考研阅读精选：最佳时机--幼儿教育

考研网

THE BEST TIME: EARLY CHILDHOOD

For Ann Wroe, life is best when the world is simple, new and there to be discovered ...
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, November/December 2011
  I’d choose to live in very early childhood, just at the beginning of  discernment. There’s no time there, beyond the eternal rhythm set by  meals at the breast and the oblivion of sleep, which comes as gently and  immediately as the closing of an eye; there’s no place there, beyond  one patch of sunlit grass, one fold of blanket, and the whole enormous  world laid out for exploring.
In this time and place, poets  tell us, dreams and waking are the same; we move easily from one to the  other. We may still keep, as Wordsworth supposed, intimations of some  ante-natal life, and know why we home like bees towards the song of a  bird or the sparkle of sunbeams on water. With our small hands, we  believe that everything can be grasped; with our small, soft mouths we  try to eat it all, assuming everything we find will be sweet and rich as  milk.
No one makes demands on us, and the world revolves  effortlessly round no one but ourselves. Our griefs are soothed and  forgotten almost before the tears fall. We are carried if we want to be,  in hugging arms, but we can pull ourselves up, reach things, and creep  away from where we’re put: every day more confident, stronger,  keener-eyed. Slowly, like a shell, the world opens and light floods in.  Any day now, we’ll stand to meet it.
Everything is new,  unnamed, important, and belongs to us. A stone is new, and a blade of  grass. We see their potential as unlimited, like our own. We make time  for it. A puddle astonishes us. A piece of paper, blown by the wind,  becomes a playmate, and the night-time tree a ragged monster. Coleridge  once took his crying baby son out of the house to show him the moon; the  moon silenced him, shining on his tears. It is good to be silenced by  beauty. Too briefly we stay there. But infancy makes of everywhere the  best time and the best place.
Ann Wroe is the obituaries  editor of The Economist and author of "Orpheus: The Song of Life" and  "Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself".
What do you  think is the best time and place to be alive? Read Arkady Ostrovsky on  pre-revolutionary Russia; Robert Guest on Heian-era Japan; Lucy Kellaway  on America c.15,000BC; J.M. Ledgard on Princeton in 1949; and Patrick  Dillon on London in the 1690s. Have your say by voting in our online  poll.