Reading Compreh...

Passage $$1$$
The first three years of life appear to be a crucial starting point - a period particularly sensitive to the protective mechanisms of parental and family support. For millennia, parents have recognized the newborn's basic need for safety, nourishment, warmth, and nurturing. Now science has added stunning revelations about human development from birth to age three, confirming that parent and other adult caregivers play a critical role in influencing the child's development. The importance of the first three years of life lies in the pace at which the child is growing and learning. In no other period do such profound changes occur so rapidly: the newborn grows from a completely dependent human being into one who walks, talks, plays, and explores. Babies raised by caring, attentive adults in safe, predictable environments are better learners than those raised with less attention in less secure settings. Unfortunately, in contrast to all the other leading industrialized nations, the United States fails to give parents time to be with their newborns, It fails to ensure pre- and postnatal health care for mothers and infants, and it fails to provide adequate childcare. The result is significant losses in the quality of its future workforce, citizenry, and parents. There are, of course, reasons other than economic ones for protecting young children and their families. Children need to be treasured for their own sake, not merely for what they do for the labor market when they are grown. But the issues of "human capital" - the combined skills, knowledge, and ideas of a nation's people - are real.

America's business and political leaders are understandably worried about the nation's children and its educational system. Their concern is well founded, but school reform alone is not the answer. Any effort to strengthen the workforce must begin with the family, a key factor in the development of human capital. By supporting families during the child's earliest years, society ensures that children will enter school ready to learn and will be ready, in time, to enter the workforce and be good parents. It is time to sound - and answer - the alarm about the neglect of our nation's young children and their families. All Americans must take responsibility for reversing this trend. As the risks to our children intensify, so must out determinations to enact family-centered programs and policies to ensure all of our youngest children the decent start that they deserve.

Passage $$2$$
Much early childhood literature suggests that the first three years of life is the critical period for brain development. It's a time when the young brain's learning power is almost limitless. After this period, as a child psychiatrist, Felton Earls remarks. "A kind of irreversibility sets in. There is this shaping process that goes on early, and then at the end of this process, you have essentially designed a brain that probably is not going to change very much more." "Neuroscientists see it a little differently. In a review of child development and neuroscience issues, Charles Nelson and Floyd Bloom discuss some genuinely new findings in neuroscience - what happens in the brain when the adult learn new motor skills and the rapidity with which the adult brain can reorganize after the loss of sensory input from an amputated limb. The new findings that Nelson and Bloom allude to suggest that the brain retains its ability to reorganize itself in response to experience or injury throughout life. They conclude, "It may be useful to question the simplistic view that the brain becomes unbendable and increasingly difficult to modify beyond the first few years of life. Although clearly much of brain development occurs through the first years of life, the brain is far from set in its trajectory, even at the completion of adolescence." If so, we should be wary of claims that parents have only a single, biologically delimited, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help their children build better brains.

Some might ask why we should care about the scientific accuracy of a view put forth by those who want to help children: isn't any argument leading to improved opportunities and outcomes for children a good argument? Many well-intentioned early childhood advocates do take this position. It's the hard-nosed but often realistic view that everyone knows that policy argument are merely exercises in political rhetoric. Helping society's children is a worthy aim. But if we want to take the science seriously, then we have to care if we are acting on a science-based agenda or a myth. What a science-based policy argument should do is add some evidence, beyond our own prejudices and ideological tastes, for what the preferable policy might be.

What the science can add to the policy debate are insights about leverage points that we could most effectively exploit to reach our goal. If the science is wrong, then we are trying to achieve our policy goals by pushing the wrong buttons.

Passage $$1$$
The first three years of life appear to be a crucial starting point - a period particularly sensitive to the protective mechanisms of parental and family support. For millennia, parents have recognized the newborn's basic need for safety, nourishment, warmth, and nurturing. Now science has added stunning revelations about human development from birth to age three, confirming that parent and other adult caregivers play a critical role in influencing the child's development. The importance of the first three years of life lies in the pace at which the child is growing and learning. In no other period do such profound changes occur so rapidly: the newborn grows from a completely dependent human being into one who walks, talks, plays, and explores. Babies raised by caring, attentive adults in safe, predictable environments are better learners than those raised with less attention in less secure settings. Unfortunately, in contrast to all the other leading industrialized nations, the United States fails to give parents time to be with their newborns, It fails to ensure pre- and postnatal health care for mothers and infants, and it fails to provide adequate childcare. The result is significant losses in the quality of its future workforce, citizenry, and parents. There are, of course, reasons other than economic ones for protecting young children and their families. Children need to be treasured for their own sake, not merely for what they do for the labor market when they are grown. But the issues of "human capital" - the combined skills, knowledge, and ideas of a nation's people - are real.

America's business and political leaders are understandably worried about the nation's children and its educational system. Their concern is well founded, but school reform alone is not the answer. Any effort to strengthen the workforce must begin with the family, a key factor in the development of human capital. By supporting families during the child's earliest years, society ensures that children will enter school ready to learn and will be ready, in time, to enter the workforce and be good parents. It is time to sound - and answer - the alarm about the neglect of our nation's young children and their families. All Americans must take responsibility for reversing this trend. As the risks to our children intensify, so must out determinations to enact family-centered programs and policies to ensure all of our youngest children the decent start that they deserve.

Passage $$2$$
Much early childhood literature suggests that the first three years of life is the critical period for brain development. It's a time when the young brain's learning power is almost limitless. After this period, as a child psychiatrist, Felton Earls remarks. "A kind of irreversibility sets in. There is this shaping process that goes on early, and then at the end of this process, you have essentially designed a brain that probably is not going to change very much more." "Neuroscientists see it a little differently. In a review of child development and neuroscience issues, Charles Nelson and Floyd Bloom discuss some genuinely new findings in neuroscience - what happens in the brain when the adult learn new motor skills and the rapidity with which the adult brain can reorganize after the loss of sensory input from an amputated limb. The new findings that Nelson and Bloom allude to suggest that the brain retains its ability to reorganize itself in response to experience or injury throughout life. They conclude, "It may be useful to question the simplistic view that the brain becomes unbendable and increasingly difficult to modify beyond the first few years of life. Although clearly much of brain development occurs through the first years of life, the brain is far from set in its trajectory, even at the completion of adolescence." If so, we should be wary of claims that parents have only a single, biologically delimited, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help their children build better brains.

Some might ask why we should care about the scientific accuracy of a view put forth by those who want to help children: isn't any argument leading to improved opportunities and outcomes for children a good argument? Many well-intentioned early childhood advocates do take this position. It's the hard-nosed but often realistic view that everyone knows that policy argument are merely exercises in political rhetoric. Helping society's children is a worthy aim. But if we want to take the science seriously, then we have to care if we are acting on a science-based agenda or a myth. What a science-based policy argument should do is add some evidence, beyond our own prejudices and ideological tastes, for what the preferable policy might be.

What the science can add to the policy debate are insights about leverage points that we could most effectively exploit to reach our goal. If the science is wrong, then we are trying to achieve our policy goals by pushing the wrong buttons.

Passage $$1$$
The first three years of life appear to be a crucial starting point - a period particularly sensitive to the protective mechanisms of parental and family support. For millennia, parents have recognized the newborn's basic need for safety, nourishment, warmth, and nurturing. Now science has added stunning revelations about human development from birth to age three, confirming that parent and other adult caregivers play a critical role in influencing the child's development. The importance of the first three years of life lies in the pace at which the child is growing and learning. In no other period do such profound changes occur so rapidly: the newborn grows from a completely dependent human being into one who walks, talks, plays, and explores. Babies raised by caring, attentive adults in safe, predictable environments are better learners than those raised with less attention in less secure settings. Unfortunately, in contrast to all the other leading industrialized nations, the United States fails to give parents time to be with their newborns, It fails to ensure pre- and postnatal health care for mothers and infants, and it fails to provide adequate childcare. The result is significant losses in the quality of its future workforce, citizenry, and parents. There are, of course, reasons other than economic ones for protecting young children and their families. Children need to be treasured for their own sake, not merely for what they do for the labor market when they are grown. But the issues of "human capital" - the combined skills, knowledge, and ideas of a nation's people - are real.

America's business and political leaders are understandably worried about the nation's children and its educational system. Their concern is well founded, but school reform alone is not the answer. Any effort to strengthen the workforce must begin with the family, a key factor in the development of human capital. By supporting families during the child's earliest years, society ensures that children will enter school ready to learn and will be ready, in time, to enter the workforce and be good parents. It is time to sound - and answer - the alarm about the neglect of our nation's young children and their families. All Americans must take responsibility for reversing this trend. As the risks to our children intensify, so must out determinations to enact family-centered programs and policies to ensure all of our youngest children the decent start that they deserve.

Passage $$2$$
Much early childhood literature suggests that the first three years of life is the critical period for brain development. It's a time when the young brain's learning power is almost limitless. After this period, as a child psychiatrist, Felton Earls remarks. "A kind of irreversibility sets in. There is this shaping process that goes on early, and then at the end of this process, you have essentially designed a brain that probably is not going to change very much more." "Neuroscientists see it a little differently. In a review of child development and neuroscience issues, Charles Nelson and Floyd Bloom discuss some genuinely new findings in neuroscience - what happens in the brain when the adult learn new motor skills and the rapidity with which the adult brain can reorganize after the loss of sensory input from an amputated limb. The new findings that Nelson and Bloom allude to suggest that the brain retains its ability to reorganize itself in response to experience or injury throughout life. They conclude, "It may be useful to question the simplistic view that the brain becomes unbendable and increasingly difficult to modify beyond the first few years of life. Although clearly much of brain development occurs through the first years of life, the brain is far from set in its trajectory, even at the completion of adolescence." If so, we should be wary of claims that parents have only a single, biologically delimited, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help their children build better brains.

Some might ask why we should care about the scientific accuracy of a view put forth by those who want to help children: isn't any argument leading to improved opportunities and outcomes for children a good argument? Many well-intentioned early childhood advocates do take this position. It's the hard-nosed but often realistic view that everyone knows that policy argument are merely exercises in political rhetoric. Helping society's children is a worthy aim. But if we want to take the science seriously, then we have to care if we are acting on a science-based agenda or a myth. What a science-based policy argument should do is add some evidence, beyond our own prejudices and ideological tastes, for what the preferable policy might be.

What the science can add to the policy debate are insights about leverage points that we could most effectively exploit to reach our goal. If the science is wrong, then we are trying to achieve our policy goals by pushing the wrong buttons.

Passage $$1$$
The first three years of life appear to be a crucial starting point - a period particularly sensitive to the protective mechanisms of parental and family support. For millennia, parents have recognized the newborn's basic need for safety, nourishment, warmth, and nurturing. Now science has added stunning revelations about human development from birth to age three, confirming that parent and other adult caregivers play a critical role in influencing the child's development. The importance of the first three years of life lies in the pace at which the child is growing and learning. In no other period do such profound changes occur so rapidly: the newborn grows from a completely dependent human being into one who walks, talks, plays, and explores. Babies raised by caring, attentive adults in safe, predictable environments are better learners than those raised with less attention in less secure settings. Unfortunately, in contrast to all the other leading industrialized nations, the United States fails to give parents time to be with their newborns, It fails to ensure pre- and postnatal health care for mothers and infants, and it fails to provide adequate childcare. The result is significant losses in the quality of its future workforce, citizenry, and parents. There are, of course, reasons other than economic ones for protecting young children and their families. Children need to be treasured for their own sake, not merely for what they do for the labor market when they are grown. But the issues of "human capital" - the combined skills, knowledge, and ideas of a nation's people - are real.

America's business and political leaders are understandably worried about the nation's children and its educational system. Their concern is well founded, but school reform alone is not the answer. Any effort to strengthen the workforce must begin with the family, a key factor in the development of human capital. By supporting families during the child's earliest years, society ensures that children will enter school ready to learn and will be ready, in time, to enter the workforce and be good parents. It is time to sound - and answer - the alarm about the neglect of our nation's young children and their families. All Americans must take responsibility for reversing this trend. As the risks to our children intensify, so must out determinations to enact family-centered programs and policies to ensure all of our youngest children the decent start that they deserve.

Passage $$2$$
Much early childhood literature suggests that the first three years of life is the critical period for brain development. It's a time when the young brain's learning power is almost limitless. After this period, as a child psychiatrist, Felton Earls remarks. "A kind of irreversibility sets in. There is this shaping process that goes on early, and then at the end of this process, you have essentially designed a brain that probably is not going to change very much more." "Neuroscientists see it a little differently. In a review of child development and neuroscience issues, Charles Nelson and Floyd Bloom discuss some genuinely new findings in neuroscience - what happens in the brain when the adult learn new motor skills and the rapidity with which the adult brain can reorganize after the loss of sensory input from an amputated limb. The new findings that Nelson and Bloom allude to suggest that the brain retains its ability to reorganize itself in response to experience or injury throughout life. They conclude, "It may be useful to question the simplistic view that the brain becomes unbendable and increasingly difficult to modify beyond the first few years of life. Although clearly much of brain development occurs through the first years of life, the brain is far from set in its trajectory, even at the completion of adolescence." If so, we should be wary of claims that parents have only a single, biologically delimited, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help their children build better brains.

Some might ask why we should care about the scientific accuracy of a view put forth by those who want to help children: isn't any argument leading to improved opportunities and outcomes for children a good argument? Many well-intentioned early childhood advocates do take this position. It's the hard-nosed but often realistic view that everyone knows that policy argument are merely exercises in political rhetoric. Helping society's children is a worthy aim. But if we want to take the science seriously, then we have to care if we are acting on a science-based agenda or a myth. What a science-based policy argument should do is add some evidence, beyond our own prejudices and ideological tastes, for what the preferable policy might be.

What the science can add to the policy debate are insights about leverage points that we could most effectively exploit to reach our goal. If the science is wrong, then we are trying to achieve our policy goals by pushing the wrong buttons.

Passage $$1$$
The first three years of life appear to be a crucial starting point - a period particularly sensitive to the protective mechanisms of parental and family support. For millennia, parents have recognized the newborn's basic need for safety, nourishment, warmth, and nurturing. Now science has added stunning revelations about human development from birth to age three, confirming that parent and other adult caregivers play a critical role in influencing the child's development. The importance of the first three years of life lies in the pace at which the child is growing and learning. In no other period do such profound changes occur so rapidly: the newborn grows from a completely dependent human being into one who walks, talks, plays, and explores. Babies raised by caring, attentive adults in safe, predictable environments are better learners than those raised with less attention in less secure settings. Unfortunately, in contrast to all the other leading industrialized nations, the United States fails to give parents time to be with their newborns, It fails to ensure pre- and postnatal health care for mothers and infants, and it fails to provide adequate childcare. The result is significant losses in the quality of its future workforce, citizenry, and parents. There are, of course, reasons other than economic ones for protecting young children and their families. Children need to be treasured for their own sake, not merely for what they do for the labor market when they are grown. But the issues of "human capital" - the combined skills, knowledge, and ideas of a nation's people - are real.

America's business and political leaders are understandably worried about the nation's children and its educational system. Their concern is well founded, but school reform alone is not the answer. Any effort to strengthen the workforce must begin with the family, a key factor in the development of human capital. By supporting families during the child's earliest years, society ensures that children will enter school ready to learn and will be ready, in time, to enter the workforce and be good parents. It is time to sound - and answer - the alarm about the neglect of our nation's young children and their families. All Americans must take responsibility for reversing this trend. As the risks to our children intensify, so must out determinations to enact family-centered programs and policies to ensure all of our youngest children the decent start that they deserve.

Passage $$2$$
Much early childhood literature suggests that the first three years of life is the critical period for brain development. It's a time when the young brain's learning power is almost limitless. After this period, as a child psychiatrist, Felton Earls remarks. "A kind of irreversibility sets in. There is this shaping process that goes on early, and then at the end of this process, you have essentially designed a brain that probably is not going to change very much more." "Neuroscientists see it a little differently. In a review of child development and neuroscience issues, Charles Nelson and Floyd Bloom discuss some genuinely new findings in neuroscience - what happens in the brain when the adult learn new motor skills and the rapidity with which the adult brain can reorganize after the loss of sensory input from an amputated limb. The new findings that Nelson and Bloom allude to suggest that the brain retains its ability to reorganize itself in response to experience or injury throughout life. They conclude, "It may be useful to question the simplistic view that the brain becomes unbendable and increasingly difficult to modify beyond the first few years of life. Although clearly much of brain development occurs through the first years of life, the brain is far from set in its trajectory, even at the completion of adolescence." If so, we should be wary of claims that parents have only a single, biologically delimited, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help their children build better brains.

Some might ask why we should care about the scientific accuracy of a view put forth by those who want to help children: isn't any argument leading to improved opportunities and outcomes for children a good argument? Many well-intentioned early childhood advocates do take this position. It's the hard-nosed but often realistic view that everyone knows that policy argument are merely exercises in political rhetoric. Helping society's children is a worthy aim. But if we want to take the science seriously, then we have to care if we are acting on a science-based agenda or a myth. What a science-based policy argument should do is add some evidence, beyond our own prejudices and ideological tastes, for what the preferable policy might be.

What the science can add to the policy debate are insights about leverage points that we could most effectively exploit to reach our goal. If the science is wrong, then we are trying to achieve our policy goals by pushing the wrong buttons.

Now, what are we to make of this sputtering debate, in which charges of imperialism are met by equally passionate accusations of vandalism, in which each side hates the other, and yet each seems to have its share of reason? It occurs to me that perhaps what we have here is one of those debates in which the opposing sides, unbeknownst to themselves, share myopia that will turn out to be the most interesting and important feature of the whole discussion, a debate, for instance, like that of the Founding Fathers over the nature of the franchise. Think of all the energy and passion spent debating the question of property qualifications, or direct versus legislative elections, while all long, unmentioned and unimagined, was the fact-to us so central- that women and slaves were never considered for any kind of vote. While everyone is busy fighting over what should be taught in the classroom, something is being overlooked. 

In college, young people continue to be assigned certain books, but far more important are the books they discover for themselves browsing in the library, in bookstores, on the shelves of friends, one book leading to another, back and forth in history and across languages and cultures. After graduation, they continue to read and in the fullness of time produce a new generation of readers. Oh happy land$$!$$ I wish we all lived there. In that country of real readers, voluntary, active, self-determined readers, a debate like the current one over the canon would not be taking place. Or if it did, it would be as a kind of parlor game: What books would you take to a desert island? Everyone would know that the top-ten list was merely a tiny fraction of the books one would read in a lifetime. It would not seem racist or sexist or hopelessly hidebound to put Nathaniel Hawthorne on the list and not Toni Morrison$$.^2$$ It would be more like putting oatmeal and not noodles on the breakfast menu- a choice partly arbitrary, partly a nod to the national past, and partly, dare one says it, a kind of reverse affirmative action: School might frankly be the place where one reads the books that are a little off-putting, that have gone a little cold, that you might overlook because they do not address, in reader-friendly contemporary fashion, the issues most immediately at stake in modern life but that, with a little study, turn out to have a great deal to say. Being on the list wouldn't mean so much. It might even add to a writer's cachet not to be on the list, to be in one way or another too heady, too daring, too exciting to be ground up into institutional folder for teenagers. Generations of high school kids have been turned off to George Eliot$$^3$$ by being forced to read Silas Marner at a tender age. One can imagine a whole new readership for her of grown-ups were left to approach Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda with open minds, at their leisure. $$^1$$Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bront$$\ddot{e}$$, is a nineteenth-century novel, Judy Blume writes contemporary young adult novels. $$^2$$ Hawthorne was a nineteenth-century American writer. Toni Morrison is a contemporary American writer. $$^3$$ George Eliot was the pseudonym of a nineteenth-century female British novelist.

Now, what are we to make of this sputtering debate, in which charges of imperialism are met by equally passionate accusations of vandalism, in which each side hates the other, and yet each seems to have its share of reason? It occurs to me that perhaps what we have here is one of those debates in which the opposing sides, unbeknownst to themselves, share myopia that will turn out to be the most interesting and important feature of the whole discussion, a debate, for instance, like that of the Founding Fathers over the nature of the franchise. Think of all the energy and passion spent debating the question of property qualifications, or direct versus legislative elections, while all long, unmentioned and unimagined, was the fact-to us so central- that women and slaves were never considered for any kind of vote. While everyone is busy fighting over what should be taught in the classroom, something is being overlooked. 

In college, young people continue to be assigned certain books, but far more important are the books they discover for themselves browsing in the library, in bookstores, on the shelves of friends, one book leading to another, back and forth in history and across languages and cultures. After graduation, they continue to read and in the fullness of time produce a new generation of readers. Oh happy land$$!$$ I wish we all lived there. In that country of real readers, voluntary, active, self-determined readers, a debate like the current one over the canon would not be taking place. Or if it did, it would be as a kind of parlor game: What books would you take to a desert island? Everyone would know that the top-ten list was merely a tiny fraction of the books one would read in a lifetime. It would not seem racist or sexist or hopelessly hidebound to put Nathaniel Hawthorne on the list and not Toni Morrison$$.^2$$ It would be more like putting oatmeal and not noodles on the breakfast menu- a choice partly arbitrary, partly a nod to the national past, and partly, dare one says it, a kind of reverse affirmative action: School might frankly be the place where one reads the books that are a little off-putting, that have gone a little cold, that you might overlook because they do not address, in reader-friendly contemporary fashion, the issues most immediately at stake in modern life but that, with a little study, turn out to have a great deal to say. Being on the list wouldn't mean so much. It might even add to a writer's cachet not to be on the list, to be in one way or another too heady, too daring, too exciting to be ground up into institutional folder for teenagers. Generations of high school kids have been turned off to George Eliot$$^3$$ by being forced to read Silas Marner at a tender age. One can imagine a whole new readership for her of grown-ups were left to approach Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda with open minds, at their leisure. $$^1$$Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bront$$\ddot{e}$$, is a nineteenth-century novel, Judy Blume writes contemporary young adult novels. $$^2$$ Hawthorne was a nineteenth-century American writer. Toni Morrison is a contemporary American writer. $$^3$$ George Eliot was the pseudonym of a nineteenth-century female British novelist.