B.C. hopes to improve kids' capacity to learn
By Charlie Smith
Georgia Straight
November 12, 2009

Only 70.4 percent of kids entering kindergarten in B.C. in 2008 were considered “ready to learn”. That figure, which was reported in a B.C. budget document earlier this year, was down from 72.1 percent in 2004.

UBC’s Human Early Learning Partnership compiled this data with the help of kindergarten teachers across the province. So what does this really mean? According to a HELP report presented at a Business Council of B.C. summit in September, it suggests that these kids are “vulnerable to less than optimal physical, socio-economic, and cognitive development”….

“Optimal development does not imply children must be rocket scientists or the next Mozart in kindergarten,” HELP researchers Paul Kershaw, Lynell Anderson, Bill Warburton, and Clyde Hertzman wrote in their report to the Business Council of B.C. …

 “Some may hold out hope that we can compensate for high early vulnerability by increasing investments in the final years of school, in expanding post-secondary education, or in job skills training for adults,” the HELP researchers write. “However, human development research warns against this hope because it ignores the genetic and biological reality of the human species: the early years represent the unique window in the human life course during which citizens’ physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive potential are especially malleable to the positive effects of strategic human capital investments.”

The report offers several solutions, ….

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