Education before age five leaves structural changes to the brain, identifiable forty years later — impressive! This is the beauty of long-term longitudinal studies (the negative side is you have to wait decades to get the results).
Abecedarian Project was an early education randomised controlled trial that has followed development since 1971 in North Carolina in the USA. In this project there was a control group (of 18) and an educational group (of 29) in groups of high-risk infants i.e. from socially under-privileged children. Both groups received extra health care, nutrition, and family support services. The education group received in addition, five years of high quality educational support (from 6 weeks old!), five days a week, 50 weeks a year.
Therefore this gives us a good control with similar situations and similar levels of support and the biggest difference being the education given in the first five years of life.
