All babies are born geniuses with innate ability to “think outside the box”, geared up by the powerful gift of right hemisphere dominance during the first years of life. Function determines structure, and the structure evolves through experience. The world’s best known geniuses, Ludwig von Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, William Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Sir Isaac Newton, and many more, all showed prodigious ability from early childhood, whose achievement heavily rely on the creative and intuitive right brain functions.

Research on lateral dominance has confirmed that the right brain is specialized for creative and intuitive tasking. However, the traditional education systems are set up for left brain learning, the right brain, the source of creative thinking, is well under-utilized. Despite well-established research now confirms the benefits of early education, and a growing recognition of the importance of high quality early education programs, the lack of public understanding as to its importance, and the gap between knowledge and action from government policy and professional practice in early education lead to a preschool crisis. What makes the things worst? Instead of maximizing young children’s creative learning during their limited time windows, the young children are exposed to all sorts of adult television programs and computer games, which merely provide entertainment, but do little to encourage children’s creativity. Business Week ever reported that 90% of a child’s creativity is destroyed by age seven, and by age forty, we are about 2% as creative as we were at age five.

When babies are born, their brains are ready to learn with fascinating bundle of neurons waiting to be hard wired into the intricate circuitry of the mind. Early childhood education can take the window of opportunity of the right hemisphere of the brain, which not only helps children to learn easily and efficiently, it can also unlock the right brain’s prodigious creative talents, as well as its photographic memory, speed reading, intuitive insight, automatic mental processing, and instant multiple language acquisition abilities. No doubt, the optimal utilization of both left and right brains leads to the ability to achieve the highest potential.

The early years are precious windows of opportunity, which lay crucial and irreversible foundation for a child’s life time development. According to Dr. Alison Elliott, School of Education and Early Childhood Studies, University of Western Sydney, quality and choice are the building blocks for good child care, and the child care scheme is a debt trap for parents. While government reforms on early education take time, we call on all parents to take advantage of the windows of opportunity of the prodigious right brain during your child’s first few years of life, and give them the time-sensitive gift of early education that effects a lifetime.