The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids (2016)

The preschool my kids go to is starting to implement more school readiness content and I am adamantly opposed to it. Unfortunately, all the other parents are pro &quot;learning&quot; and want the changes.<p>Forcing young children to learn specific topics can only lead to one outcome: a destruction of man&#x27;s natural desire to learn about the world through association of learning with pain.<p>Kids learn all the time at an incredible rate. One day, my daughter came home and said, &quot;Daddy, look at this picture I made: a dog, a cat, a pig, a horse, a cow, a chicken! These are all animals that live on a farm!&quot; Yet when I ask her &quot;did you learn anything at school today,&quot; the answer, invariably, is &quot;no.&quot;<p>To switch out this kind of early childhood education with a curriculum of forced learning intended to mold the child into a bureaucrats ill-conceived vision of a virtuous society is monstrous.

&quot;Remember Citizen, your worth as a human being begins and ends at how much more measurable value you provide than average. If you can&#x27;t do better than average, your existence was a mistake!&quot;<p>This article kind of reminds me of the super-high-pressure environment of Japanese education, where test scores are the be-all-end-all until you (hopefully) become the appendage of some state-supported hypercorp.<p>I&#x27;ve heard somewhere (I can&#x27;t remember and my search-fu is weak) that &quot;People need bread, but they need roses too&quot;, where bread is what makes life possible, and roses are what makes life worth living (like art and such). We hyper-optimize for bread, and burn the roses to save on fuel.<p>This shit makes my blood run cold.

None of this early academic education is necessary. In Finland, which consistently has top scores in reading and math, kids don&#x27;t start school until they&#x27;re seven, and at that point they&#x27;re only expected to be able to turn text rightside up.<p>(And before anybody jumps to the &quot;homogenous society&quot; explanation, Finland used to have mediocre schools before they put a lot of effort and money into them in the 70s and 80s.)

There seems to be a cycle for trends like these:<p>&quot;New education alternative available to some children.&quot;<p>&quot;Wealthy suburban parents begin turning to new education alternative.&quot;<p>&quot;Public outcry over lack of education alternative available to middle and lower class children.&quot;<p>&quot;New education alternative now being implemented in public schools.&quot;<p>&quot;Wealthy suburban parents unhappy about options available in public schools, begin looking elsewhere.&quot;<p>...<p>I am very thankful that my parents ignored any of the hyped trends and just gave us both the most convenient education experience possible. Unfortunately, I think there is a spirit of constant, hand-on meddling that our generation has developed.

This is why my wife and I chose a play-based co-op pre-school for our kids. They both were academically above average compared to their peers in kindergarten.<p>But everyone is different. Our kids learned well by being allowed to pick what they studied. That may not be suitable for all children, and some, perhaps even many or most, might need more structure and rigor earlier.

Last night at bedtime my 7yo son (2nd grade) said that he doesn&#x27;t have enough time to play. Yesterday was a short day that he has once a week and he wished every day was a short day.<p>To be honest, it was really sad to hear him say that. He&#x27;s a kid and doesn&#x27;t understand the schedule being imposed upon him.<p>Without getting into a discussion about the right number of hours a 7yo should spend in class I wanted to ask another question.<p>What ideas have parents come up with to make it &quot;feel&quot; like there&#x27;s more unstructured play time for kids during the school year?

The most important thing my kids got out of preschool is mature immune systems.

Not all preschools are like this, and I&#x27;m not sure how things are really trending. In my neck of the woods, the more highly sought after programs feature more talking, listening, and discovery. A slogan that our child&#x27;s school uses is &quot;Play is children&#x27;s work.&quot; Unfortunately, many of these are private and may or may not be eligible for state funds.<p>See this link for more information on this approach to learning: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reggio_Emilia_approach" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reggio_Emilia_approach</a>

The more I read about the state of modern education, the more convinced I become that I dodged a bullet as an 80&#x27;s kid. This is essentially child pageantry for the middle-upper class, with all of the associated pathologies.

I was homeschooled up until high school, and more or less allowed to study whatever I found interesting. When I entered high school I tested well ahead of my peers academically in most areas- taught myself to program a computer when I was 8- but, I didn&#x27;t do well at all in terms of grades because I was never able to get used to studying what I was told to study instead of whatever I found fascinating. To this day, my work is somewhat sloppy unless I find it personally interesting. The fact is that to do well in our society you need heavy, heavy doses of obedience and conformity- originality and passion are sharply discouraged.<p>I have a feeling I&#x27;m really not that special in this regard though- I think most people feel kind of crushed in their daily lives, whether they were homeschooled as children or not.

&quot;mainly served as a safe social space for children to learn to get along with others&quot;<p>That&#x27;s exactly what pre-school is supposed to be.<p>Now it&#x27;s &quot;If you don&#x27;t get into the right pre-school, you won&#x27;t get into an Ivy League university, so you&#x27;ll be a failure!&quot;.

You always have to be careful when drawing conclusions about causality from observational studies.<p>&gt; New research sounds a particularly disquieting note. A major evaluation of Tennessee’s publicly funded preschool system, published in September, found that although children who had attended preschool initially exhibited more “school readiness” skills when they entered kindergarten than did their non-preschool-attending peers, by the time they were in first grade their attitudes toward school were deteriorating. And by second grade they performed worse on tests measuring literacy, language, and math skills. <i>The researchers told New York magazine that overreliance on direct instruction and repetitive, poorly structured pedagogy were likely culprits;</i> children who’d been subjected to the same insipid tasks year after year after year were understandably losing their enthusiasm for learning.<p>Without knowing more about this study, it seems vastly more likely that sociological differences between the preschool and non-preschool groups explain this difference.

Who on earth designs these things! Do they hate kids? Do they hate life? Are they doing this so there will be a plentiful market for antidepressants? Is the goal to program an unmotivated an unimaginative workforce of robots?

Is anyone else in their early twenties, who is still a ways off from having kids but intends to, considering the option of moving to Europe to raise your kids? Could any Europeans chime in on such a sentiment?

There are still plenty of play-based preschools, you just have to look for them. They are more common in the Co-Op preschool community, where parents are present, and see the impact of play-based learning.

Where do you draw the line between play-only and learning? My kids go to a preschool where they learn stuff. Writing their name and whatnot. They always have something to work on, but it&#x27;s fun for them. I suppose if it ever ceases being fun or becomes stressful for them, I would pull them out.

Here is what the arguments in the OP led up to but the OP omitted: Children from birth to age at least 5 need nearly all their time (A) with their mothers, (B) in play with their siblings and&#x2F;or peers, (C) with other loving adults, and (D) active alone, in about this order.<p>With this, and with only a little deliberate effort, the children will naturally enough learn about emotions, language, communications with others, how to interact with others, and much more.<p>In one word, it&#x27;s called motherhood.<p>Do I understand motherhood? Nope. Neither does anyone else, even including the mothers themselves. So, no one knows how to replace motherhood.<p>To replace motherhood, we need new laws from Congress, new Federal funding, lots of achievement tests and numerical measures, researchers in child development, educational theorists, educators with special training in pre-school, kindergarten, pre-school, No Child Left Behind, Common Core, some AI robots with life-like plastic skin? Nope!

<i>It’s illegal not to educate a child, so our control group will be hard to find. But perhaps the best bet will be the “unschooling” movement, a group of parents who think school is oppressive and damaging. They tell the government they’re home-schooling their children but actually just let them do whatever they want. They may teach their kid something if the child wants to be taught, otherwise they will leave them pretty much alone.</i><p><i>And this is really hard to study, because they’re a highly self-selected group and there aren’t very many of them. The only study I could find on the movement only had n = 12, and although it tried as hard as it could to compare them to schoolchildren matched for race and family income level and parent education and all that good stuff I’m sure there’s some weirdness that slipped through the cracks. Still, it’s all we’ve got.</i><p><i>So, do these children do worse than their peers at public school?</i><p><i>Yes, they do.</i><p><i>By one grade level.</i><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;23&#x2F;ssc-gives-a-graduation-speech&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;23&#x2F;ssc-gives-a-graduation-...</a>

I have one child in preschool and another that just entered second grade. They go to a progressive school that focuses on inquiry based learning, and the most important metric is that they seem engaged and enthusiastic about school every day.<p>The bigger picture is that not every kid is the same, and that&#x27;s shaped by the child and also the parents. Our parenting style is a combination of firmness around core behaviors coupled with plenty of freedom beyond that.<p>It&#x27;s obvious when interacting with other kids and parents that other people have very different styles. Some of the other things other kids do, like behaving crazily at the dinner table, we would shut down immediately. Other things, like putting their 2nd graders into &quot;Kumon,&quot; a kind of cram school with lots of busy-worksheets, we avoid. Check out the messaging and branding here to get some idea: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kumon.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kumon.com&#x2F;</a>. Apparently on the first day of Kumon they show kids the logo and tell them that the kid isn&#x27;t smiling because learning is not fun, it is supposed to be hard work. I found it horrifying that parents felt the need to push their kids into that kind of environment to &quot;keep up&quot;.<p>On the other hand, the progressive school is definitely touchy-feely and there&#x27;s a sense that there&#x27;s less structured learning. Fortunately it seems there&#x27;s a balanced approach as they get into higher grades where progressive units of inquiry are augmented with some book learning. It takes an act of faith to believe that this will ultimately pay off - that they are not &quot;wasting their time&quot; just playing all day. Who wants to gamble with their kid&#x27;s future?<p>Outside of school, we try to think &quot;anticipate and encourage&quot; not &quot;force feed&quot;.<p>For example, when we visited friends and our son always gravitated towards playing with the piano, we got him a keyboard and let him play with it at home. Soon enough he was asking &quot;why don&#x27;t I have a piano teacher?&quot;. So we got him one. He generally likes it, and practices largely on his own with just a few reminders.<p>On the other hand, we took him to play soccer and after two games where he refused to step foot on the green, he insisted &quot;I don&#x27;t like any games with balls. Except dodgeball.&quot; So we didn&#x27;t force it, but we did have him go to martial arts, which he enjoys. Maybe we&#x27;ll have him try out socceer or baseball in the future - but only if he shows an interest.<p>The same goes for reading. We put lots of books in the house and also spend our own time reading physical books, so they can see us. They get curious what we&#x27;re doing when we&#x27;re not paying attention to them. While they aren&#x27;t as advanced as some of the other kids in class, they are enjoying reading every time they pick up a book. And that&#x27;s all we want.

About time North America adapted to this new reality: Kids in Countries like Pakistan (and I reckon in China and India) as young as 3 year old are being pushed into learning reading&#x2F;writing and from age of 4 onwards, they are learning basic arithmetic.<p>If we North Americans want to compete with them, we have train for it accordingly.

Counterpoint: why do we insist that children and learning be so customized? Are we <i>really</i> that different from one another?<p>Shouldn&#x27;t we be demanding at least a certain amount of uniformity in our society to ensure we <i>are</i> a society?