The Myth of the First Three Years: A New Understanding of Early Brain Development and Lifelong Learning - Softcover

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John T. Bruer, Ph.D., has been President of the James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis since 1986. He also works as a consultant on educational issues for the national media, including The New York Times Magazine. He is author of Schools for Thought: A Science of Learning in the Classroom. Dr. Bruer lives in St. Louis with his wife and two sons.

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Chapter One: Through The Prism of the First Three Years

0ne afternoon in early fall of 1996, the phone on my desk rang. The call was from a journalist who was writing an article for a national parenting magazine. She was doing a story for her readers based on the then recently released Carnegie Corporation reportYears of Promise. She told me that I was on the media list for the report -- a list of interested or knowledgeable people, sent out in the report's press kit, who would be willing to speak to journalists. My name appeared on the list because for the previous decade I had been funding and writing about applications of modern psychology to education and school reform.

She asked me, "Based on neuroscience, what can we tell parents about choosing a preschool for their children?" When I answered, "Based on neuroscience, absolutely nothing," I heard a gasp on the other end of the line. The journalist politely suggested that I must have been living under a rock for the past four years. She told me that there was a wealth of new neuroscience out there that suggested otherwise.

I did not think I had been living under a rock. And I did not offer my answer casually. For the four previous years, along with almost everyone else, I had been hearing murmurs about how new breakthroughs in neuroscience -- our new, emerging understanding of how the brain worked and developed -- were about to revolutionize how we think about children, childcare, and parenting. I had read the occasional articles, features, and editorials that had been published in major American newspapers. The headlines did get one's attention: "To Shape a Life, We Must Begin Before a Child is 3," "Building a Better Brain: A Child's First Three Years Provide Parents Once-in-Lifetime Opportunity to Dramatically Increase Intelligence," and "Youngest Kids Need Help, U.S. Told: Federal Government Urged to Focus on Their 1st Three Years." The articles under the headlines said that new brain research could now tell us how and when to build better brains in our children. The first three years -- the years from birth to 3 -- we were told, are the critical years for building better brains.

In early 1996, I read Sharon Begley's February 19 Newsweek article, "Your Child's Brain." Although I was glad to see that brain science was getting cover-story attention, some of the claims and statements in the article, especially those offered by childcare advocates who were not brain scientists, seemed farfetched. But that is not unusual in popular articles about science and research.

In spring 1996, because I was on the media list, I saw an advance copy of the aforementioned Carnegie Corporation report,Years of Promise, which briefly touched on what the new brain science might mean for educational practice. The report's discussion of the brain science was so fleeting that I dismissed the neuroscience as rhetorical window dressing to increase interest in educational policy and reform. About that time, during a visit to the MacArthur Foundation, I read an editorial in theChicago Tribune titled "The IQ Gap Begins at Birth for the Poor." In this piece, as in others I was now collecting in my file cabinet, the writer claimed that applying the new brain science offered "the quickest, kindest, most promising way to break" the cycle of poverty and ignorance among the nation's poor and to "raise the IQs of low-scoring children (who are disproportionately black)...."

However, the more I read, the more puzzled I became. For the previous eighteen years, at three private foundations, I had been following research and awarding grants in education, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. All during that time, I was wondering when I would begin to see credible research that linked brain science with problems and issues in child development and education. I was puzzled because, despite what the headlines proclaimed and the articles stated, I had not yet seen any such research.

In late spring 1996, I had received an invitation to attend a July workshop in Denver, Colorado, sponsored by the Education Commission of the States and the Charles A. Dana Foundation. The workshop's title was "Bridging the Gap Between Neuroscience and Education." Based on the reputations of the sponsoring organizations, I thought that the workshop would offer an ideal opportunity for me to learn about the new brain research and its implications. Unfortunately, I had a scheduling conflict and could not go, but my colleague, Dr. Susan Fitzpatrick, a neuroscientist, attended in my place.

When she returned from Denver and briefed me about the meeting, I had expected to hear about new research linking brain development, child development, and education. Instead, she began her briefing with a one-word description of the workshop: "Bizarre." She told me, and my subsequent reading of the workshop report confirmed, that there was little neuroscience presented in Denver and certainly none that I had not previously known about. There were, however, Susan told me, wide-ranging policy discussions, bordering on the nonsensical, in which early childhood advocates appealed to what might be most charitably described as a "folk" understanding of brain development to support their favorite policy recommendations. Reflecting on the Denver meeting and its report, it seemed as if there was, in fact, no new brain science involved in the policy and media discussions of child development. What seemed to be happening was that selected pieces of rather old brain science were being used, and often misinterpreted, to support preexisting views about child development and early childhood policy.

Thus, my response to the journalist's call reflected my conviction, based on what I had read and heard up to that point, that there was no new brain science that could tell parents anything about choosing a preschool. Her call, however, did change how I thought about the issue. If claims about brain science were confined to rhetorical flourishes in policy documents likeYears of Promise or to the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune, it was probably relatively harmless. It might even draw attention to some important issues that policymakers and newspaper readers might otherwise ignore. However, it struck me as a very different matter if people were taking the brain science seriously as a basis for policy and legislation and if parents were asking what the new brain science meant for raising their children and choosing schools. Following that call, I was no longer comfortable being merely puzzled or bemused about what I read in the newspapers. I wanted to understand what was going on and to consider more carefully what the brain science might actually mean for children, parents, and policy.

The White House Conference

My job as a foundation officer responsible for funding research in mind, brain, and education, plus some strategic letters from colleagues, earned me an invitation to the April 17, 1997, White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning: What New Research on the Brain Tells Us About Our Youngest Children. For those interested in children and education, the conference was an exciting development. It promised to focus the nation's interest, even if only for a few days, on science, children, and related, highly significant social issues. What better occasion could there be to understand the growing enthusiasm for what brain science meant for parenting and policy?

Mrs. Clinton opened the conference. She emphasized the significance of our new understanding of the brain. Brain science confirms what parents have instinctively known, "that the song a father sings to...