Minister of Education, Technological and Vocational Training, Kay McConney, has expressed the view that love needs to be the key in reaching the hearts of the nation’s children.
Minister McConney shared this view on Thursday while speaking at an Early Childhood Symposium at Solidarity House.
She stated: “Raising children is a love story, and for everything we have done and will do in the interests of our children, it will only be clinical and sterile, detached, until we humanise it with love.”
The Minister of Education cited many renowned child psychologists as having promoted different approaches to teaching and stimulating growth and development of young children.
She continued: “Among these approaches are experiential learning and learning through play and discovery. Today, teachers and caregivers alike can all be guided by these approaches as we seek to meet our children’s various needs, whether it’s their cognitive needs, their physical needs, their social needs or their emotional needs.”
Minister McConney continued: “I hope that at some point, our agencies, our partners here will explore how we can not only educate and guide and support our children safely through the early childhood development years, but how we can also love them through it. Love is not a term that we consistently hear at symposia and seminars and conferences like this, but it needs to become so, because underpinning every pedagogical approach, every social intervention every teacher engagement and parental interaction must be love.”
The Minister added that while traditional teaching methods have their place, “they will only get us so far”. She said that teachers must be more than just knowledge experts who impart their knowledge on young learners.
She also suggested that as teachers transitioned into becoming learning facilitators, they should do so “anchored in love”.
In addition, Ms. McConney announced the acceptance age for children starting school would move from five years old to three.
She explained that this would be achieved by increasing access over the next three years through the ministry’s expanded universal pre-primary education programme.
She added that in order to improve outcomes for the nation’s children, the Ministry of Education, Technological and Vocational Training had invested significantly in education and indicated that her ministry was committed to enhancing the delivery of quality early childhood education across the system.