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More strictly pedagogic is a Philadelphia organization called the Better Baby Institute, which offers a training course to enable mothers to "multiply their baby's intelligence." Specifically, the school claims that parents can learn in one week of intense instruction (for a fee of $500) how to teach their infants to swim, to read, to do math, to speak foreign languages and to play the violin at the age of two. You can't make it to Philadelphia? "Better Baby Video," a California-based spinoff, can provide the same lessons in a weeklong course offered primarily in West Coast cities. Some critics believe that a11 this mainly makes babies learn a few skills by rote, but it is difficult to obtain any scientific assessment of the five-year-old institute.
Many of these ventures in infant education are fueled by eager parents who will try anything to give their children a head start. Similar experiments are arousing interest in those who work among the poor. Dr. Joseph Sparling, for example, has developed and published a series of 100 educational games at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These games, which range from specific subjects like language development to vague concerns like self-image, have been tried out with some success over the past five years in a federally funded program called Project Care. Researchers use the games both in day care centers and in weekly visits to children's homes. They report that the children get "significantly" higher intelligence-test scores at the age of one year than children in a control group who are not exposed to the games.
If nothing else, the push toward earlier education gives infants a valuable chance at making friends. Says Psychologist Colwyn Trevarthen of the University of Edinburgh: "They really have this intrinsic social capacity, and that's what human beings have evolved for, just as giraffes have evolved for eating high leaves."
But is early education itself really desirable? Does the discovery that a young child can absorb large quantities of knowledge require that it be stuffed like a Strasbourg goose? There were social reasons for launching Project Head Start in the 1960s to get poor children into preschool programs. Most psychologists engaged in the new research, however, are strongly opposed to any formal schooling before the age of three or four, even if the child is capable of it. "We know that babies are coming into the world with a lot more sophisticated skills than we had previously thought, but I do not think reading, writing and arithmetic should be in their curriculum," says Psychologist Tiffany Field of the University of Miami School of Medicine. Warns Child Psychiatrist Robert Harmon, director of the Infant Psychiatry Clinic at the University of Colorado School of Medicine: "I think you're going to get children burned out on learning." And University of Denver Psychologist Kurt Fischer says of the baby's first year: "Don't worry about teaching as much as providing a rich and emotionally supportive atmosphere."
As Fischer's statement indicates, much of the new research emphasizes the extreme importance of the infant's