Chapter 7 - The vital years

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The vital years	255

  Thirty percent of Missouri families with youngsters under three were on the PAT program at the start of the 1990s. The cost per family was approximately $250 a year, of which the state provided $180 and the school district found the rest. So to provide that service to every American family with children up to three would cost $3-billion a year for 12 million youngsters. That's only about twice what tiny Singapore (with Oregon's population) is spending equipping its schools with computers.
  But Former Harvard Professor Burton L. White, who played a big part in establishing the program, has ended his involvement with PAT because he says it is "hopelessly underfunded".28 To do the job properly, he says, would require much higher spending - and it should be top priority. He says not more than one American child in ten gets adequate development in the vital first three years of life. "This state of affairs may be a tragedy," he says, "but it is by no means a twentieth-century tragedy. In the history of Western education there has never been a society that recognized the educational importance of the earliest years or sponsored any systematic preparation and assistance to families or any other institution in guiding the early development of children."29
  Professor White says the period from when a child starts walking up to two years is most important. "Every one of the four educational foundations - the development of language, curiosity, intelligence and socialness - is at risk during the period from eight months to two years."
  He says bluntly that "our society does not train people to raise children". Today he runs a model program at his Centre for Parent Education in Waban, Massachusetts, and dreams of the day when nations make similar projects the top educational priority. So do we.
  Professor Diamond, however, sounds a note of caution: "I do worry when people say things like 'Well, if you don't do something by three years of age forget it; you've closed the opportunity to stimulate that brain.' We don't want to give the impression that all of cortical input is essential that soon, though it is true for certain functions to reach optimal development, such as vision, hearing, and beginning language."30
  Adds Professor Robert Sylwester: "The best time to master a skill associated with a system is just when a new system is coming on line in your brain. Language is a good example. It's very easy for a two- or three-year-old to learn any language. But if that person waits until 18 to 30, learning a new language will be more difficult because the systems governing this have been used for something else. Many skills, like

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