KATHLENE M. writes:

This article explores how kindergarten has become worse in recent years. This excerpt interested me for the reason I explain below:

How and why has kindergarten changed?

In a word: testing.

According to a 2009 report from the Washington, D.C.-based Alliance for Childhood, kindergartners are being taught to comply with state and national standards, which takes away from creative play-time known to be important to early childhood development.

“These practices, which are not well grounded in research, violate long-established principles of child development and good teaching. It is increasingly clear they are compromising children’s health and long-term prospects for success in school,” according to the report.

The report, called “Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in Schools,” was based on nine studies of public school classrooms and showed that kindergartners spent four to six times as much of the school day focused on reading and math as they did playing.

“Pushing down” curriculum is not creating better test scores, Guddemi says. Instead, “We’re getting children who feel like failures and who hate school as early as kindergarten,” she says. A renewed focus on child development is a way to help close the achievement gap, she says.

The Alliance for Childhood’s 2009 report and the Gesell Institute’s new study debunk the theory that the earlier children are taught reading, writing, math and science, the more successful they’ll be in school and life.

I agree with the statement, “We’re getting children who feel like failures and who hate school as early as kindergarten” based on my own situation with my 8-year-old son. He’s in 3rd grade and has been getting increasingly anxious about school. Writing has been the most frustrating for him. The children are assigned several paragraph-writing assignments each day. My son used to love writing and now hates it to the point of tears when we do paragraph-writing homework assignments. Part of his frustration is related to his performance anxiety: he’s so afraid that he’ll write “poorly” (i.e., use the “wrong” word or that he’ll have used less-than-enough adjectives), that this will earn him a lower numerical score. I don’t recall having to write this much when I was in 3rd grade or to have my every word, sentence, and paragraph scrutinized so mercilessly at such a young age. Adding to the anxiety, my son also has numerous other weekly tests which are designed to prep the children for the state testing in May.

The situation has become so intense in the public schools that Vicki Abeles, a 48-year-old mother and lawyer, produced the documentary Race to Nowhere to bring national attention to the matter and to “understand the stresses her children, now ages 16, 14 and 11, were experiencing.”

One daughter had become physically sick as she struggled with the demands of school. Then, several months into Abeles’s effort, a teenager in her community committed suicide after getting a failing math grade, a tragedy Abeles says intensified her commitment to making the film.

“I think there is tremendous pressure on all kids to get the grade, to get the test score … which is creating an epidemic of unhealthy kids who are also arriving at college and at the workplace unprepared,” Abeles said in an interview.

While standards and goals are very important to have, our schools have lost sight of what education is about: teaching children to think and explore.

Laura writes:

The early grades have become much more pressured. This is part of an overall trend to disregard the basics of child and adolescent development, to hurry children along so that they become adult-like sooner.  Young children are expected to perform like little office workers, like bureaucrats with jobs. Teenagers are expected to make mature decisions among an array of freedoms and without much supervision.  Technological change, the decline of family, the absence of mothers, and a materialistic mentality, an almost hysterical fear that if children cannot function early they will never be competitive or survive in a competitive world, have all contributed to this trend.

Unfortunately, as you probably know, I don’t think these issues can be addressed by tweaking or re-engineering education in our public schools or even in many of our private schools. The purpose of education is to develop all aspects of human personality. If you think of human beings as inhabiting four realms – the physical, the spiritual, the intellectual, and the emotional – you see that modern education denies important aspects of them all. But, in general, mass institutions will never be protective of childhood or respect the individual.

You may enjoy Kay Hymowitz’s book Ready or Not: What Happens When We Treat Children as Small Adults.

As far as kindergarten, not only has it failed to save the world, it is harmful in many cases and entirely unnecessary to the child.

                                             — Comments —

Jill F. writes:

I remember the words of the Quaker father in the book Christie by Catherine Marshall who said, “My job is to see that thee has a happy childhood tucked under thy belt.” A happy childhood is, indeed, something each parent should strive toward.

Our children will never get another childhood. They are only young, bright and eager for a very short time. I still remember the joy of playing under the big currant bush in our back yard and the sound of the New Mexican Spring wind around me as I I lost track of time. Losing track of time is a joy that all children should experience regularly.

The schools are not going to change their teach/test/teach methods because now their funding is tied to how well the schools (and individual classes) score on the tests. Boys have always struggled in the consolidated schools of today but this emphasis on testing will make schooling even more of a nightmare for our boys.

Schools hinder children in their development not just from pressuring them to perform but also by taking away precious hours in the day in which children should be thinking, playing, questioning and exploring. Why the huge backpacks full of homework that children lug home from school each day? Whatever happened to being able to breathe and laugh and converse?

Parents have hard decisions to make which may entail real financial sacrifices to find alternatives to pressurized schooling. Change will not come easily. Remember that each child who leaves the public school system results in a huge loss of revenue. School officials don’t like that.

I do recommend homeschooling. The following story illustrates why.

One year we had had a new baby and moved three times and we weren’t able to get to our homeschooling school work (we tried but it just didn’t happen) so we read and read and read. We had no t.v. and we limited the computer. We read aloud together and we enjoyed regular trips to the library.

At the end of the year I tested the children on the Iowa Basic test (the standardized test given to all school children in Idaho at that time) and my children scored off the charts; in the 99th percentile in every area…including math!

As I looked at the Iowa Basic Test graph comparing the scores of my children to those of both the private and public school children I felt like the old professor in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe who would mutter to himself, “What do they teach them in those schools?”

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