Kindergarten Has Become the New First Grade
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It does not take a genius to figure out that this is not a sustainable system. All benefits of the lower classes working really hard will keep accumulating to the top until society collapses on itself. Or maybe not; we could return to a stable feudalism.
In any case, the solution to this obviously is that kids should not have preschool, but their parents (particularly the mom) should stay home with the kids and play. That interaction with parents teaches kids far more than a lowly paid preschool teacher will. That's how it was done for centuries. That's what works.
- Two-income households are struggling to make ends meet
- We don't need all the labor we have
The two statements would seem to support eachother. But what if all households switched to single-income? Then we would need all the labor we have. Presumably pay would rise to match.
Or it's a more sustainable system. The American lifestyle in the past was mostly propped up by slave labor, both domestically and abroad. The reason the standard of living for the middle class is lower now is in part because of increasing equality. (Ignoring the massive wealth gap domestically, which almost certainly will be unsustainable in the long run.)
That is, rich people can hire nannies, drivers, coaches, tutors, move to safer neighborhoods (less time spent on teaching Junior how to not get mugged or killed), and install security systems. They can upgrade old-and-maybe-not-safe foods and products with expensive better-safe-than-sorry alternatives.
Even given the premise that all of this is the middle class coming down to Earth, going forward, it's another question entirely if families are generally better off with an at-home parent.
Maybe you mean "quality of life" instead of "niceness"?
I find that niceness is incredibly overemphasized, especially in early childhood education and media. Often things are unpleasant, but good to do.
Appeals to tradition don't provide a very compelling basis for arguments with people who prize reason.
-Lame Deer
Do you have kids? I have a 2.5 year who has been in a small day care setting (about 10 kids) for 2 years. The effect it has had on her social (and even academic) skills have been pretty amazing.
She is learning so much more about how to deal with other people, social interactions, ect than she ever could staying at home with me.
>[One parent staying at home with the kids] was done for centuries.
Not really. Preindustrial revolution life was much more communal and based around large, multi-generational family units.
At the very low age you specify the selection is somewhat limited and usually they demand a parent participate with the kid WRT bathroom issues etc. When the kids get older there is more fun to be had, (semi-)organized sports and minecraft night at the library and movie night at the park (they use a projector and screen) and after school clubs and stuff.
A condo downtown means the kids will have nothing to do, but the burbs are a lot of fun as a kid and also as a side effect of the cost of entry, they're also relatively safe.
And in those large family units, all the kids played with each other constantly and barely bothered the parents to do anything.
It is pretty sad.
The real concern is whether families have the choice to keep their kids home a bit more (i.e., say not every weekday) rather than force them to use daycare because they don't have time not to.
Anyone who hasn't read "Twilight of the Elites" and "Average is Over" should do so.
Winner-take-all society: http://prospect.org/article/talent-and-winner-take-all-socie...
The superstar effect: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/business/26excerpt.html?_r...
Non-stop retraining: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/business/to-stay-relevant-...
My personal preference would be to accept this as the new reality and give better societal supports to allow people to compete (as Twilight of the Elites makes clear, you need more equality of outcome to enable equality of opportunity vis a vis education, tutors, etc.) like debt-free college and retraining programs, GBI, a more comprehensive unemployment system, etc. Rather than trying to roll the clock back, we should instead embrace it and allow people who want to be part of the race to have the tools to compete, while allowing those who would rather not to step away without starving and becoming homeless.
This is largely an advocacy piece about how practices should be changed (focusing on what is viewed as negative about current practices); it makes as much sense to see it now -- when the federal rules allow practice to change -- as any other time.
Where is the weirdness?
The biggest change is that state will have the freedom to develop their own local set of success indicators rather than relying on the federal department of education to tell which schools are successful and which are not. If you are in California, take a look at the CORE districts to have an idea about where the CA department of education is heading towards in regards of school and district accountability measures.
Back on topic: Kindergarten is actually still optional for California' students (see, http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/gs/em/kindergartenfaq.asp and CA Ed Code Section 48010). There is some push in Sacramento to make kindergarten mandatory but the initiative is still gaining support. It is known that children from low social-economic status are at a disadvantage ausually nd start kindergarten with a developmental gap worth between 1-2 years of instruction.
Making kindergarten compulsory and pre-kindergarten optional is a step in the direction of strengthening early education and hopefully closing the achievement gap from an early age (in fact, we can already tell in 3rd grade which students will be successful and which will struggle by their reading test scores).
My parents both liked reading (thanks Mm & Dad) so I was lucky enough to be able to read before I went to school at age 4, and the idea that it's bad for kids' brains to teach them to read before 5 or 6 just seems laughably delusional to me. I would have resented anyone trying to interfere with my reading at a young age and certainly plan on teaching my own kids to read should any come along. The article's suggestion that kids can't identify any similarity between the veins in a leaf and those in their hand because they're being subjected to too much book learning strikes me as bizarre.
Of course one shouldn't generalize from one's own experience, but given the highly standardized nature of the educational curriculum I grew up with, if it was so bad I'd expect that to have manifested in the form of intractable social problems or declining international rankings by now.
edit: I had no patience for it but would spend most of my time building things out of wood/nails and legos.
PS: I also started to speaking at 3. There seems to be a huge emphasis on progressing as fast as possible, but in the long term a year or two has little meaning.
The key idea though was that it was always just a game, never a chore. We'd put the cards back BEFORE she got bored of them.
She could read a 400+ page novel in a day at age 11. I can't even come close to that.
Teaching children to read is weirdly controversial though.
OK I'll admit dorkiness in public, I loved Tom Swift books when I was a little boy. Couldn't have had my childhood without reading Tom Swift books, wouldn't trade it for anything. The first book I ever sat down and read front to back was the one with the triphibian atomic car. I was probably about 5. Do not want to hear bragging along the lines of "my first book was the Silmarillion at age 2" but I'm sure this was not a unique childhood experience, especially here.
Some people may enjoy their childhood, but I don't see why they wouldn't similarly enjoy life as younger adults. Kids learn to read earlier, then they move on to more productive pursuits earlier.
If anything, I think it's insane that we encourage people to behave like children well into their 20's (c.f. college students complaining about costumes that are too scary). Historically we didn't do this; the real question is what is the long term effect of treating 15-22 year olds like children.
My response to the question of "what will happen if they learn to read a year earlier" is that they will be a year ahead in learning to read of the previous generation.
I think that being taught some stuff at home might have stunted the development of my time management skills, because I could always complete the work in a very small part of the assigned time.
Mum had taught me some basic mathematical manipulations and "short-cuts", and I remember for a while I was ahead of the class in that too, again I wasn't bored though, because I just completed the problems quickly and then did my own thing. The problem was, when the level of difficulty caught up to my skill level again in high school, I was used to having time to muck around in class, and I never put in enough time and effort to finish the assigned work.
When I eventually have kids, I'll teach them anything they ask about, or need help with, but I'm going to trust their teachers with their core subjects by default.
The way I see it, the school material will be pretty straightforward, and easily remediated, but soft skills and self discipline are developed early on, and should not be interrupted for the sake of knowing how to simplify a fraction a year early.
edit:
Thinking about it more, it probably wasn't just my Mum that had made class too easy, the pace was probably a bit too slow for me anyway. When I entered high school, I was put into the advanced stream/track, but by that time my poor study habits were already formed. Perhaps there should have been multiple streams in primary school also.
One lamenting that college graduates don't have any real skills and the other saying that Kindergarten is now harder than ever.
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.
And yet we pretend this isn't by design! The US system is based on 18th-19th century's Prussian system which was used in their military to create more obedient soldiers. That's why school is soul crushing and so many children suffer in school. We are teaching them obedience above all else.
The system stinks.
it's always seemed to me that policy like "no child left behind" is fundamentally misguided: teaching for average rather than excellence. isn't society better served by a few outstanding students meeting their maximum potential than it is by the group meeting some mean?
Any approach is going to have consequences. For most Americans, the purpose of both is primarily daycare and also a bit of socialization.
> 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... 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.
The problem here isn't that preschoolers were more "school ready," the problem is that the school system isn't prepared to handle "school ready" students. School ready kindergartners have just come from a preschool like that of my sons, where state regulations require a 1:10 teacher to student ratio [1], and they are now in a 1:20 or worse ratio public school [2]. When a teacher is going over material some students have already mastered, those students zone out.
> Unfortunately, much of the conversation in today’s preschool classrooms is one-directional and simplistic, as teachers steer students through a highly structured schedule, herding them from one activity to another and signaling approval with a quick “good job!”
The author claims that providing a conversational class room is "relatively cheap to provide." But this isn't something a teacher can just change their teaching strategy and accomplish. This kind of interaction requires focusing attention on a student at the expense of the other students--so it takes more teachers. It is laughably naive to claim a teacher can have personalized dialogue with 20 kindergartners at once.
> Pedagogy and curricula have changed too, most recently in response to the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s kindergarten guidelines... One study, titled “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?,” compared kindergarten teachers’ attitudes nationwide in 1998 and 2010 and found that the percentage of teachers expecting children to know how to read by the end of the year had risen from 30 to 80 percent.
And yet, the Common Core only requires children know a number of sight-words, basic phonetics, and the concepts of reading (words are separated by spaces, we read left-to-right, etc.) [3]. The standards, which everyone loves to criticize but no one seems to know what they actually say, are quite easy to meet. One of my preschoolers has easily mastered the Kindergartner recommendations with nothing but teaching him that the alphabet, words, reading, and books are fun--but it takes personalized time to encourage that attitude.
[1] http://dphhs.mt.gov/Portals/85/hcsd/documents/ChildCare/STAR...
The sentence betrayed his logic, that a MS is now entry level.
When asked if there were questions, one student said:"Wait, are masters now an entry level requirement or preference?"
He relied:"Yes, they are a requirement, and they are entry level not just in terms of comapny structure, but in terms of pay too"
This was bioengineering, by the way.
You see the same thing in any field that attracts more workers than it needs.
4,066 undergrad in 2001 got a bio engenearing degree. +1,558 masters.
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/biomedic...
22,000 total jobs 2014 (http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/biomedic...)
There does seem to be steady growth in the field. But supply is definitely outstripping demand.