The First Twelve Months
I have always been interested in education and the role it plays in shaping our society. Unfortunately, the basic assumption of our educational system has always been and large continues to be, that education is something which begins when a child enters elementary school. It is this assumption which I feel needs to be challenged, not only by experts working in the field, but by society itself.
The concept that a person's intelligence and personality are predetermined and fixed by a set of genetic codes is false. This misconception is probably the result of studies done of children whose personalities and intelligence levels appeared to be quite distinct and set by the age of two or three. When I speak of living and learning, I include the time a child spends in its mother's womb; the effect that the mother's physical and psychological condition, and even her living environment have had on the developing fetus.
Education, I believe, begins at the fetal stage. In the East, this belief has long been an accepted fact, and impressive results have been obtained by those practicing fetal education. Take, for example, Mr and Mrs Susedik whose conscious efforts to begin educating their children in the womb have produced four daughters whose IQ's are all over 160. In the West, the concept of prenatal education has been viewed with some skepticism.
However, as recent developments in technology allow us to directly observe a fetus and its responses to outside stimuli, through the use of ultrasonic scanners, more and more people are beginning to give credence to the idea that what a child learns in its earliest stages may directly affect its later development, and most westerners are not yet willing to admit that environment can play such an important part in fetal development.
A recent breakthrough in the science of botany may help me illustrate and expand on the tremendous implications inherent in the theory of fetal education. In 1985, Japan hosted a science exposition at Tsukuba Academic City. There 20 million or more people were treated to the amazing sight of a single tomato plant bearing 130,000 tomatoes! There was nothing unusual about plant itself. It was just an ordinary tomato plant, like those found in any garden, grown using regular fertilizer. The difference was that it had been planted in water rather than soil, with a small amount of fertilizer. With plenty of sunshine and room for its root system to grow freely and absorb nutrients from the water, the plant grew in only six months to the size of a tree, with a 20cm thick, branches which were 8 to 10 meters long, and roots which were 10cm thick and filled a 5m x 3m water tank. What's more, the tomatoes it produced were very tasty, better even than those produced by tomato plants grown in soil.
Who should have imagined that it would ever be possible to grow a tomato plant capable of producing over 10,000 pieces of fruit? And who can really say what we human beings are capable of? We know, for example, that the average human uses only a few percent of his or her total brain capacity in a lifetime. Is this because we have not yet found the ideal way to cultivate our intelligence, the ideal medium in which it can flourish and produce freely? Perhaps, as I have suggested, our intelligence can be nurtured, expanded and developed to levels not yet imaginable, if we begin at the earliest stages of life, before birth.
I have one more purpose, to emphasize the importance of the mother. The mother is the child's first connection to life, the source not only of physical but psychological nurturance as well. It is the through the mother and her love that a baby is first introduced to the world. There is no substitute for this exchange, no way any future education can undo or replace what is learned on an unconscious level during this most elementary stage. The mother is the first source of knowledge and it is at the source that we must begin.
