The findings of neuroscience into how the brain develops are beginning to seep into mainstream media. An example from The Sunday Times, 2 December 2007, from 'Guest Contributor' Eleanor Mills. I shall quote at length from her middle section:
"Neuroscience shows that emotional experiences in infancy have a measurable effect on how we develop as human beings; our earliest experiences of social interaction are translated into precise physiological patterns of response in the brain that then set the neurological rules for how we deal with our feelings and those of other people for the rest of our lives.
It is all down to the hormone called cortisol. When a baby is upset, the hypothalamus at the centre of the brain produces cortisol. In normal amounts that is fine, but if a baby is exposed for too long or too often to stressful situations its brain becomes flooded with cortisol, and it will then either overor underproduce cortisol whenever the child is exposed to stress.
Too much is linked to depression and fearfulness; too little to emotional detachment and aggression. Babies can’t regulate their stress response on their own; they learn to do so by the reaction of their carer when they are upset.
When the baby’s needs are met, the brain learns to produce only beneficial levels of cortisol. What the science shows is that good parenting isn’t just nice for small children; it actually leads to proper development of the baby’s prefrontal cortex, which in turn enables the child to develop self-control and empathy and to feel connected to others.
I have always been haunted by those Romanian orphans, left alone to cry in their cots from birth with no mummy to love them. Well, when scientists studied their brains, they found a virtual black hole where the orbitofrontal cortex should have been (this is the part of the brain that enables us to manage our emotions, to empathise with others, to experience pleasure and appreciate beauty). Turns out that I was right to be haunted: the lack of love had inhibited their capacity to be fully human.
The point about my mini brain science lecture is that there is no point in taking kids who have been appallingly badly parented – whose brains haven’t been programmed right, because their needs haven’t been met – and expecting that they will be able to absorb the kind of education-based nursery curriculum that the government has in mind.
One psychologist told me that it’s like pouring water into a bucket with no bottom. The maths and phonics won’t stick. The brains of these very deprived children are simply not chemically wired well enough to be able to learn."
The writer is criticising the Government's proposed curriculum for 3-4 year olds, that The Times made its frontpage feature earlier in the week under the headline "Stealth curriculum is 'threat to all toddlers'".
If it is true, and all that I have been able to read of recent research says it is, that "love matters" in the development of infant brains, and if it is also true, as I believe it is from my observations as a granddad to four grandchildren, that the physical and sensory interaction of the child with its environment, especially with its mother but also other family members, is the key medium through through which 'love matters' is expressed - my question, yet again, is what happens in the growing infant brain of a child with cerebral palsy that maybe cannot manage the physical and sensory interaction with its environment and its mother, especially when the mother, father and other family members are themselves coming to terms with having a, possibly seriously, disabled child?
Referring to Romanian orphans, two phrases that Eleanor Mills employs chill me:
"the lack of love had inhibited their capacity to be fully human" and
"The brains of these very deprived
children are simply not chemically wired well enough to be able to learn."
Try that again: not "fully human", not "able to learn" well enough.
To understand that educational policy needs to be evidence-based and that neuroscience is increasingly generating that evidence is fine. To oppose the Government's plans for 3-4 year olds for the lack of an evidence base is also fine. However, to then somehow conclude that there are children who are less than "fully human" and "not chemically wired well enough to be able to learn" is not only an intellectual place to which I prefer not to follow the writer when it comes to children with severe disabilities, it is also, as I understand the evidence, a misunderstanding of the neuroscientific evidence of brain plasticity throughout life and contradicts a truly human understanding of human potential, that is dynamic and not fixed.
Deprived or disabled , these children deserve better. "Better" might include alternatives and choices that the Government appears not to conceive of, insisting that all nursery environments, whether public, private or voluntary will conform to its model of child development. Montessori and Steiner offer two such alternative developmental models on which nursery education is founded. For children with cerebral palsy, conductive education offers another choice. How much harder it is going to be to ensure parents have these choices, when officers in Children and Young People Directorates across the country are busy asserting that 'one size fits all''? What price then, evidence-based public policy? What price then, parental choice? And where does that leave children with cerebral palsy and their families in the new Children's Centres? Better off than now, or not?