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Fractals shows us that ratios are universal regardless of scale. If we apply this idea, then we might gain some insight into an early years continuum curriculum for the development of a single child by looking more broadly at the developmental history of early man.

Survival is the psychological driving force behind early attachment as children will die without adult help. In fact, the underlying thematic subsol to the cohesion of most societies is the death of the individual without cooperation from the collective. Seen in this light, early education should provide a child with basic survival skills to survive first in the natural world, and then in the social world. That once a child is confident it could survive without its primary adult carers it is more free to move in greater orbits of independence from them both socially and physically.

The most basic early years education should look at the challenges and solutions of hunter-gatherers before introducing basic physical technologies.

• Shelter and clothing – temperature control
• Fire and Ice – temperature control
• Environmental threats and predators
• Discerning clean water from foul water
• Discerning vegetables from poison plants.
• Basic hygiene around smell and poop and shelter.
• Life and death (hunting) in the natural world
• First gathering of clean water and sharing water with the community.
• First gathering experience and offering a pay back meal to the community
• First hunt experience of killing and eating.

This short list points to the importance of social worth by providing the community with value. It also highlights that relative water and food abundance or scarcity would have been keen in early child awareness. Most prey animals and even harvesting herbs and fruits provide a certain puzzle that must be solved before food as a reward is granted. I believe this explains the zeitgeist in early childhood education – children love water play, and learning about animals. This reflects the need for a child to find water and determine both food sources and potential threats in the ecology.

In this modern world, food is provided and is abstracted away from labour and effort. Not that I am imply children should catch their own food at school, but it would be important to reconnect food with cognitive and physical challenge as a reward. To teach respect for food and re-couple food to a finite resource provided by their environment.

While there are many philosophies and movements around food, a continuum concept curriculum would assume we are omnivores. A continuum expectation of early man and also of early child would be a first hunt. While this could be mostly ceremonial, I do believe the first hunt experience should also be an existential confrontation with killing to eat. Killing to eat is a basic universal truth to all life and initiates the human into a cyclical and impersonal ecological awareness. I think the most basic way we could re-create this experience is fishing and then catching, killing, cooking, and eating a fish. I believe that successfully catching and cooking a fish meal would be a considered a survival graduation milestone.

I believe that once basic survival in the natural world has been mastered, the next phase of the curriculum would look at survival in the social world. This would look at tribal identity, hierarchy, property, conflict resolutions, tribal (team) competition, and human predation and human threats. The social phases of the curriculum would look at two basic ideas: securing cooperation, and resolving conflict. Under these 2 broad headings social continuum experiences include:

• martial arts
• status and assessing status
• community vs strangers
• greetings, and protocals
• rules, justices, punishments
• respect, trust, loyalty
• property, theft, gifts.
• money and impersonal interactions

Maslow’s pyramid of needs also seems to follow the history of early man. It makes the sense that the first and most important foundation for human life should be the first part we learn. Then as follows in the pyramid, social needs are the next the phase of early education.

I will use the continuum concept to direct my educational design research towards creating an early years curriculum that incorporates the continuum concept, epigenetics, and contemporary research on child development. My goal is to create a wholistic timeline of instructional experiences from ages 0-5. This will be a chronological list of specific experiences for children to directly experience without theoretical or cultural narrative overlayed.

While I do believe a world narrative is an important continuum experience and helps the child ground the story of their existence into a broader story – the specifics of the narrative should be provided by that child’s born-into-community. Direct experiencing of specific continuum experiences is the foundation and the world narrative is the superstructure. Ideally, no narrative would be provided for the most basic experiences and a culture of conjecture and discussion cultivated.

An important addition to the continuum concept is the idea of epigenetic development. Our DNA is programmed by important experiences in our own life-time. These experiences switch genes on and off and direct our early neurological and physiological development. This also means our bodies and minds are waiting for specific input about our social and ecological environment.

Be it epigenetic or otherwise, our early development is directed by our first experiences and the presence or absence specific stimuli. Our emotional and cognitive capacities as adults is largely determined by our first 5 years of experience. I will focus my design research on developing a 5 year curriculum of social, emotional, mineral, and physiological experiences for both the parents and child.