Kindergarten Too Late?

Our friends at the Asia-Pacific Regional Network for Early Childhood pointed us to an article in The Straits Times of Singapore focusing on a speech in Chicago by Nobel Laureate James Heckman.  Highlights of his remarks:

• "Governments should do more for children aged 0 to 5 years old, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and not wait till they get to kindergarten or primary school.  "They ignore a powerful body of research in the economics of human development."...  "For early childhood programmes targeted at disadvantaged children, there is no trade-off between equity and efficiency as there is for most other social programmes.  Every dollar invested in high-quality early childhood programmes for disadvantaged children produces a 7 to 10 percent annual return on investment through increased productivity and lower social costs."
• "Without doubt, the family is the greatest contributor to the success of children and to upward social and economic mobility.  The way parents interact with their children, the amount of time they spend with them, and the resources they have to provide intellectual and social stimulation greatly affect their children's potential for leading flourishing lives."
• "America has educated itself into ignorance with its single-minded focus on solely boosting cognitive skills.  We see this in the endless debates over K1-12 education and the succession of initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and STEM that place little or no value on building and measuring non-cognitive skills, social skills that are just as important and, in many cases, more important than cognition.  It is empirically documented and now rigorously established as common sense that people need multiple skills to successfully navigate all of life's challenges. There is a strong body of research that documents how important social and emotional skills are for life success."

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