Throughout the ages, Chinese parents have attached the greatest importance to their children's intellectual development and habit formation, and this concept has also contributed to the prevalence of early education in China. As the hope of China's education reform, a few days ago, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, a child educator, and academician Wei Yu, who was vice minister of education, vice chairman of the China Association for Science and Technology and president of Southeast University, once said: "Children's brain development cannot rely on early education classes, and we must truly "put your children on your heart."
The following is the details of the interview, on the issue of treating early education, Academician Wei Yu's answer can be described as a pearl of words:
Reporter: At present, early education classes are prevalent in society, proposing "don't lose at the starting line", and there are many criticisms of this phenomenon.
Wei Yu: Early education classes are mostly driven by interests, and the early education revolution is a "revolution" that violates the law of early childhood development in education, and I have criticized a so-called "father of early education" before. True science, every study, a problem, hundreds of articles to prove.
Now kindergartens teach Chinese mathematics, which is not right. Kindergarten threatens parents, saying you can't keep up with elementary school if you don't learn. My grandson is not smart, he didn't learn anything in kindergarten, didn't he still keep up with the fourth grade?
Scientific research proves that the child has no episodic memory until the age of 5, and he does not remember until he is 6 years old, and it is useless for you to call him rote, he will forget. Learning knowledge before the age of 6 is adding pressure to the child. Early learning is not about memory, but on circumstance. If Dad speaks English and Mom speaks Chinese, he will soon speak Chinese English. His way of learning is to imitate and observe, to learn by speaking and communicating with other people's languages.
The famous American children's language development expert, Professor Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, has done an experiment, children learn language, must be taught, machines, repeating machines are useless. There are also suggestions for e-reading. Early education must interact with children, must communicate, such as children watching TV, like watching advertising, because it is simple, children do not have the ability to integrate complex information.
I've made eight points about early education:
Nutrition, food and environmental safety;
Stable, secure attachment relationships;
Parents who need warmth, stability, and positive interaction;
Good, interactive language environment (listening, understanding and speaking);
Rich, positive learning environment (imitation and inquiry);
avoidance of early neglect and injury (prevention of being in a state of chronic stress for a long time);
Increase social communication with peers;
Discovery, diagnosis and correction of early abnormal development.
"Don't let the child lose at the starting line", the United States also agrees, the environment should be good, the starting point should be high, the child should have a stable nurturing environment, and constant communication should be made. Parents are the hope of China's education reform, to truly "put your children in your heart". Parents have no other interests, and they want their children to have a correct and happy growth path. The expert is not, the expert may go back to teaching his own children to use this set, but he must hold this position, he is against this thing. The biggest obstacle to educational reform is the experts. For every change, experts in the field are the biggest obstacles.
Reporter: Can intelligence be developed? Is intelligence innate or nurtured?
Wei Yu: The so-called "development of intelligence" statement is not scientific. There are many kinds of intelligence, the diversification of human intelligence, only two countries in the world have undergone misinterpretations, one is our China, the other is Australia. Australia believes that indigenous people have only music and sports. China is now popular, everyone has multiple intelligences, anything can be good, singing and dancing are developing. In fact, there must be one thing in a person's life that he does the most effortlessly and learns the fastest, you want him to discover this, and do this thing for the rest of his life, he will be happy and interested.
People have intelligent genes, and children's learning ability is not completely innate, but it is not completely formed by acquired training, but by the innate gene to give a framework for the development of certain abilities and many abilities, which require acquired experience to start and develop. Musicians, born in a musical family, are more likely to become musicians, but not every musician's child is a musician. Any outcome is the result of constant action between genes and the environment. But there are also innate factors. Two brains in a hundred thousand people have special structures, but sometimes they are pathological.
Reporter: What is the sequence of learning progress in early education you are talking about? What is the main reference to social-emotional ability? What role does social-emotional capacity play in a child's development? What does a child's executive function refer to? What role does executive function play in children's development?
Wei Yu: The sequence of early education learning progression is language learning, social emotional ability and executive function. An important function of early education is to cultivate children's social-emotional abilities, which are formed at an early age, and children's social-emotional abilities can only be cultivated through social practice activities. Research shows that the emotional abilities they have in childhood, rather than their emotional intelligence, are the best predictors of their success later in life. One of the important research directions of the Key Laboratory of Child Development and Learning Science of the Ministry of Education of Southeast University is to study the development, evaluation and cultivation of children's social and emotional ability, which is our characteristic, and we combine the cultivation of children's social and emotional ability with inquiry-based science education, which is also leading in the world.
Through emotional education, parents establish a safe relationship of dependence with their children, and a warm and stable positive interaction family relationship. The child will imitate, how you treat him at this time, he will do to people, he relies on imitation to form a mechanism of self-reaction. Magashule would not have sinned if he had controlled it. Uncontrollable, rapid, unconscious reactions are formed in early education. Parents can not give him too much pressure, we do not advocate arguing in front of the child, do not tell the child about the difficulties of the family, this has an impact on him.
For example, there is a child of a family who likes to set up blocks and then "uproar" to tear them all down. This is not good, there is no ability to control, and it is indiscriminate to vent emotions. You have to teach him, put one first, then put the second, teach him patiently, only parents have this heart. If you educate him in this way, there will be no problem in adolescence. If the relationship with the parents is solid in the early days, believe you, and the rebellion of adolescence will be reduced, which is called attachment. The child wants to treat you as the closest person, and he will talk to you.
Executive function is also very important, training control ability, early childhood is an important stage in the development of executive function, can not be willful. Including the ability to social situations, there is also the ability to control, to recognize their emotions and control them. Our laboratory has done a great deal of work in the study, evaluation and intervention of executive function in children.
In 2007, Southeast University united several departments, including the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health, the All-China Women's Federation and other units, invited two very famous foreign experts who studied early childhood development to make a report at the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. It is too late to educate your children correctly, and it is sad.
During the meeting, I brought these two experts to a leader, and they said very profoundly, "If you do not revise the early childhood development policy, there will be endless troubles in the future." We proposed to revise the relevant education policies in the form of a letter from the CPPCC National Committee to the General Office of the State Council, and we quickly received instructions from the leaders.
Reporter: Now many parents let their children learn English when they are very young, do you think it is necessary? Why?
Wei Yu: The whole people are educated in English, but I don't know how this policy was decided? In 1981, Professor Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize for his left-right brain theory, saying that learning a second language before the age of 14 can become a native speaker, so our country stipulates that English should be learned from the first grade of primary school. In fact, people have different memory systems, and there are many advantages to learning before the age of 14, but now that the United States is doing experiments, the learning of a second language cannot be less than 150 minutes a day to reach the level of native language, and it is not certain. In general, early learning is not based on memory, but on the environment. If the father speaks English and the mother speaks Chinese, the child will master the bilingual language very quickly, and an environment is needed. I asked my grandson not to learn English at all when he was in elementary school. Now he has a hundred or so TOEFL tests, and 5 American schools have given him college acceptance letters. He was very happy, he had been playing since he was a child, the sun was shining, he didn't learn English when he was a child, I taught him pronunciation. He didn't go to English class at all, and the English class drove the teacher out of the classroom and went outside to play.
Reporter: Do you believe that "diligence can make up for clumsiness"? In other words, how much weight does IQ and effort each play in a person's growth process?
Wei Yu: It is said that diligence can make up for clumsiness, diligence should see which level, accumulation is OK, to break through, diligence is always needed, but more importantly, the method. The method is not useful for light diligence. The quality education we are engaged in now is to change the educational method of taking the test and teach them the method of solving problems.
The biggest problem with china's test-taking education is that the basic education methods are not known. First, brain science reveals that, for example, good chess players, who have chess scores in their heads, are unconscious when they are playing, and concepts and models have been constructed in their minds, so we want children to build such things in their minds as well. Yang Zhenning said that these concepts have become intuition, and we have spent a lot of effort to teach these epoch-making concepts of great science, so that these most basic concepts have become children's intuition. Our laboratory has done a good study, using the EEG method to identify whether scientific concepts are really mastered.
When a chess player meets a good teacher, he can learn well. Bad teacher, the chess game is not right, how to play? Liu Xiang, he has good talent, but to meet a bad teacher, the basic movements are not taught correctly, and the grades will not go up, and the coach is very important. The method of education must be correct, but also interested, and when the ideas suddenly burst out, they must be highly concentrated. Experts read the article, at a glance can see the problem, because there is a model in the brain. So to teach students, there must be this structure in consciousness.