Raise early childhood teachers qualifications to Master’s degree

I salute the Ministry of Education’s resolution to raise qualifications of all primary and secondary school teacher’s to bachelor’s degree. I highly recommend that nursery school teacher entry and qualifications should be raised even higher. This is because they lay the foundation upon which all the other teachers build on.
According to cognitive psychologists, a child’s character, is formed between two and six years. This is a time of acceleration for how children learn, develop and build skills necessary to succeed in school and in life. From birth to age five, a child’s brain develops more than at any other time in life. The quality of a child’s experiences in the first few years of life – positive or negative – helps shape how their brain develops.
The brain is the command centre of the human body. A newborn baby has all of the brain cells (neurons) they’ll have for the rest of their life, but it is the connections between these cells that really make the brain work. Brain connections enable us to move, think, communicate and do just about everything. At least one million new neural connections (synapses) are made every second, more than at any other time in life. The connections needed for many important, higher-level abilities like motivation, self-regulation, innovation, problem solving and communication are formed in these early years – or not formed. It’s much harder for these essential brain connections to be formed later in life.
Early childhood/nursery teachers, are therefore, dealing with the most critical and formative stage of development that handles all the pre-reading, mathematics, writing skills, speaking and relating skills.
Yet ironically, they have the least college entry points, shortest training duration and poorest pay. Majority join the profession with bad scores and have little or no exposure. The result is poor quality of learners. It is no surprise that we are grappling with creativity, imagination and innovation because this stage has been mismanaged, eg mathematics (a subject that imparts problem solving skills), is poorly done and hated because of the way pre-mathematics skills are introduced and administered during early childhood education, probably the teacher’s attitude towards the subject.
In Luke 6:39-40, Jesus asked in a parable: “Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit? (40) A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher”.
A teacher passes on who they are in terms of values, dressing, faith, character, handwriting, etc. Whatever the teacher writes on this child’s slate at this stage will stick for life, that’s the way this child will be as an adult as Prov 22:6 states. And true to this proverb, we are reaping the fruits of bad training at early childhood with learners who cannot innovate, think critically and creatively, copy cats, lacking in vision, with poor work ethic, lacking sense of direction and purpose
There is an interesting observation that after A-Level, the A students opt for high professional courses like medicine, law, statistics etc, the B students go for Business courses like B-COM, and other more recent ones like oil and gas, C’ students go into politics, D students go for education to become teachers, while E students become pastors. You then have the pyramid turned upside down with the D class teaching children of the A class, C class students making laws for the A class and the A class going to E students for spiritual guidance. Imagine this quagmire.
Nursery teachers should, therefore, be well motivated and facilitated. Early childhood teachers should have the highest qualifications eg Master’s degree. Our advancement in development, innovation, creativity, values, work ethic and discipline, among others are hinged on how well we manage early childhood training.