A Modest Proposal for LESS Formal Schooling
One of the most frustrating aspects of our current push for high academic standards and achievement [masquerading as a push for educational equality] is the expansion of ’schooling’ to the early years of childhood and with it the increasing fetishization of assessment. It is now commonplace for policy-makers and politicians to establish their educational street-creds by advocating for increased funding for pre-school and ’school-readiness’ programs designed to ensure that 5 year-olds are ready for the barrage of instruction and assessment that awaits them in Kindergarten, and pre-school and day-care providers are jumping on the testing bandwagon with glee. A colleague of mine recently expressed her frustration to me about her fight with a day-care provider intent on assessing her toddlers academic progress, and her fight is emblematic of where this focus on early-childhood education is leading us.
For parents, their well-justified concerns about their children’s education leads many middle-class parents possessing the necessary cultural capital to think strategically about when to enroll their children in Kindergarten. NYTimes…
AFTER all those attentive early childhood rituals — the flashcards, the Kumon, the Dora the Explorer, the mornings spent in cutting-edge playgrounds — who wouldn’t want to give their children a head start when it’s finally time to set off for school?
Suzanne Collier, for one. Rather than send her 5-year-old son, John, to kindergarten this year, the 36-year-old mother from Brea, Calif., enrolled him in a “transitional” kindergarten “without all the rigor.” He’s an active child, Ms. Collier said, “and not quite ready to focus on a full day of classroom work.” Citing a study from “The Tipping Point” about Canadian hockey players, which found that the strongest players were the oldest, she said, “If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.”
Hers is a popular school of thought, and it is not new. “Redshirting” of kindergartners — the term comes from the practice of postponing the participation of college athletes in competitive games — became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, and shows no signs of waning.
In 2008, the most recent year for which census data is available, 17 percent of children were 6 or older when they entered the kindergarten classroom. Sand tables have been replaced by worksheets to a degree that’s surprising even by the standards of a decade ago. Blame it on No Child Left Behind and the race to get children test-ready by third grade: Kindergarten has steadily become, as many educators put it, “the new first grade.”
First off, as the classically trained economists like to say, incentives matter. Parents with the where-with-all and the means to delay the enrollment of their children in Kindergarten will do so if that means they get a leg up on both academic development and maturation, and their ability to do so only confirms the sad reality that American education is a two-tiered system. However, that is not the point which I would like to focus on today. Instead, I would like to make what might appear to be a radical proposal to some.
While the mantra for the past hundred years of education policy has consistently called for more schooling, I would like to make an argument for less schooling. In Nordic countries, such as Finland, formal schooling begins at the age of 7 for a total of 9 years of mandatory education, although the majority of students continue on for two more years as preparation for technical school or the academy. My proposal is to follow this model, and I will justify this proposal following two lines of argument… one pedagogical the other financial.
First off, it is well-established that human cognitive and emotional development is not uniform nor does it follow a neat schedule that can be tracked by the calendar year. The assumption of policy-makers and specialists is that today’s new crop of Kindergarten students should walk in the door with, at the very least, the rudimentary skills of reading in hand, but this assumption is one built on a factory-model of schooling that bears no resemblance to the course of actual human development. I would argue that the primary mission of pre-school and day-care from day one to the age of 6 should be summed up with one word: play. Provide pre-schoolers with cognitively rich environments in which to explore, play, and imagine in collaboration with nurturing adults and mixed-age groupings of other children. Academic instruction as we adults envision it should be totally absent; formal instruction should begin at age 7. This would provide quite a few benefits… I’ll mention two here.
First, it would help to ensure that the students walking in the door the first day of school would have had two more years to mature and develop the necessary skills for reading and mathematics through play. For sure, some students would walk in the door already reading and writing but for those who mature more slowly those extra years would provide them with the time they need to develop the necessary skills required for literacy. Second, the idea that 5 and 6 year-olds are ready to spend the majority of their time sitting still behind a table or desk is simply mad. While 7 year-olds aren’t known for their low energy, those added years of maturation does provide them with a greater ability to attend to more formal instructional tasks, and their cognitive development provides them with more opportunities to make connections with the material they’re learning and to construct more advanced cognitive frameworks for future learning.
Turning to school finances, the savings involved with eliminating two years of formal schooling would be significant. Those resources could be re-directed toward practices that are proven to work, such as lower class sizes in elementary schooling. In the age of austerity, it is clear that resources for research-based education reform will not be forthcoming, so I would argue that instead of trying to expand schooling with limited resources [that results in the expansion of inadequate educational practices] let’s focus on getting more bang for our buck. I advocate that we use resources currently being dedicated to Kindergarten and the first grade to the expansion of small, neighborhood elementary schools with low student-teacher ratios and cohesive class structures that work with the same teacher throughout the elementary years. In short, I would argue that we should re-focus our resources not on more schooling but on better schooling.
Obviously, the blog format is not the best medium for fleshing out all of the particulars involved with a policy proposal such as this, and there are certain issues, such as child care, that are not addressed here. However, my intent here is to begin the process of re-thinking the way we educate our children and to work out my thoughts by writing about them… I’ll be coming back to this idea again…
Posted: August 22nd, 2010 under Education Policy, Popular Culture, Schools.
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