James Heckman was already a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics when he began to dedicate himself to the subject for which he would become truly known: the first childhood (from 0 to 5 years old), its relationship with social inequality and the potential that exists in this stage of life for changes that can take people out of poverty.
Largely because of his studies, the subject has gained more attention in recent years. Heckman concluded that investing in early childhood is an effective strategy for economic growth. He calculates that the financial return for every dollar spent is among the highest.
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That's because, between birth and age five, the brain develops rapidly and is more malleable. Thus, it is easier to encourage cognitive and personality skills - attention, motivation, self-control and sociability - necessary for success in school, health, career and life.
In the early 2000s, Heckman began poring over data from the Perry Preschool Project, a social experiment that changed the lives of its participants. It worked like this: in 1962, in the small town of Ypslanti, in the State of Michigan, in the United States, 123 students from the same school were randomly divided into two groups.
One of them, with 58 children, received a high quality pre-school education and the other, with 65, did not – the latter is the control group. The proposal was to test whether access to a good early childhood education would improve the ability of disadvantaged children to succeed in school and in life.
“The consensus when I started analyzing the data was that the program had not been successful because the IQ of participants was equal to that of non-participants”, he recalls, years later, in conversation with BBC News Brazil.
Heckman and colleagues decided to analyze the results of the experiment from another angle. “We looked not at IQ but at the social and emotional skills that participants demonstrated in later stages of life and we saw that the program was actually much more successful than people they thought. We found that participants were more likely to be employed and were much less likely to have committed crimes,” says the economist.
His analysis of the Perry program came to the conclusion that there was a return on investment of 7-10% per year, based on the increase in schooling and professional performance, in addition to reducing costs with school reinforcement, health and system expenses criminal.
More than 50 years after the start of this program, Heckman released, this May, new research, carried out with his colleague at the University of Chicago, Ganesh Karapakula, which confirms these results and shows that not only the participants benefited from the pioneering program, but also their children, who are better educated and better employed than your pairs.
BBC News Brazil – What was Perry's CV like and why was he so successful?
James Heckman – When I started to study this, I also thought of the project as a curriculum, but it is not – neither Perry was nor other quality early childhood education programs are. Not exactly classrooms. They are like an extended family. They are small groups of children, receiving a lot of attention, guidance, a lot of stimuli.
In Perry's case, they took children from very poor families and took them to daycare. It was like being a parent – they spent a lot of time with the child and mentored him. They took the children to the zoo, to the park, played with them. This gave the child the opportunity to interact with peers. So it worked. The program also had weekly parent visits.
Parents were very excited. The child returned home excited. And the parents ended up stimulating the child even more. Lessons from this program are also transferable to visiting programs (to parents' homes, in which an educator teaches parents how to encourage their young children), even though they seem to be many different. One lesson is how important home life is in formation.
A program being implemented in Jamaica, for example, consists of spending an hour a week with the mother teaching her how to interact with the children – challenge her, engage her. The price is not that high and the return is huge.
BBC News Brasil – What caught your attention in the data about him?
Heckman – Many people said that the program was a failure because the IQ of the participants was the same as that of non-participants. That was the consensus at the beginning. We looked at other things – the social and emotional skills that participants demonstrated in later life stages.
They develop executive skills – planning, interacting, completing tasks, following instructions. We look at their employability, participation in crime. And so we saw that the program had been much more successful than people thought, because they were only evaluating it from a narrow angle (that of IQ).
In all countries where this subject was researched, it was concluded that inequality in early childhood remains in later stages. The environment in the early years is very important. In this phase you build a foundation of skills that will serve you for the future.
Young children are very malleable and changeable. There is a flexibility in this step that you don't see in others. It's a matter of economic efficiency.
BBC News Brasil – However, in general, more attention is given to education in later stages of life. Why is it difficult to change this?
Heckman – Because parents of underprivileged children don't know what makes them fall behind. In fact, you just need to encourage them. There are studies that show that reading to children already has a huge impact on their development.
Also, people don't have time. I'm not saying that mothers shouldn't work and spend the day at home with their children, but these early years need to be enriched. One solution is quality preschool.
BBC News Brasil – Do you think governments have paid more attention to early childhood in recent decades? What are the challenges in this regard?
Heckman – The challenge is to change the way of thinking. The wrong way is to think that formal education is the way to create skills and that the model of a teacher standing in front of the class teaching children is the right way to create lives well succeeded. This reasoning is even promoted by higher education courses and by well-meaning people. But what matters is thinking about the family and the upbringing of the child.
BBC News Brasil – In the case of Perry, you conclude that the benefits extend to the second generation. How does this transfer from one to the other take place?
Heckman – Participants are successful people. They are statistically much less likely to have committed crimes. We see that there is a lot of correlation between criminal activity of parents and children. Perry's parents reproduce with their children what they learned in childhood.
BBC News Brasil – Your research shows that men benefit from these programs much more than women. Why does it happen?
Heckman – Boys are more sensitive (to changes) and are more likely to enter the world of crime. Girls also benefit, but their risk is much lower than that of boys.
There is a social influence that in practice separates boys from girls very early. But it's also true that three-year-old girls from dysfunctional families are more likely to be engaging in activities like reading books and less likely to be getting into trouble. People don't want to talk about it, but it's true.
Boys develop at a different pace and girls seem to get structures more easily than boys. Girls are more resilient.
Generally speaking, when boys are raised in single-mother families with no father figures, they have more difficulty getting guidance in life. The bond between daughters and mothers is different from that of mother and son. The mother loves the child, but it is different.
BBC News Brasil – What is the relationship between good child development and crimes?
Heckman – This is the main result of all these early childhood education programs. The biggest return for every dollar invested in all of them is the reduction of crime and the creation of an encouraging environment for children.
People ignore this, but it's very important. That's why these programs are so successful for men. It's an anti-crime strategy. If only for that reason, they should be taken seriously as public policy.
BBC News Brasil – If the person does not have the opportunity to develop in early childhood, is it a lost cause?
Heckman – Development happens at other stages of life. However, one step leads to another. A well-formed child can make better use of future learning. But we shouldn't give up on people after a certain age. This is not true.
BBC News Brasil – Some critics say that Perry's results have to be viewed with care as the program was implemented in a very particular context, which makes it reckless to extrapolate its results. What do you think about this?
Heckman – If you do an imitation and apply Perry from 1960 to Porto Alegre in 2019 it would be crazy. There are cultural adaptations that need to be made. But the mechanisms we describe are replicable. Teaching parents to be involved in the child's life, this pays off for the rest of their lives.
(Source: BBC Brazil)
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