Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve looked high and low and spent decades trying to find different solutions that will move our educational systems forward. However, recently, over probably the last decade, we’ve found exciting and informative advances in our knowledge about brain development and the development of our capacity to learn and to be healthy throughout life.
This has been exciting and it is becoming known throughout society now. It goes far to explain our failures to date in achieving our education goals. I believe our Education department is well aware of this, as are all of my colleagues. We’ve chatted about this quite a bit.
What is the crux here? First, brain development during pregnancy and the first three years of life is the biggest opportunity to ensure we have full learning capacity and health. Second, the neural pathways developed during this period largely dictate the future of a lifetime of well-being of this person. Third, if it doesn’t happen during this period, it is very challenging and very expensive to play catch-up.
What are the implications? We need to put our money into early childhood development, supporting families, communities and community-based programs towards effective early childhood development. We should not continue to gnash our teeth and throw new money at our educational system until we have made clear and measurable progress at supporting our young children prior to their entry into the education system.
Few gains will be made despite our best efforts through the Education Renewal Initiative until this has been achieved. This should not stop us from pursuing the Education Renewal Initiative with existing resources to begin implementing our new knowledge about learning and teaching in today’s environment.
Finally, we should not be putting dollars into junior kindergarten, again, until we have a comprehensive program in every community for ages zero to three. Mahsi.