It is widely recognised within the neuroscience community that neuroscience is a very new science and that some tentative initial findings have been massively over-interpreted by educationalists, politicians and other commentators.
The proliferation of books claiming to offer 'brain-based' ways of teaching or parenting has been unhelpful and these are generally viewed with horror by neuroscientists. My own colleague at Cambridge, Professor Usha Goswami, who is recognised internationally for her important work on the neuroscience of dyslexia, has written extensively about 'neuromyths'.
To this extent I would support the position adopted by John Bruer. He is certainly correct that the ideas about the damaging effects of early deprivation derive from experiments with mice, who were subjected to very extreme deprivation, and cannot be used to infer anything about brain development among children brought up in what might be regarded as relatively poor circumstances, but whose physical and social environments are most likely perfectly stimulating enough to ensure normal physiological development of the brain.
However, in my view, to use the current limitations and over-interpretations of neuroscience to dismiss all scientific study of factors impacting on children's development is highly misleading.
We do have a good body of evidence from social science research, including longitudinal studies within educational research and developmental psychology, to suggest that children's experiences in the first few years of their lives can have significant long-term effects on their academic success and life chances.
The High Scope studies from the US and the EPPE study in the UK have both shown that good quality nursery education, for example, is associated with various measures of academic and social/emotional development (including levels of criminality, home ownership, employment outcomes etc., as well as academic progress).
We also have a body of research indicating that the quality of early child-parent relationships impacts upon children's early development of emotional and cognitive self-regulation, which is now clearly recognised as a key determinant of children's success at school and emotional well-being.
An important finding from a number of studies, furthermore, has shown that it is what parents do, rather than who they are (eg. social class, level of education) that makes the difference. To the extent that this is associated with poverty, this association is almost certainly mediated by parental stress.
Given the strength of the evidence in this area, in my view it would be irresponsible to deny parents access to this information, or to suggest, as some of the presenters at the conference seem to be doing, that parents should, on principle, disregard evidence provided by scientific research in this area.
At the same time, (and this bit is just my personal opinion), it is equally facile of politicians to start making pronouncements about why people rioted recently.
In my view, this probably had far more to do with the removal of funding by the present administration for all kinds of youth programmes and educational support for young people, who consequently have nothing to do and feel rather hopeless as regards their job and life prospects. But they can't say that, can they?
