Dear Editor,

In recent months we have been hearing repeatedly about early childhood education as if it were a new idea.

Interestingly, there is a remarkable and instructive history of early childhood education in Jamaica. This form of education was not part of the 1835 Negro Education Act that gave rise to primary school education under the leadership and control of the Church. Early childhood institutions emerged over the period of time in the church rooms, community centres, and in the backyards of homes led by church and community leaders.

What is instructive about the history is the important role played by Reverend Henry Ward and Reverend Madge Saunders during the 1920s and 1940s, respectively. New pages in the history of its development were written in the 1960s and 1970s, and in 2003 the Task Force on Educational Reform made the recommendation for early childhood education to be fully integrated into the Ministry of Education.

There is a prevalence of early childhood education in contemporary Jamaica, including those attached to primary schools. The problem is complex and has to do with a combination of lack of resources and lack of adequate response to a crisis in communication. A dysfunctional system of communication leads to a dysfunctional system of education.

The absence of policy did not mean the absence of early childhood institutions. Prior to 1962 I attended Miss Flemming’s basic school on the Old Road in York district, in a bamboo church building. Miss Flemming walked two miles from Seaforth with a small group of children to York. She was a member of a kind of revivalist type church movement in Seaforth. We sat on a bamboo bench with no backrest and used blackboards and slates. And, of course, she had the leather strap given to her by my grandmother.

My grandmother could not read, but she knew the value of education. No one in the family spoke English and the people in the village were Patois speakers. The community was at the fringe of Morant Plantation and the villagers worked on their small farms or on the plantations cultivating banana and/or sugar cane.

My early education came from planting, reaping, and hunting birds with sling shots and catching “janga” in the river for cooking. I went to high school, but I did not pass English language at the General Certificate of Education (GCE) O level examinations.

It is important to examine the relationship between the child, his/her community, language, and communication in early childhood education in a post-slavery society. Therefore, matters concerning history and culture cannot be left out of the discussion. The child emerges into a society with social, linguistic, and cultural interactions that will have influence on his/her development. This, of course, has to do with the child’s background, community, family, and exposure to language as early forms of learning. I suppose one could call it “natural” learning.

When that child is immersed in formal schooling with a totally different cultural setting and is being taught in a language that is new, there must be some confusion in his/her mind. The child must have cultural activities in his/her language included in the wider cultural exposure along with English, the language of the education system, as a second language.

It is a crime against humanity to teach a child in a language he/she does not speak. The demand here is to teach them English so they can learn the rules of the game. Language is more than grammar, paragraphs, and sentences. It is also about critical thinking, logic, and reasoning, and since reading is more than recognition of words, it should be understood that having a poor grasp of the language of education leads to poor results in mathematics and the sciences.

After 60 years of Independence, we have not yet embarked on the journey of cultural decolonisation.

Louis E A Moyston

thearchives01@yahoo.com