Joseph Johannes
The biblical scriptures in Luke 6.48 state: “He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when a flood arose, the stream broke against the house and could not shake it, because it had been well-built”.
Primary education is the fulcrum of all levels of education upon which meaningful, national development is based (Agbatog, 2013).
Therefore, a strong foundation means first and foremost giving our children a life built on the rock of Christ Jesus, that all other things built upon that bedrock will stand strong when the floods come.
A good, strong education is the same as early foundational learning that is laid to the children when they start education.
In fact, a strong early learning foundation is the ladder to ensure a future where learners can adapt and thrive.
The children begin to build upon their academic knowledge and social awareness, the building blocks of learning in society. Just as babies’ milestones differ, children’s educational and social milestones will differ as well. A mother will not force crawling upon her unsteady baby, but she allows the baby to practice at his/her own pace, strengthening and building confidence. Once the child is ready, he/she takes off, all on their own. This is the same as in academics. In the same way, it can actually be a hindrance to force a child forward academically or socially when they have not yet mastered the previous
skills.
When children are given sufficient time and space to build strong foundations with respect to skills development in education, it paves the way for a future where they can make decisions and continue to be critical, creative thinkers and doers.
Barnes (2018) stated that a child first needs to master early building blocks of academic learning, recognising letters, numbers, colours and shapes. In addition to this, a child will not master well the next skills if they omitted the first skills. Hence, the Namibian pre-primary syllabus is made around these skills, meaning for the children to have a strong foundation, the child has to go through all these skills as the start of the foundation.
Once these skills are mastered, the child will begin to take the next steps and that is reading, writing and maths practice. There should be no expectation of a child to master the same information, in the same amount of time, when they are all different ages with different family dynamics and living different stories.
Therefore, a strong foundation needs to be laid at an early stage to ensure success at the end of school. Parents or guardians need to see the significance of early learning to the young ones so that it yields good results and leads to low failure rates in schools.
*Joseph Johannes is a teacher at Ombandjele CS and a master’s student, majoring in languages at Great Zimbabwe University. He can be reached @
nenguhe@gmail.com.