200 years old in England, created to meet the requirements of the industrial revolution, instilling basic literacy and numeracy into the masses

• It was never designed to deal with young children under five years of age, certainly not those additionally traumatised by parental neglect and societal indifference.

• Nursery education, particularly for disadvantaged children, as initially envisaged by early twentieth century pioneer Margaret McMillan was based on nourishing food, cleanliness, plenty of outdoor play and peer socialisation, not relentless, target driven instruction by adults.

Margaret McMillan 1924:

‘Educate every child as though he were your own’

The crux of the issue • While few would dispute that it is the more advantaged children

within  our  society  who  ‘get  a  steady  stream  of  educational  activities  in their early years,’  (Elizabeth  Truss,  Children’s  Minister  in  the  Telegraph, September 2013) it must also be emphasised that these do not  equate  to  ‘listen[ing] to a teacher, learn[ing] to respect an instruction’  and  certainly  not  ‘through  activities  which  [a]  teacher  is  clearly leading’!  

• Young children in the vast majority of contemporary British families, regardless  of  presumed  ‘class’  or  ethnic  background,  interact  with others within immediate and extended family/ neighbourhood environments, absorbing  ‘lessons’  in  human  social  and  emotional  cohesion which, in order to prepare them for human adult interaction, must be spontaneous and flexible, not formal, targeted or transmitted.

• It is in this stage that they learn to absorb the narratives that allow them  to  grasp  what  the  full  extent  of  ‘being  human’  actually  involves. This cannot be simply transmitted through a pre-prepared lesson; in order to become,  they  first  have  to  learn  to  flexibly  ‘be’  within secure and supported interactions.

Educating the babies... • The key focus for the

government is therefore revealed as how children from a societal minority (estimated at 120,000 disadvantaged families by Prime Minister David Cameron in December 2011) might be given access to rich social immersion in their early developmental period.

• How, then has this issue been subsequently developed into a mission  to  conscript  the  nation’s  two and three year olds en masse into formal teaching and learning environments?

The academic response • Whitebread and  Bingham  (2011)  propose:  ‘It  is

not whether a child is ready to learn, but what a child  is  ready  to  learn…  [the current]... approach fuels an increasingly dominant notion of education  as  ‘transmission  and  reproduction’,  and  of early childhood as preparation for school rather  than  for  ‘life’

• Jarvis, Newman and Swiniarski (2014) outline research in psychology, anthropology, education, sociology and philosophy that indicates young children learn through a range of face-to-face play-based interactions, in which they independently and spontaneously interact with others, both adults and peers.

• Such experience is crucial in terms of building flexible social skills that later enable them to cope with intricate webs of co-operation, collaboration and competition, both formal and informal, that are characteristic of all human social arenas, for example high schools, neighbourhood committees and international negotiations.

• Singer (1999) makes the very useful suggestion that  we  should  construct  ‘policies...  grounded  on  the best available evidence of what human beings are like’

The proof of the pudding.... • According to Piaget, who conducted

the most extensive empirical research in this area, children become increasingly more able to deal with abstract communications and ideas around the seventh birthday

• In Shanghai, Korea and Finland, the school starting age is seven

• In Singapore, Canada, Japan and Norway, it is six

• Therefore the school starting ages in all nations that significantly out-perform the UK are later, not earlier

• Those at the top of the performance scales have the latest school starting ages of all

• Calling for an earlier school starting age to improve standards is thus revealed as completely illogical, as revealed by both theoretical and empirical data.

So... should we force the bud apart and destroy it, or help it to flourish by nourishing it while it grows naturally?

A practical suggestion...

• All British infants’  social  and  emotional  needs,  most importantly those relating to attachment and stability, should be nurtured in flexible, spontaneous, play based interactions with other children and adults

• Such experience is vitally required to underpin development into secure, sociable human beings from which more formal interaction skills emerge, from mid-childhood onwards

• Nurseries and day care centres should be managed by graduate leaders who understand these fundamental elements of human development.

• With respect specifically to children living in situations of disadvantage, we should request assistance from community volunteers to help staff ‘neighbourhood’  centres, who would work alongside paid professionals under the guidance of graduate leaders

• Such centres could be developed from the basis of existing  children’s  centres

• There are many over-sixties in particular who would welcome the sense of purpose gained from offering support to young families struggling with poverty, unemployment, depression and feelings of hopelessness.

Can we afford the funding for such a project? • Such an initiative would help to

address the cycle of disadvantage, eventually reducing rates of mental illness, substance abuse and child neglect.

• The costs would eventually be recouped in reducing the amount spent on the criminal justice and child protection services

• See the ongoing results of the ‘Head  Start’  Perry  Pre-school Study in the US; the researchers calculate that for every dollar spent, seventeen were eventually saved. (Schweinhart et al 2005)

References British Pathé Archive, video file: Nursery Days! Video Newsreel Film, 21st August 1939: British Pathé Archive.

Retrieved from: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/nursery-days Cameron, D. (2011) Troubled Families Speech, 15th December 2011. Retrieved from:

http://engage.number10.gov.uk/static/engage/troubledfamilies/ Gray, P. (2011) The decline of play and the rise of psychopathology in children and adolescents. American Journal of

Play 3(4), 443–463, (pp.362-363) The Guardian (2013) Early schooling damaging childrens well-being, say experts. Retrieved from:

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/sep/12/early-years-schooling-damaging-wellbeing (September 2013)

Jarvis,  P.  Newman,  S.  And  Swiniarski,  L.  (2014)  On  ‘becoming  social’:  the  importance  of  collaborative  free  play  in  childhood. International Journal of Play (in press). Retrieved from: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21594937.2013.863440#.U0OrY1ePNQR

Lyle, S. (2000) Narrative Understanding: Developing a Theoretical Context for Understanding how Children Make Meaning in Classroom Settings. Journal of Curriculum Studies 32 (1), pp.45-63

Nursery World (2014) Ofsted Chief writes to inspectors to outline reporting priorities. Retrieved from: http://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/nursery-world/news/1142906/ofsted-chief-writes-inspectors-outline-reporting-priorities (March 2014)

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2013) Skilled for Life? Key findings from the survey of adult skills. Paris: OECD. Retrieved From: http://skills.oecd.org/SkillsOutlook_2013_KeyFindings.pdf

Singer, P. (1999) A Darwinian Left: Politics, evolution and cooperation. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson p.61 Schweinhart, L., Montie, J., Xiang, Z., Barnett, W.S., Belfield, C. and Nores, M. (2005) Lifetime Effects: The

High/Scope Perry Preschool Study through age 40. Yipsilanti: High/Scope Press. The Telegraph (2013) If we care about the poorest children education must start early. Retrieved from:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/10305030/If-we-care-about-the-poorest-children-education-must-start-early.html (September 2013)

UNICEF (2007). An overview of child well-being in rich countries. Florence: UNICEF. Retrieved from http://www.unicef-icdc.org/presscentre/presskit/reportcard7/rc7_eng.pdf

UNICEF (2013). Child well-being in rich countries: a comparative overview. Florence: UNICEF. Retrieved from: http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc11_eng.pdf

The World Bank (2014) Primary School Starting Age. Retrieved from http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.PRM.AGES