What is too little known is that the baby inherits a gene code that enables them to learn how to bond with an adult. This coding allows the baby, infant, and child to learn how to gain sympathy and protection for their survival. What is more unknown is that this coding also underlies how the child can develop their intelligence. Imprinting is a process that is very little recognised and yet it does play an integral part in the intelligence process, because it explains exactly why intelligence is reliant upon language and why language is reliant upon emotional sensitivity. After all, when this process of imprinting is impaired by a parent, their infant may not talk, be retarded in their movement, and may show no emotion. When it is fostered in the later school child by the parent and the teacher working together, the child has the potential to learn anything.
The 3 dimensional world of the child abruptly changes when they enter that of school. For the world of school is of a 2 dimensional order defined by pen and paper. This world, which the child must continually compete against the drives and insecurities of other children, is defined by rules. The competence developed in the child by their parents, through the language skills they teach them, will much decide the ability of the child to survive in this system. Their ability to know the rules and to learn how to play them, are the foundations for what we will use to define their intelligence. After all, it is a great misconception that all children start as equal when they join the educational system or that they catch up as they move through it. They do not. As they enter the gates for the very first time, some already know how to read and write at an advanced level, while others may never have quite held a pen. These differences do matter, and backed by the home that caused these differences, the child is likely to maintain them right through the whole educational process.
Mediation: Crafting the Intelligence of the Child
introduces an awareness to how the parent and the later teacher can help a child to understand their world more sensitively, and learn how to better present their mind to one who is judging them. In short, it shows how to develop the intelligence of a child.
The book also discusses the work of Professor Reuven Feuerstein. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, Reuven Feuerstein began to develop a new way of understanding how intelligence could develop. His now world famous system is discussed in this book with new insights into how it actually works, and to the many children whose intelligence has been transformed by it.