You may be aware that the brain and body recapitulate evolutionary development during embryonic growth, and the brain's final structure reflects that evolutionary recapitulation of stages commonly called reptilian, fish, and finally mammalian. We are failing generally in our educational/child rearing performance by not following that blueprint for child rearing and training.

Our traditional m.o. is: we take a child that has been living in a water-world for nine months and suddenly pull him out of the water, confine him on his back in a crib where he is helpless, like a fish caught and thrown on the shore. The newborn body is craving activity to develop muscles which also stimulates autonomic nervous development in the brain stem, but it is forced to lie flopping around in its crib "jail," pretty much inactive for months. Scientific studies have shown that proper development of higher brain structures is dependent on good development of lower structures. We are no doubt stunting our children's physical/emotional/mental growth by hampering their early physical development. Newborns should be happily swimming around in a no-gravity environment... WATER! Their bodies would develop much faster, they would be walking sooner, talking sooner, learning faster, and the end result would be much smarter, healthier people and society.

A good place to start research on this is Dr. Wen Wanger's book Limbic Learning and Observations on the Nature of Genius. He makes it pretty obvious that we are not giving our children the proper early training and therefore not allowing them to reach their full potential mentally, emotionally, and physically. Without that early physical "edge" the brain stem's proper development gives, the brain's pons don't develop fully, and our emotional potential suffers, which then causes mental development to suffer when the medula and cortex don't develop fully.