Education Innovation

The importance of early education is at last catching world attention. If you have a baby below one year's of age, I would recommend you to take a look at excerpts of the article "Chile Starts Early" in the current issue of Newsweek, Aug 10-17, 2009 which follow. I would also recommend you to click into Washington University's Institute of Learning and Brain Sciences (ilabs) website at http://ilabs.washington.edu/index.html and view the 11 episodes of KCTS9 and the article on Foundations for a New Science of Learning.

Le Beaumont Language Centre has been promoting early education from 3-months to 3-years in Hong Kong since 2004. The results are impressive. Babies grow up more confident, more responsive, and with the mastery of 5 languages, all at native level standard! These children become good communicators and active learners. They excel in admission interviews and continue their lead after being admitted to top schools.

We are inviting expecting mothers whose babies will be born in 2010 to join our "Gifted Babies 2010 Program". The program is self-financing. Parents have to pay the monthly tuition fee, like other students, of $3,000 (3 languages, 3 days/week) to $5,000 (5 languages, 5 days/week) to cover the overhead costs of high quality native teachers from 5 different countries and the expensive rental as well as operating costs.

The babies will go through the state-of-the-art program from 3-months to 3-years. Parents and teachers will conduct joint assessment on an agreed list of key identifiable performance indicators once every 3 months. There will be video-taped archives of activities and assessment sessions of children in this and other age groups on our website with password access. The centre will follow up on their academic, leadership and language performance through kindergarten, primary, secondary schools and university. We shall follow up on their early career path.

The study will be on the effects of early education on EQ, IQ, & LQ in general, and on subsequent academic performance and career development in particular. It will cover a period of 30 years. There will be no pre-selected control group. The performance of the experimental group will be compared with their classmates and the population at large. Our hypothesis is that Beaumont Gifted Babies will all go into the top quartile, with a significant number of them ending up in the top 1%.

We shall invite leading universities, local or overseas, that are interested in this field of study as research partners.

The following are excerpts from the Newsweek article on Education Innovaton.

"In October 2007, the Inter-American Development Bank brought together a panel of top economists and asked them, if they had $10 billion to solve Latin America's most pressing problems, how would they do it? The group, using cost-benefit analysis, decided that the most effective use of the cash would be to invest it in programs like day care, preschool, parenting and hygiene courses as well as early childhood health services.

"James Heckman, (2000)Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, has found that introducing preschool education for disadvantaged kids results in at least a 10% annual return for society by improving students' intelligence score and social skills, leading to better school performance and employment prospects in later years as well as reduced crime and teenage pregnancy rates.

"Work by Harvard's Jack Shonkoff has found that depriving poor children of access to good health care, nutrition, and education during their first three years increases the likelihood they'll suffer from disease, learning difficulties, and poverty.

"All the data are showing that proper care and quality education in the first years ensure that we learn faster and are emotionally better able to cope with life's challenges," says Mgiuel Hoffmann, a Buenos Aires psychiatrist who specializes in early childhood development.

"In October 2006, Bachelet's government in Chile inaugurated a ground breaking campaign called "Chile Grows With You". The program aims at kids from conception through age 4. The President was a paediatrician.

"Chile has been amazing in its ability to create a national concensus and act on it," says Andrea Rolla, director of A Good Start, a joint early-education program of Harvard Universities's Graduate School of Education and Chile's Education Opportunity Foundation.

"Now that the infra-structure is in place, Chilean officials say the next challenge is to boost enrollment and quality. But local preschools are already reporting a dramatic rise in interest."

Chile Starts Early, by Jimmy Langman, P48/49, Newsweek Aug 10-17, 2009.

When do you think a baby begins to learn? Based on what evidence?

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『你必須盡早送你的孩子到東山語言中心』爸爸告訴他的好友。