Family & Education

How to Educate a Child Long Before School Begins

True education begins not in the classroom, but in the home—where a child’s senses, imagination, and love of truth are first awakened.
How to Educate a Child Long Before School Begins
Early childhood development research shows that sensory experiences in the first years of life strongly influence cognitive and emotional growth. Tetyana Kovyrina/Pexels
Walker Larson
|Updated:
0:00

When does education begin? Is it when the child first enters a preschool classroom? Or first opens a book? Or first asks an important question? I would suggest it begins before all these incidents, important though they may be.

Education is an opening up of the whole person to the light of reality, so that body, mind, and soul may be suffused with the luminosity of being. And that light begins to shine—growing incrementally brighter, like early morning sunrays—in early infancy. Thus, the process of education begins long before the first schoolbook is ever opened.

Walker Larson
Walker Larson
Author
Before becoming a freelance journalist and culture writer, Walker Larson taught literature and history at a private academy in Wisconsin, where he resides with his wife and daughter. He holds a master’s in English literature and language, and his writing has appeared in The Hemingway Review, Intellectual Takeout, and his Substack, The Hazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, “Hologram” and “Song of Spheres.”