Early Childhood Education

    Yes, it's important that children learn. But how we children did I can't quite comprehend. For the time, we were not different from many other families. We lived in houses without electricity, central heat and indoor plumbing for our early years, until we moved to the village. We had no educational toys; they didn't exist then as far as we knew, unless you count the wooden alphabet blocks, and even then we never had a full set.

      Our father traveled to work from dawn to dusk, literally. He'd leave in the early morning hours and arrive home in the evening in time for supper. 

    Our mother was always busy: doing laundry was a nightmare of pumping water outside, hauling it inside, heating it on the stove, washing and wringing the clothes by hand, and then hanging them  outside to dry unless the weather dictated they had to be dried inside on a line strung above the stove, and then many of the articles had to be ironed, which meant heating the flat iron on top of the wood stove. And she had to bring in the wood and feed it into the stove, after she had shaken it down, and carried out the ashes. The drip pan under the icebox also needed daily emptying to prevent overflow on the kitchen floor. Food preparation was not easy as she often had to construct a meal out of very few ingredients, and many times baked from scratch. And there were animals to tend to, and, seasonally, gardens and the canning process. And regular household chores in addition. 

    The point is she had little time to devote to teaching us. And no materials. We had no books except for a very old Bible, which was stored away, and an old dictionary, which was not really reading material. Sometimes, when she had time, she would take a pencil and a piece of paper and write letters of the alphabet on it. She must have taught us the alphabet, maybe along with our prayers, which we said every night. She must have taught us our numbers and how to count, probably on Sundays when people were not supposed to do physical work. We certainly never attended any educational classes or events; they didn't exist back then.

   However it happened though, we learned to read before we even set foot in school. No formal syllabus of instruction, no insight into what school would be like. We knew our letters and numbers. Knowing the letters of the alphabet made the ability to read almost automatic or so it seems.  I have an image, even today, of Dorothy, about age 3, standing on our parents' bed and reading from the holy picture hanging at the head of the bed. She read: "Angel of God, my Guardian dear, to whom God's love entrusts me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen."  Her lifelong devotion to angels may have started then, I suppose. 

   In those days, education was much simpler than it is today; there is so much more that children have to learn. But I can't help but wonder if aggressive teaching of three and four year old children is unnecessarily stressful, considering that children are capable of assimilating so much information without even being aware of the process.