EDUCATION CONTINUES AT BIRTH

by Jameela Ali

In the previous article 'Education Begins in the Womb' we came to realised how the foetus can hear and at birth can recognise what it had heard.  We also realised how important it is to expose the foetus to the Words of Allah so that it can hear and recognise these Words once it is born. In this article, will come to know that babies will continue to hear and recognise and differentiate what s/he is hearing.  We will then realise how important it is to continue to expose babies to the Words of Allah at this young age.

Babies are born with the ability to hear the differences among the sounds of many languages.  As they grow, any sounds that they continue to hear will reinforce the brain connections used to process them.  This will allow them to retain the ability to perceive and produce them.  However, any sounds that babies do not hear will begin to fade out.

Below is a timeline of this process:

- Birth                           Ability to hear the differences in all sounds.

- 6 months         Beginning of a drift  towards the speech sounds of the language that they hear around them.  The sounds that are not within the languages that they hear  begin to fade out.

- 8 months         There is a decrease in the ability to detect small differences between sounds which are not in the home language.

- 10 months       Babies can make all the necessary discriminations between the speech sound of their mother tongue and can only discriminate between phonemes (speech sounds which signals changes in meaning like 'pat' and 'bat') in that language.

- 24 months       The process in which the sounds not in the children's mother tongue cease to appear in their speech is complete.

- 5 years old      The critical period for language learning begins to close (and ends at puberty).

What this means to Qur'an learning is that parents should continue to recite or play Qur'an audios to their babies from birth.  This is so that the brain will continue to make and reinforce the connections of the sounds of the Qur'an.  The more parents do it the stronger the connections will be and the better will be the babies' ability to perceive and produce the Qur'anic sounds.

Take, for example, older children and adults who have not heard the Qur'an before or their neuron connections are weak (that is, they have not heard it often enough), they will have difficulties in producing certain sounds such as kha, 'ain, ghain.  Another common example is among asians.  Most asian languages do not have the sound that letter r produces.  When they begin to learn the Qur'an or English at a later age, they find it difficult to do so and often substitute the 'l' sound for it.  Although it is not completely impossible to learn these new sounds, it is very difficult to do so.

Another benefit of continuing to recite the Qur'an or play the audio of it to babies is that it will aid in their memorisation.  This is for the same reason that stronger neural connections make it easier for them to remember.

Many parents go to all lengths to give their children a headstart in learning, especially in reading, writing and mathematics.  So why do Muslim parents not give their children a headstart in Qur'an recitation and memorisation?