Recently, I have had a number of conversations with friends regarding the importance of the early years in a child's development, especially in relation to the formation of their worldview.It is indisputable that 'from birth to age 5, children rapidly develop foundational capabilities on which subsequent development builds. In addition to their remarkable linguistic and cognitive gains, they exhibit dramatic progress in their emotional, social, regulatory, and moral capacities' (NRCIM, p. 5). However, does this translate to predictive worldview development?
According to Sieger, 'by the time we have reached the age of two, 50% of our belief system has been determined. By the age of eight years about 80% is in place, and by fifteen between 85-90% of the beliefs you hold to be true will, if they remain unchallenged, stay with you for the rest of your life' (Sieger 2005, p. 58). Similarly, Belkin asserts that the 'complex process by which values are modified is fully developed by the time a child is five years old' (Belkin 1974, p. 173). These claims asserts the formative importance of childhood in worldview development.
Critically, if we take as given, that a worldview operates unconsciously and is many ways like a complex, we are faced with a significant challenge in the formative years - and one that confronts both parents and educators.
Apart from the Jungian discussion of worldview, I am very attracted to Anthony Wallace's definition of worldview as 'not merely a philosophical by-product of each culture like a shadow, but the very skeleton of concrete cognitive assumptions on which the flesh of customary behavior is hung' and something which is 'implicit in almost every act' (Wallace 1970, p. 143). This is totally consistent with Jung's explication of weltanschauung, and even suggests the unconscious operative nature of worldview.
From this I conclude that worldview is the implicit framework (skeleton) upon which we hang the specific things we believe (concrete cognitive assumptions) and upon which our behaviour is unconsciously predicated. Consequently, we must be either challenged by, or tempted to dismiss, the assertion that this fundamental aspect of our personhood is more or less established by early the teens.
Consequently, we can ask ourselves, are there any analogues of worldview development that may corroborate the weighty assertion that worldview development occurs early in our lives as children? I suggest that there are at least two, namely brain development and language development.
Studies in neurophysiology indicate that 95% of the brains architecture is established by the time a child is five or six years old. Similarly, the most rapid stage in synaptic development occurs in the first three years of life, and by age three, a child's brain has formed about 1,000 trillion connections, which is about twice as many as an adult brain. Furthermore, by early adolescence, the brain starts to eliminate more synapses than it produces, so that by late adolescence only half the number of synapses remain (Shore 1997).
Concomitant with this, from three years old until about 10 years old, children's brains are two and a half time more active than adults. (Shore, 1997, p 21). From this we can conclude that the formative stages of brain development occur early, and that by the time a child is about 12 years old, the majority of their neurophysiological development is completed.
Although studies in language acquisition are varied and report conflicting results, they report a similar picture. Problematically, different studies are based on different assumptions with regards to both receptive and expressive vocabularies, as well as definitions of words and word families. However, according to Beck and McKeown (1991), an average 5 to 6 year old child has a working vocabulary of between 2,500 and 5,000 words. According to Dupuy (1974) this grows to about 7,000 words by late teenage years and may peak at 10,000 words by adult for a non-university educated adult (Pei 1965).
Further to this, language acquisition studies show that the ability to learn new languages actually declines after the age of 12 (Thompson Giedd et al, p. 192 ). Excluding the influence of reading (which expands vocabulary fourfold over not reading) or higher education (which broadens the vocabulary base) as literacy developers, we can conclude that an average teenage child has achieved about 70-80% of adult language acquisition.
Interestingly, the relationship between vocabulary and worldview development might well be more than analogous. Heidegger asserts that ‘words and languages are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are’ (Heidegger 1959, p. 13). Furthermore, as Jung observes, 'if we scrutinise our thinking more closely still and follow out an intensive train of thought - the solution of a difficult problem, for instance – we suddenly notice that we are thinking in words' (Jung 1967d, p.11).
If words represent the objects of thought and apperception, then an a priori relationship must exist between vocabulary and worldview. As Humboldt famously said 'language is not a product [ergon] but an activity [energia]' (Humboldt 1988, p. 280), and consequently must play a dynamic role in the development of worldview (Budwig 2002).
This line of thinking is very similar to that developed by Walter Ong. He asserted that speech communication is a distinguishing mark of being human, and that society is based upon speech communication. Thus orality is, in many ways, the primary technology of human beings (Ong 2002). Ong states that ‘ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language’ (Ong 2002, p. 175).
For Ong, speech is inseparable from consciousness and as Jung correspondingly asserts, ‘the material with which we think is language and verbal concepts – something which from time immemorial has been directed outwards and used as a bridge, and which has but a single purpose, namely that of communication’ (Jung 1967d, p. 12).
Consequently, I am very confortable concluding that the fields of brain development and language development do both corroborate the assertion that childhood is an extremely important time for worldview development. Importantly, by the early teens, a person's worldview is fundamentally formed, and notwithstanding significant psychological adjustment, remains fixed for the rest of their life.
Sources:
Beck, I.L. and McKeown, M.G., 1991, Social studies texts are hard to understand: Mediating some of the difficulties, Language Arts, vol 68, pp. 482-490
Belkin, G. S., 1974, Communion in Teaching, Education Theory, April , vol. 24, iss. 2, pp. 170-182
Budwig, N., 2002, A developmental-functionalist approach to mental state talk, in, Language, Literacy, and Cognitive Development, ed. Amsel, E., & Byrens, J. P., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, NJ.
D'Anna, C.A., Zechmeister, E.B., & Hall, J.W., 1991, Toward a meaningful definition of vocabulary size, Journal of Reading Behavior, vol 23, pp. 109-122.
Dupuy, H. F. 1974, The rationale, development, and standardization of a basic word vocabulary test, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
Hirsh, D. & Nation, P., 1992, What vocabulary size is needed to read unsimplified texts for pleasure?, Reading in a foreign language, vol 8, pp. 689-696.
Jung, C. G. 1967d, Symbols of Transformation, Collected Works, vol. 5, trans. Hull, R. F. C., Routledge, London.
Nagy, W.E. and Anderson, R.C., 1984, How many words are there in printed English?, Reading Research Quarterly, vol 19, pp. 304-330
National Research Council and Institute of Medicine (NRCIM), 2000, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: the Science of Early Childhood Development, Shonkhoff, J.P. & Phillips, D., A., eds., National Academy Press, Washington, D. C.
Ong, W., 2002, Orality and Literacy, Routledge, London
Pei, M., 1965, The Story of Language, Unwin Books, London
Shore, R., 1997, Rethinking the Brain: New Insights into Early Development, Families and Work Institute, Washington, DC.
Sieger, R., 2005, You can change your life any time you want, Arrow Books, London
Thompson, P. M, Giedd, J. N., et. al., 2000, Growth patterns in the developing brain detected by using continuum mechanical tensor maps, Nature, vol 404, 9 March 2000, p. 190-192
von Humboldt, W., 1988, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language–Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, trans. Heath, P., Cambridge University Press, New York
Wallace, A. F. C., 1970, Culture and Personality, Random House, New York