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| How to enrich your
child's intelligence from birth to ten
Every country's educational priorities
are completely back to front.
Researchers have proved beyond doubt that you develop
around 50 percent of your ability to learn in the first four years of life. And you
develop another 30 percent of that ability before you turn eight.1
This does not mean that you absorb 50 percent of your knowledge
or 50 percent of your wisdom or 50 percent of your intelligence by your
fourth birthday. It simply means that in those first few years you form the main learning
pathways in your brain. Everything else you learn in life will be built on that base. You
also take in a fantastic amount of information in those early years. And all later
learning will grow from that core.
Yet nearly every country spends well under ten percent
of its educational budget on the years where 50 percent of development takes place.
Says British psychologist Tony Buzan: "At the
moment a child is born it's already really brilliant. It picks up language, much better
than a doctor of philosophy in any subject, in only two years. And it is a master at it by
three or four."2
Buzan says every child born, unless it has severe brain
damage, is a budding genius. He demonstrates that early built-in urge to learn with a
piece of paper. "Imagine I am now a three-month-old baby," he smiles.
"You've given me this piece of paper. You know it's not going to last long. Now do I
do it like this? (He mimes a small child looking passively at the paper and then ignoring
it.) Or do I do it like this?" (He then tries to tear the paper, crumple it, rattle
it, and even stuff it in his mouth.) "It's obviously the second way. And what that
little baby was doing was being
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