As you've probably seen over at Yglesias's place, Sara's got a new paper out arguing that we're placing too much important on education in the first three years of life. It's an interesting read, and short enough that you've got no excuse for not grabbing the PDF. By the end, I was inclined to agree that our current efforts in the 0-3 range are wasted, and that we'd probably be better off paying more attention to education for slightly older kids.

With that said, the neuroscience classes I took in college make me bristle a little at the idea that early childhood intervention isn't scientifically justified. Kids' brains are simply doing too much interesting and dramatic stuff during that period for me to believe that there's nothing to be gained by intervening during it. We're probably not addressing that opportunity very well — but I do believe that the period represents a genuine opportunity. So, some quibbles:

First, I kind of think that the scientific case against very early intervention is being overstated. Just because idiotic measures like Zell Miller's classical CDs for newborns don't work doesn't mean that that the first few years aren't a big deal in neural terms, or that the government might someday be able to make itself useful during them. And since the fad for neuroscientifically-justified curricula only occurred in the mid-to-late nineties, citing the lack of evidence in favor of these programs seems a little harsh to me — it's a bit early for any good longitudinal data about these early interventions' impact on life outcomes to have shown up, right? The kids born during this period of brainthusiasm aren't even in high school yet.

Similarly, just because the adult brain is more plastic than we once thought doesn't mean that the brain isn't at its maximum plasticity during early childhood. Myelination is occurring at a breakneck pace during this time, making connections usably speedy at the cost of reduced synaptic flexibility. It's a big deal, and it's plausible to think that stimuli that affect this process could have significant impacts on the final state of the brain.

As Sara's paper points out, we know that the richness of the environment has an effect on synaptic density in animal models. But she discounts this by saying:

Child advocates also cite experiments in which animals that lived in more stimulating environments—with toys and other animals—developed more synapses per neuron than those that lived alone in sterile lab cages. They argue that these studies show that enriched environments enhance brain growth. But, as author John Bruer points out, the environments that wild animals live in are more like the enriched environment than the lab cage one.

But couldn't you also say that a preschool classroom more closely resembles the proto-human existence on the primordial savanna (or whatever) than a crackhouse does?

Thus, this experiment simply repeats the finding that severe deprivation hurts development; it does not show that a more engaging environment produces smarter animals— and it definitely does not show that extra stimulation produces smarter children.

True. But it's reasonable to consider deprivation and stimulation as a continuum, right? It seems likely that it's not a linear relationship; there's doubtless a point of diminishing returns. Extra stimulation may not produce smarter children, but there are decent reasons for thinking that seemingly-benign neglect can producer dumber children. Is it crazy to think that government-sponsored early childhood programs could be a way to remedy this problem?

I wholeheartedly agree with this, though:

Even if neuroscience evidence did show unequivocally that the years from zero to three are the most important for children’s development—and it does not—that wouldn’t tell us how, or even if, governments can intervene effectively during that time to improve child development or life outcomes. In other words, neuroscience research—with its heavy reliance on PET scans, MRIs and studies of lab rats—is meant to help academics understand how the brain the works; it is not meant to inform social policy.

All those baby Einstein products are made by hacks and charlatans, and I have no difficulty believing that the education money the government currently spends on kids' first years is mostly wasted. But based on my understanding of the neuroscience, it does seem like those years are probably worth some policy attention. I agree with Sara that we're not capable of making superbabies — but I still believe that these programs might help us avoid subpar babies. But maybe that's a task for social services rather than the school system.