It’s the personal development we need to succeed, and eighty percent of it takes place before the age of six. So, if we are really serious about Self Development for the next generation, we have to improve early childhood education.
Strength of your Personality (Self Development)
No degree, no number of certifications bring you more success than the strength of your personality, which is a blend of your beliefs, convictions, and commitments. The empathy exhibited by a person in a given situation is worth more than the amount of knowledge poured in.
Even the most important skill of the 21 century: the ability to learn new things, is part of a positive and open personality. That makes self-development the most important component of education. Sure, contacts, GPA, and certifications make a difference. But they are just a small part of a personality and don’t represent a person’s whole self.
Self-development requires growth in cognitive as well as emotional domains. The life skills related to the heart are the most important part of personality development, no doubt about it. Yet, we don’t teach children how to be emotionally strong and caring.
Similarly, imagination and creativity are part of a healthy personality. Artificial intelligence is about to take over all the knowledge-based decision-making from humans. What we will be left with are our creative thoughts. Our worth will be the new ideas we generate. in mathematical terms, the worth of a human being in the 21st century is directly proportional to the number of new ideas they produce.
No wonder self-development has become a multi-billion dollar industry. With all the seminars, workshops, and books, the most effective self-development takes place in the early years, before the age of six, to be precise. Eight percent of what we are today, we became by age six, a scientific fact ignored by many of us. The amount of change that can come by spending money on early childhood education is a fraction of what money can buy in later years.
Research shows a three-fold increase in self-development of children who received better ECE as compared to the control group. This difference was observed in the areas of self-actualization, optimism, positive thinking, self-reliance, creativity, and love for reading.
So, in a nutshell, as far the self-development is concerned, we spend less and gain more in the early years, and that calls for focusing more on Early Childhood Education.