I wanted to share my email that I received from Robin in South Africa. This class has been an amazing journey for me. This is what she wrote.

This seems to be a world-wide problem in early childhood education. I’ve been to a number of international conferences where the same questions and concerns are being raised.

In South Africa we have a history of inequality in education which has caused great inadequacy in levels of education. Our National curriculum is trying to address this imbalance by

Creating more ‘formal’ and academic learning in early childhood. This is known as Grade R (reception year), for the 5-6 year old child, preparing them for school.

This academic approach is putting both children and teachers under a great deal of pressure and forcing the child into early learning.

Our pedagogy does not support early learning as we firmly believe that this does not truly meet the child at their developmental stage. We base our work on very valuable (international) research that supports the fact that formal learning is detrimental to the child’s development as it forces them into an unnatural intellectual situation before they are ready. We work in a way that supports the child’s ‘emergent’ (or unconscious) knowledge, so that by the time they are ready this will become conscious knowledge (rather than forcing them into conscious knowledge when they are still in a largely unconscious phase of life).

As you so rightly point out, there are many aspects of child Development, with each area integrating into the other and we have huge concerns about the focus on academic learning. We have a very  ‘common-sense’ wholistic approach to early childhood development which we bring into our training of teachers. We do also make sure that they understand what the National curriculum expects from them so they are well informed , and by comparing these methods, have a better understanding of how to truly support the development of the child.

In our poorer communities we have huge problems with the lack of qualified teachers and there are a number of ways in which our government is trying to address this. All Early Childhood Centres/schools have to be registered, and one of the main criteria for this is that the teachers have to be qualified. There are many training programmes running to support this need but often the education (schooling) of the teachers themselves has been so poor that they struggle with the training and need much support and mentoring to be qualified. Many children in these communities are not being properly prepared for school – an ongoing challenge for us all.

As far as funding goes our teachers, especially in Early Childhood, are very poorly paid. At present there are moves in government to address the lack of ‘career -pathing ‘in ECD and the professionalism in ECD where these teachers are often considered ‘less than’ the Primary and High school teachers. There is also a lack of sufficient funding for the research that is hugely necessary for early childhood.

Robyn Davis

   
I wanted to add some additional information that I found on this subject according to saep.org. According to this site many of the schools are overcrowded, lack education and the ratio is 60 children to 2 adults. According to the site there are not a lot of resources for the children, not many children make it to higher education and many children live without electricity. It was really interesting to read that there is intensive training in HIV and also classes in hygiene.

resource http://www.saep.org/media/docs/134053962824.pdf