Kindergarten is, first and foremost, free daycare; a place to warehouse children so their mothers can work, without paying for childcare. When I was five, we s

Kindergarten is, first and foremost, free daycare; a place to warehouse children so their mothers can work, without paying for childcare. When I was five, we still had half-day kindergarten, and that was more than enough for the very modest and realistic scholastic expectations. Those consisted of learning the letters, doing circle time to go over the weather and the days of the week and count how many days of school we'd endured, and a healthy charge of playing with blocks. Public schools have to deal with both precocious children and those who are essentially feral, and this problem seems to be getting worse as the atomization of society progresses.