Page 2333 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 1 November 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
putting the preschools in a situation in which they appear always to be on the defence.
We have situations - and I have seen evidence of them - of manipulation of numbers in the preschools in an attempt to rearrange which preschools are vulnerable and which are not. That is done, on my understanding, through what Mr Whalan has just described as offers of placement and confirmation. I give credit to preschool principals for attempting to arrange their teachers and staff in the best possible way.
What it fails to understand is how important the individual preschools are to the community - and to the local community. That is one of the factors that we must take into account. It is one of the factors that my colleague Dr Kinloch has emphasised today, so I shall not go through it too much. Dr Kinloch referred to the headstart program, which I consider is unfortunate because I am going to refer to some of the others. I am going to quote from a paper entitled Competence and Coping in Children by Dr Kathy Sylva. It states:
Proponents of American Head Start programmes in the 60's and early 70's promised boldly that pre-school attendance would increase the 'life chances' of disadvantaged children by raising their intelligence, school attainment and self-concept.
She goes on later to say:
The first wave of evaluation studies were cheering, but soon came the disappointing 'wash-out' effects, notably those in Westinghouse Corporation ... study showing that the 'extra' skills of pre-school graduates had disappeared 3-4 years after leaving the programme. Hopes were dashed, funding was cut, and many psychologists began to question the view that early experiences are fixed forever ...
The new scepticism about the indelible stamp of early experiences brought a halt to pre-school expansion. As psychologists became more and more convinced of the plasticity and resilience of childhood ... they lost interest in early intervention. Worse still, policy-makers turned their attention to cost-cutting exercises, which often decreased pre-school provision.
I have not used this example to debunk Dr Kinloch. On the contrary, I think what has happened is that we have got to the stage in Canberra at which we have the same sort of situation. If we can just move ourselves out of that time warp into the more current thinking, we can have a look at what has come as a result of the Perry preschool experiment, which was part of the High Scope Research
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .