11 ms·

The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids (2016)

103 points by michaelrkn 9y ago

madengr 9y ago
"mainly served as a safe social space for children to learn to get along with others" That's exactly what pre-school is supposed to be. Now it's "If you don't get into the right pre-school, you won't get into an Ivy League university, so you'll be a failure!".
- watty 9y ago
  This has got to be regional as my kids are in preschool and I've never heard anything remotely close.
  - sidlls 9y ago
    It's possibly a Bay Area (and similar regions) thing. There are waiting lists years long for some schools, especially those perceived to offer that "leg up" on the academic career path. Some of this may be due to deficiency of supply, but some is definitely due to academic pressure.
  - madengr 9y ago
    Probably so. I just thought of an article I read about the hyper-competitive pre-school scene in NYC. The parents hired a coach for their 4 YO's pre-school admissions interview.
    - rb808 9y ago
      NYC has an exam for 4 year olds to get into 'gifted and talented' kindergarten classes. Of course there is a test prep industry and ridiculous numbers of preschoolers now qualify. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/nyregion/as-ranks-of-gifted-soar-in-ny-fight-brews-for-kindergarten-slots.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/nyregion/as-ranks-of-gifte...
      - rconti 9y ago
        Suddenly toddlers and tiaras doesn't sound so bad
      - imajes 9y ago
        The delta between a good school and whatever you get assigned seems to make this worth it.
  - athenot 9y ago
    In my area, this is definitely a common feeling. It's not expressed in quite that way, but there's an underlying tone of stress among parents that want the latest buzz for their children, lest they suffer failure later on in their life. Sadly, those parents are often the ones who eschew quality time with their toddlers. Yes it's tiring after a full day of work. Yes it's demanding. But that's also how as parents we help our little ones develop healthy emotional responses. Just as with startups, children can suffer from vanity metrics. I'm always impressed when my 3-year old can use a 5-syllable word, but I'm acutely aware that it's a vanity metric. What matters to me are healthy emotional foundations which will help my child cope with all the setbacks that will happen when trying to learn.
- lisper 9y ago
  That can actually turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy completely independently of any actual change in the structure of the preschool curriculum. In fact, it can (and often does) become a self-fulfiling prophecy with regards to any externally observable characteristic of a person, whether or not that characteristic has any predictive power at all with respect to anything that anyone should actually care about. Skin color is the canonical example.
QAPereo 9y ago
The more I read about the state of modern education, the more convinced I become that I dodged a bullet as an 80's kid. This is essentially child pageantry for the middle-upper class, with all of the associated pathologies.
ben_jones 9y ago
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?
- busterarm 9y ago
  It's okay. I'm in my mid-thirties and still don't see kids in the near future. Denmark would honestly be ideal.
- Sargos 9y ago
  Europe is a big place with wildly different educational standards. Just like the US. If you are wanting to move due to the schools then you should be aware that many places in the US have better schools than most places in Europe. It's not cut and dry.
  - legitster 9y ago
    When most people refer to Europe as an example of well functioning, progressive social policies, they are most always referring to the small, wealthy, socially homogeneous Scandinavian countries.
    - felipellrocha 9y ago
      Being socially homogeneous is not relevant here
    - HarryHirsch 9y ago
      The kindergardens that I've walked past in Portugal did not feature 4-year olds cooped for hours and force-fed the alphabet. Portugal is the antithesis of Northern Europe.
    - oh_sigh 9y ago
      Or France/Germany/Switzerland. Never Slovenia, Belarus, Montenegro, or Moldova.
    - 9y ago
sidlls 9y ago
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. 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.
- gnicholas 9y ago
  Appreciate the nuanced perspective. When we toured preschools, they touted the "play-based" foundations, but there were very few specifics. It was mostly in response to parent questions about "do you do anything with the alphabet, numbers, days of the week, etc.". All of the messaging around play-based learning was in the negative — "no, we don't do that; it's play based!". They never said "we do play based learning, which means that the teachers do x, y, and z to facilitate outcomes 1, 2, and 3."
  - sidlls 9y ago
    In our case the school was almost completely unstructured and "play-based" was quite literal. The teachers would organize projects at "stations", but the kids were free to completely ignore that and go outside and play on the playground the entire time if they wanted. Of course teachers and parents played up the projects the teachers worked on, and encouraged learning through play (e.g. understanding why the sand fell the way it did or how the swings worked, etc.). But it was very indirect and light-touch. What we found was most kids naturally gravitated to things out of curiosity. Most knew the alphabet, days of the week, numbers and the like by the time they went to kindergarten. Many could even read and do simple arithmetic.
- martian 9y ago
  If you're interested in play-based schooling, I recommend looking at the Reggio Emilia approach. Some very interesting and very practical approaches around early childhood education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggio_Emilia_approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggio_Emilia_approach
virusduck 9y ago
Not all preschools are like this, and I'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's school uses is "Play is children's work." Unfortunately, many of these are private and may or may not be eligible for state funds. See this link for more information on this approach to learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggio_Emilia_approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggio_Emilia_approach
abtinf 9y ago
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 "learning" and want the changes. Forcing young children to learn specific topics can only lead to one outcome: a destruction of man's natural desire to learn about the world through association of learning with pain. Kids learn all the time at an incredible rate. One day, my daughter came home and said, "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!" Yet when I ask her "did you learn anything at school today," the answer, invariably, is "no." 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.
- soared 9y ago
  > Forcing young children to learn specific topics can only lead to one outcome: a destruction of man's natural desire to learn about the world through association of learning with pain. Wow, op, please take a step back and relax. Every American spends 10+ years in a classroom, sitting at a desk for 6+ hours a day (post-kindergarten). Man's natural desire has yet to see this inevitable destruction. I thought the article was a bit fear monger-y, but you've stepped us up to pure clickbait.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    OP's point is that it's shitty in high school, too, and that it kills your intrinsic motivation to learn, by associating "learning" with "memorizing boring, rote information without any particular reason to ever apply it". And you can lighten up on the ad-hominem attacks and the clickbait cry-foul.
  - otakucode 9y ago
    You're wrong. Watch the two documentaries called 'High School' and 'High School 2'. The way schools are structured absolutely do kill, in almost all cases, any persons desire to learn, along with their general spirit and enjoyment of living. One of the documentaries, I honestly forget which, is of a school that decided to try instead centering every single class on critical thinking. Instead of teaching by fiat, the teachers gave the students the tools to question them and encountered them as intellectual equals, two thinking human beings one of whom simply had more knowledge in an arena than another. When they didn't know the answer to a question, they'd admit it and try to figure it out with the student. It took a poor Latino neighborhood school and created the class that set the record for number of students to go on to receive a college degree - across any school in the country. But it's hard to teach if you have to treat the students like people, and teachers for the most part go into it because they were very good at manipulating the arbitrary meaningless systems of rules at schools when growing up, then got scared by the whole 'you have to have reasons' part of reality so fled back into the school system as teachers where no reason was needed. No hats indoors? Sure! It's law! No shorts? Or maybe mandatory shorts? Whatever, nothing matters, they're just kids you can restrict and regulate them all you want to make your own life easier, no one will stand up for them!
fsloth 9y ago
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?
- bitwize 9y ago
  It's because the U.S. Department of Education got TDD religion -- Test Driven Didactics. Your child will not be allowed to grow and develop interests naturally; they will be refactored until they pass all the tests. Otherwise the school district loses money.
  - Zee2 9y ago
    Ooh, that's a good word for it. They'll refactor your children!
legitster 9y ago
There seems to be a cycle for trends like these: "New education alternative available to some children." "Wealthy suburban parents begin turning to new education alternative." "Public outcry over lack of education alternative available to middle and lower class children." "New education alternative now being implemented in public schools." "Wealthy suburban parents unhappy about options available in public schools, begin looking elsewhere." ... 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.
twoquestions 9y ago
"Remember Citizen, your worth as a human being begins and ends at how much more measurable value you provide than average. If you can't do better than average, your existence was a mistake!" 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. I've heard somewhere (I can't remember and my search-fu is weak) that "People need bread, but they need roses too", 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. This shit makes my blood run cold.
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  >"Remember Citizen, your worth as a human being begins and ends at how much more measurable value you provide than average. If you can't do better than average, your existence was a mistake!" Apologies for the pedantry, but doesn't that make half the world a mistake? I think the roses comment is from V for vendetta (the comic book not the movie) but it's probably quoting from something better.
  - cJ0th 9y ago
    > Apologies for the pedantry, but doesn't that make half the world a mistake? If we take that statement literally, then yes. But it seems to be enough if there is one area in which you are better than average. That being said, there would still be loads of people who'd be a "mistake". I am afraid this is in fact how many people receive reality. This is probably one of the reasons why we discuss UBI so much lately.
  - twoquestions 9y ago
    That quote was meant to be a caricature of a heartless monster who can only regard something like the Mona Lisa by how much heat that burning it would put out.
- cproctor 9y ago
  If you want to follow this idea further, I highly recommend Scott's "Seeing Like a State." It's an analysis of how states exert power by imposing legibility--insisting on having access and to measuring in certain ways. His thesis is that this legibility is actively corrosive to other properties that don't show up in the measurement. The book starts with an account of how 19th C European forestry managers imposed legibility on their forests in terms of lumber production, and ended up killing off everything but a monocrop, which then collapsed. Eventually he gets around to education, where it's pretty clear there are big externalities to the way we insist on measuring what happens in school. There are broader lessons here for the technocratically-inclined.
sulam 9y ago
The most important thing my kids got out of preschool is mature immune systems.
nsxwolf 9y ago
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's fun for them. I suppose if it ever ceases being fun or becomes stressful for them, I would pull them out.
chrismealy 9y ago
None of this early academic education is necessary. In Finland, which consistently has top scores in reading and math, kids don't start school until they're seven, and at that point they're only expected to be able to turn text rightside up. (And before anybody jumps to the "homogenous society" explanation, Finland used to have mediocre schools before they put a lot of effort and money into them in the 70s and 80s.)
- astockwell 9y ago
  Really appreciate the perspective. This is just one more on the huge pile of things where the US would be well served to just look around at how other countries are doing it better.
  - liberte82 9y ago
    It's funny how a child shouting "me first!" will generally be scolded for being selfish, yet an entire nation shouting "America first!" is somehow considered virtuous.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    The population of Finland is roughly 5.5 million. The population of New York City (not the metro area) is 8.5 million. There are almost certainly 'scaling' problems with "just look around at how other countries are doing it better".
achou 9y ago
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. The bigger picture is that not every kid is the same, and that'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. It'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 "Kumon," a kind of cram school with lots of busy-worksheets, we avoid. Check out the messaging and branding here to get some idea: https://www.kumon.com/ https://www.kumon.com/. Apparently on the first day of Kumon they show kids the logo and tell them that the kid isn'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 "keep up". On the other hand, the progressive school is definitely touchy-feely and there's a sense that there's less structured learning. Fortunately it seems there'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 "wasting their time" just playing all day. Who wants to gamble with their kid's future? Outside of school, we try to think "anticipate and encourage" not "force feed". 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 "why don't I have a piano teacher?". So we got him one. He generally likes it, and practices largely on his own with just a few reminders. 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 "I don't like any games with balls. Except dodgeball." So we didn't force it, but we did have him go to martial arts, which he enjoys. Maybe we'll have him try out socceer or baseball in the future - but only if he shows an interest. 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're doing when we're not paying attention to them. While they aren't as advanced as some of the other kids in class, they are enjoying reading every time they pick up a book. And that's all we want.
pnathan 9y ago
Counterpoint: why do we insist that children and learning be so customized? Are we really that different from one another? Shouldn't we be demanding at least a certain amount of uniformity in our society to ensure we are a society?
jmathai 9y ago
Last night at bedtime my 7yo son (2nd grade) said that he doesn'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. To be honest, it was really sad to hear him say that. He's a kid and doesn't understand the schedule being imposed upon him. Without getting into a discussion about the right number of hours a 7yo should spend in class I wanted to ask another question. What ideas have parents come up with to make it "feel" like there's more unstructured play time for kids during the school year?
- zhemao 9y ago
  > What ideas have parents come up with to make it "feel" like there's more unstructured play time for kids during the school year? Uh maybe, I don't know, actually giving them more unstructured play time? Schools have been drastically cutting back on mid-day recess and other types of "free time".
  - jmathai 9y ago
    My point is that there's a small window of time remaining in their day once school is out. And my wife picks them up right after school. Most kids are in after care until 6pm. How can we make the 2 hrs of actual free time he has feel like 3? That's what I'm asking.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >What ideas have parents come up with to make it "feel" like there's more unstructured play time for kids during the school year? Give them more unstructured play time and stop scare-quoting "feel" as if your kids can't tell you're lying to them.
  - jmathai 9y ago
    1 hour of watching television feels shorter than 1 hour of jumping on the trampoline. I think you misunderstood my question.
- astockwell 9y ago
hasfkahf21 9y ago
You always have to be careful when drawing conclusions about causality from observational studies. > 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. The researchers told New York magazine that overreliance on direct instruction and repetitive, poorly structured pedagogy were likely culprits; children who’d been subjected to the same insipid tasks year after year after year were understandably losing their enthusiasm for learning. Without knowing more about this study, it seems vastly more likely that sociological differences between the preschool and non-preschool groups explain this difference.
- otakucode 9y ago
  Or the researchers were just generally guessing about the situation when talking about it one day and spitballing and a reporter wrote that up as 'researchers told... likely culprits'. That's seriously weak language, and when you account for reporters inflating things to make their work seem important, the reality was probably an off-hand comment with no backing or even significant thought behind it. Doesn't mean it's wrong, of course... just that if it DOES have actual factual support, that certainly doesn't give it to you.
secabeen 9y ago
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.
graycat 9y ago
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/or peers, (C) with other loving adults, and (D) active alone, in about this order. 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. In one word, it's called motherhood. Do I understand motherhood? Nope. Neither does anyone else, even including the mothers themselves. So, no one knows how to replace motherhood. 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!
fallingfrog 9y ago
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'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. I have a feeling I'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.
- ubu7737 9y ago
  My experience is very similar to yours. I see my peers as too-easily crushed most of the time, and insist on my own way more than most.
- xkcd-sucks 9y ago
  The flip side of this is really unfortunate, though. Sometimes people don't feel passion about the fundamental underpinnings of something they feel passionate about, e.g. they want to build brain interfaces but throw a tantrum when you try to teach them about biochemistry. Eventually they do learn the underpinnings of their passion, but are left with gaps in their knowledge which means they simply don't see solutions. Human intelligence is just pattern matching, and you do better pattern matching when you memorize a bunch of stuff even if it's boring. The other part is that sometimes stuff just sucks to learn/do and it must get done-- metaphorically, taking out the trash, cleaning etc. Somebody that does all the fun stuff and disappears when it's time do do the boring stuff is a liability. Doing only stuff that one feels passion about is a privilege that very few people are skilled/fortunate abough to enjoy.
  - fallingfrog 9y ago
    Yeah, I'll admit these are good points (I upvoted your answer). However, I'd propose that having a teacher who could sell other topics and make them interesting too might make the other stuff less boring- ultimately forcing your students to memorize material they find boring is a failure on some level or another.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
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. 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. So, do these children do worse than their peers at public school? Yes, they do. By one grade level. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-speech/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-...
m23khan 9y ago
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/writing and from age of 4 onwards, they are learning basic arithmetic. If we North Americans want to compete with them, we have train for it accordingly.
- jff 9y ago
  If we want to adopt the Chinese and Indian methods of academic success, we should start teaching 4 year olds how to plagiarize--your average Chinese 7th grader is copying work at a level surpassing even a 12th grade American child!
- Fej 9y ago
  The point of this article is that education at this age us harmful, not helpful.

103 points by michaelrkn 9y ago

"mainly served as a safe social space for children to learn to get along with others" That's exactly what pre-school is supposed to be. Now it's "If you don't get into the right pre-school, you won't get into an Ivy League university, so you'll be a failure!".

watty 9y ago
This has got to be regional as my kids are in preschool and I've never heard anything remotely close.
- sidlls 9y ago
  It's possibly a Bay Area (and similar regions) thing. There are waiting lists years long for some schools, especially those perceived to offer that "leg up" on the academic career path. Some of this may be due to deficiency of supply, but some is definitely due to academic pressure.
- madengr 9y ago
  Probably so. I just thought of an article I read about the hyper-competitive pre-school scene in NYC. The parents hired a coach for their 4 YO's pre-school admissions interview.
  - rb808 9y ago
    NYC has an exam for 4 year olds to get into 'gifted and talented' kindergarten classes. Of course there is a test prep industry and ridiculous numbers of preschoolers now qualify. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/nyregion/as-ranks-of-gifted-soar-in-ny-fight-brews-for-kindergarten-slots.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/nyregion/as-ranks-of-gifte...
    - rconti 9y ago
      Suddenly toddlers and tiaras doesn't sound so bad
    - imajes 9y ago
      The delta between a good school and whatever you get assigned seems to make this worth it.
- athenot 9y ago
  In my area, this is definitely a common feeling. It's not expressed in quite that way, but there's an underlying tone of stress among parents that want the latest buzz for their children, lest they suffer failure later on in their life. Sadly, those parents are often the ones who eschew quality time with their toddlers. Yes it's tiring after a full day of work. Yes it's demanding. But that's also how as parents we help our little ones develop healthy emotional responses. Just as with startups, children can suffer from vanity metrics. I'm always impressed when my 3-year old can use a 5-syllable word, but I'm acutely aware that it's a vanity metric. What matters to me are healthy emotional foundations which will help my child cope with all the setbacks that will happen when trying to learn.
lisper 9y ago
That can actually turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy completely independently of any actual change in the structure of the preschool curriculum. In fact, it can (and often does) become a self-fulfiling prophecy with regards to any externally observable characteristic of a person, whether or not that characteristic has any predictive power at all with respect to anything that anyone should actually care about. Skin color is the canonical example.

QAPereo 9y ago

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

ben_jones 9y ago

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?

busterarm 9y ago
It's okay. I'm in my mid-thirties and still don't see kids in the near future. Denmark would honestly be ideal.
Sargos 9y ago
Europe is a big place with wildly different educational standards. Just like the US. If you are wanting to move due to the schools then you should be aware that many places in the US have better schools than most places in Europe. It's not cut and dry.
- legitster 9y ago
  When most people refer to Europe as an example of well functioning, progressive social policies, they are most always referring to the small, wealthy, socially homogeneous Scandinavian countries.
  - felipellrocha 9y ago
    Being socially homogeneous is not relevant here
  - HarryHirsch 9y ago
    The kindergardens that I've walked past in Portugal did not feature 4-year olds cooped for hours and force-fed the alphabet. Portugal is the antithesis of Northern Europe.
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    Or France/Germany/Switzerland. Never Slovenia, Belarus, Montenegro, or Moldova.
  - 9y ago

sidlls 9y ago

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. 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.

gnicholas 9y ago
Appreciate the nuanced perspective. When we toured preschools, they touted the "play-based" foundations, but there were very few specifics. It was mostly in response to parent questions about "do you do anything with the alphabet, numbers, days of the week, etc.". All of the messaging around play-based learning was in the negative — "no, we don't do that; it's play based!". They never said "we do play based learning, which means that the teachers do x, y, and z to facilitate outcomes 1, 2, and 3."
- sidlls 9y ago
  In our case the school was almost completely unstructured and "play-based" was quite literal. The teachers would organize projects at "stations", but the kids were free to completely ignore that and go outside and play on the playground the entire time if they wanted. Of course teachers and parents played up the projects the teachers worked on, and encouraged learning through play (e.g. understanding why the sand fell the way it did or how the swings worked, etc.). But it was very indirect and light-touch. What we found was most kids naturally gravitated to things out of curiosity. Most knew the alphabet, days of the week, numbers and the like by the time they went to kindergarten. Many could even read and do simple arithmetic.
martian 9y ago
If you're interested in play-based schooling, I recommend looking at the Reggio Emilia approach. Some very interesting and very practical approaches around early childhood education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggio_Emilia_approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggio_Emilia_approach

virusduck 9y ago

Not all preschools are like this, and I'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's school uses is "Play is children's work." Unfortunately, many of these are private and may or may not be eligible for state funds. See this link for more information on this approach to learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggio_Emilia_approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggio_Emilia_approach

abtinf 9y ago

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 "learning" and want the changes. Forcing young children to learn specific topics can only lead to one outcome: a destruction of man's natural desire to learn about the world through association of learning with pain. Kids learn all the time at an incredible rate. One day, my daughter came home and said, "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!" Yet when I ask her "did you learn anything at school today," the answer, invariably, is "no." 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.

soared 9y ago
> Forcing young children to learn specific topics can only lead to one outcome: a destruction of man's natural desire to learn about the world through association of learning with pain. Wow, op, please take a step back and relax. Every American spends 10+ years in a classroom, sitting at a desk for 6+ hours a day (post-kindergarten). Man's natural desire has yet to see this inevitable destruction. I thought the article was a bit fear monger-y, but you've stepped us up to pure clickbait.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  OP's point is that it's shitty in high school, too, and that it kills your intrinsic motivation to learn, by associating "learning" with "memorizing boring, rote information without any particular reason to ever apply it". And you can lighten up on the ad-hominem attacks and the clickbait cry-foul.
- otakucode 9y ago
  You're wrong. Watch the two documentaries called 'High School' and 'High School 2'. The way schools are structured absolutely do kill, in almost all cases, any persons desire to learn, along with their general spirit and enjoyment of living. One of the documentaries, I honestly forget which, is of a school that decided to try instead centering every single class on critical thinking. Instead of teaching by fiat, the teachers gave the students the tools to question them and encountered them as intellectual equals, two thinking human beings one of whom simply had more knowledge in an arena than another. When they didn't know the answer to a question, they'd admit it and try to figure it out with the student. It took a poor Latino neighborhood school and created the class that set the record for number of students to go on to receive a college degree - across any school in the country. But it's hard to teach if you have to treat the students like people, and teachers for the most part go into it because they were very good at manipulating the arbitrary meaningless systems of rules at schools when growing up, then got scared by the whole 'you have to have reasons' part of reality so fled back into the school system as teachers where no reason was needed. No hats indoors? Sure! It's law! No shorts? Or maybe mandatory shorts? Whatever, nothing matters, they're just kids you can restrict and regulate them all you want to make your own life easier, no one will stand up for them!

fsloth 9y ago

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?

bitwize 9y ago
It's because the U.S. Department of Education got TDD religion -- Test Driven Didactics. Your child will not be allowed to grow and develop interests naturally; they will be refactored until they pass all the tests. Otherwise the school district loses money.
- Zee2 9y ago
  Ooh, that's a good word for it. They'll refactor your children!

legitster 9y ago

There seems to be a cycle for trends like these: "New education alternative available to some children." "Wealthy suburban parents begin turning to new education alternative." "Public outcry over lack of education alternative available to middle and lower class children." "New education alternative now being implemented in public schools." "Wealthy suburban parents unhappy about options available in public schools, begin looking elsewhere." ... 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.

twoquestions 9y ago

"Remember Citizen, your worth as a human being begins and ends at how much more measurable value you provide than average. If you can't do better than average, your existence was a mistake!" 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. I've heard somewhere (I can't remember and my search-fu is weak) that "People need bread, but they need roses too", 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. This shit makes my blood run cold.

GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
>"Remember Citizen, your worth as a human being begins and ends at how much more measurable value you provide than average. If you can't do better than average, your existence was a mistake!" Apologies for the pedantry, but doesn't that make half the world a mistake? I think the roses comment is from V for vendetta (the comic book not the movie) but it's probably quoting from something better.
- cJ0th 9y ago
  > Apologies for the pedantry, but doesn't that make half the world a mistake? If we take that statement literally, then yes. But it seems to be enough if there is one area in which you are better than average. That being said, there would still be loads of people who'd be a "mistake". I am afraid this is in fact how many people receive reality. This is probably one of the reasons why we discuss UBI so much lately.
- twoquestions 9y ago
  That quote was meant to be a caricature of a heartless monster who can only regard something like the Mona Lisa by how much heat that burning it would put out.
cproctor 9y ago
If you want to follow this idea further, I highly recommend Scott's "Seeing Like a State." It's an analysis of how states exert power by imposing legibility--insisting on having access and to measuring in certain ways. His thesis is that this legibility is actively corrosive to other properties that don't show up in the measurement. The book starts with an account of how 19th C European forestry managers imposed legibility on their forests in terms of lumber production, and ended up killing off everything but a monocrop, which then collapsed. Eventually he gets around to education, where it's pretty clear there are big externalities to the way we insist on measuring what happens in school. There are broader lessons here for the technocratically-inclined.

sulam 9y ago

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

nsxwolf 9y ago

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's fun for them. I suppose if it ever ceases being fun or becomes stressful for them, I would pull them out.

chrismealy 9y ago

None of this early academic education is necessary. In Finland, which consistently has top scores in reading and math, kids don't start school until they're seven, and at that point they're only expected to be able to turn text rightside up. (And before anybody jumps to the "homogenous society" explanation, Finland used to have mediocre schools before they put a lot of effort and money into them in the 70s and 80s.)

astockwell 9y ago
Really appreciate the perspective. This is just one more on the huge pile of things where the US would be well served to just look around at how other countries are doing it better.
- liberte82 9y ago
  It's funny how a child shouting "me first!" will generally be scolded for being selfish, yet an entire nation shouting "America first!" is somehow considered virtuous.
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- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  The population of Finland is roughly 5.5 million. The population of New York City (not the metro area) is 8.5 million. There are almost certainly 'scaling' problems with "just look around at how other countries are doing it better".

achou 9y ago

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. The bigger picture is that not every kid is the same, and that'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. It'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 "Kumon," a kind of cram school with lots of busy-worksheets, we avoid. Check out the messaging and branding here to get some idea: https://www.kumon.com/ https://www.kumon.com/. Apparently on the first day of Kumon they show kids the logo and tell them that the kid isn'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 "keep up". On the other hand, the progressive school is definitely touchy-feely and there's a sense that there's less structured learning. Fortunately it seems there'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 "wasting their time" just playing all day. Who wants to gamble with their kid's future? Outside of school, we try to think "anticipate and encourage" not "force feed". 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 "why don't I have a piano teacher?". So we got him one. He generally likes it, and practices largely on his own with just a few reminders. 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 "I don't like any games with balls. Except dodgeball." So we didn't force it, but we did have him go to martial arts, which he enjoys. Maybe we'll have him try out socceer or baseball in the future - but only if he shows an interest. 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're doing when we're not paying attention to them. While they aren't as advanced as some of the other kids in class, they are enjoying reading every time they pick up a book. And that's all we want.

pnathan 9y ago

Counterpoint: why do we insist that children and learning be so customized? Are we really that different from one another? Shouldn't we be demanding at least a certain amount of uniformity in our society to ensure we are a society?

jmathai 9y ago

Last night at bedtime my 7yo son (2nd grade) said that he doesn'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. To be honest, it was really sad to hear him say that. He's a kid and doesn't understand the schedule being imposed upon him. Without getting into a discussion about the right number of hours a 7yo should spend in class I wanted to ask another question. What ideas have parents come up with to make it "feel" like there's more unstructured play time for kids during the school year?

zhemao 9y ago
> What ideas have parents come up with to make it "feel" like there's more unstructured play time for kids during the school year? Uh maybe, I don't know, actually giving them more unstructured play time? Schools have been drastically cutting back on mid-day recess and other types of "free time".
- jmathai 9y ago
  My point is that there's a small window of time remaining in their day once school is out. And my wife picks them up right after school. Most kids are in after care until 6pm. How can we make the 2 hrs of actual free time he has feel like 3? That's what I'm asking.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>What ideas have parents come up with to make it "feel" like there's more unstructured play time for kids during the school year? Give them more unstructured play time and stop scare-quoting "feel" as if your kids can't tell you're lying to them.
- jmathai 9y ago
  1 hour of watching television feels shorter than 1 hour of jumping on the trampoline. I think you misunderstood my question.
astockwell 9y ago

hasfkahf21 9y ago

You always have to be careful when drawing conclusions about causality from observational studies. > 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. The researchers told New York magazine that overreliance on direct instruction and repetitive, poorly structured pedagogy were likely culprits; children who’d been subjected to the same insipid tasks year after year after year were understandably losing their enthusiasm for learning. Without knowing more about this study, it seems vastly more likely that sociological differences between the preschool and non-preschool groups explain this difference.

otakucode 9y ago
Or the researchers were just generally guessing about the situation when talking about it one day and spitballing and a reporter wrote that up as 'researchers told... likely culprits'. That's seriously weak language, and when you account for reporters inflating things to make their work seem important, the reality was probably an off-hand comment with no backing or even significant thought behind it. Doesn't mean it's wrong, of course... just that if it DOES have actual factual support, that certainly doesn't give it to you.

secabeen 9y ago

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.

graycat 9y ago

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/or peers, (C) with other loving adults, and (D) active alone, in about this order. 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. In one word, it's called motherhood. Do I understand motherhood? Nope. Neither does anyone else, even including the mothers themselves. So, no one knows how to replace motherhood. 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!

fallingfrog 9y ago

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'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. I have a feeling I'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.

ubu7737 9y ago
My experience is very similar to yours. I see my peers as too-easily crushed most of the time, and insist on my own way more than most.
xkcd-sucks 9y ago
The flip side of this is really unfortunate, though. Sometimes people don't feel passion about the fundamental underpinnings of something they feel passionate about, e.g. they want to build brain interfaces but throw a tantrum when you try to teach them about biochemistry. Eventually they do learn the underpinnings of their passion, but are left with gaps in their knowledge which means they simply don't see solutions. Human intelligence is just pattern matching, and you do better pattern matching when you memorize a bunch of stuff even if it's boring. The other part is that sometimes stuff just sucks to learn/do and it must get done-- metaphorically, taking out the trash, cleaning etc. Somebody that does all the fun stuff and disappears when it's time do do the boring stuff is a liability. Doing only stuff that one feels passion about is a privilege that very few people are skilled/fortunate abough to enjoy.
- fallingfrog 9y ago
  Yeah, I'll admit these are good points (I upvoted your answer). However, I'd propose that having a teacher who could sell other topics and make them interesting too might make the other stuff less boring- ultimately forcing your students to memorize material they find boring is a failure on some level or another.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

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. 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. So, do these children do worse than their peers at public school? Yes, they do. By one grade level. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-speech/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-...

m23khan 9y ago

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/writing and from age of 4 onwards, they are learning basic arithmetic. If we North Americans want to compete with them, we have train for it accordingly.

jff 9y ago
If we want to adopt the Chinese and Indian methods of academic success, we should start teaching 4 year olds how to plagiarize--your average Chinese 7th grader is copying work at a level surpassing even a 12th grade American child!
Fej 9y ago
The point of this article is that education at this age us harmful, not helpful.