The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids (2016)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
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.
I hate how educators are attempting to force standardization of learning at such an early age.
I generally describe modern schools as the assembly-line for obedient workers who shall live in factories -- hence a need for "unschooling".
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.
The destruction of man's mind will not be witnessed as an explosion. It will be a quiet kind of wasting away. The factory that isn't built. The breakthrough that isn't discovered. The rise of a culture that isn't based on ideas, but on pure emotion.
As you say, most Americans spend 10+ years in a classroom, sitting at a desk for 6+ hours per day. This has gone on for decades. And the result? Trump. Post-truth. A culture in which most people can't rationally debate ideas without resorting to emotional attacks. A nation that formerly accepted immigrants by the millions, confident that our greatest days awaited us if we would only reach and work for them... to a nation focused on building walls, terrified of the unknown, and fearful of ideas.
Cultural change is slow, until it isn't: 30 years ago, Venezuela was the wealthiest country in South America, now there are no more dogs left to eat. We are more fortunate because past generations created a culture of achievement, science, liberty. But the overall trajectory is unmistakable and we are running on borrowed time.
A radical shift in education is the fundamental challenge of our time. Fix education - teach children to think, use reason, and to know that they can shape the world through dedicated focus and effort - and everything else is easy.
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!
The real problem, which you seemed to be getting at in the first half of your post, is standardized testing becoming the be all end all of educational goals and outcomes. Which is exactly why OP was not being alarmist and GP is being foolishly dismissive. Extending this faulty pedagogical regime to even earlier points in children's educations will undoubtedly have the effect of further degrading the population's desire to learn for learnings sake.
I graduated high school 10 years ago. I was lucky enough to go to a good public school and learn from some great teachers who didn't only teach to the test to the exclusion of teaching critical thinking. Even so, you know what I came out of high school feeling like I was genuinely good at? Taking standardized tests. I was proud of how good I had become at gaming the testing system (even though I already understood this to be somewhat perverse, I also couldn't help it). But you know what? If I hadn't been a high percentile achiever, I'm certain it would have severely impacted my sense of self-worth and my desire and willingness to continue to higher education.
Using test scores as a proxy measure for the educational attainment of a population is a similar fallacy to using GDP as a proxy for a the wellbeing of a nation's populace. Like the GDP, outsized gains at the top will cover up stagnancy in the middle and bottom, and encourage further macro level policies that continue this trend.
I graduated right before Columbine. I know that there have to be people who went to my high school who think "we barely got out alive". About a half dozen of my friends would wear pin-stripe suits on Fridays and people called them the 'pin-stripe mafia'. I wore a floor-length green military trenchcoat most of the time. At one point I wore an empty 9mm pistol shoulder holster on top of a loud Hawaiian shirt. I and my friends were basically the incarnation of every "warnings signs" list produced after Columbine. I've never been in a fight. Neither have most of my friends. Only 1 or 2 even tried anything illegal substance-wise. We produced 3 out of the 5 top students in our graduating class, including the Valedictorian. We were the freaks and weirdos, and utterly harmless. And one thing they ignored about Columbine when putting together their warning signs: Columbine was a new school. It had metal detectors on the doors. It had surveillance cameras inside and outside. It had police that periodically patroled. It required students to carry a badge and tracked their movements around the building. It was an authoritarians wet dream. And, as far as I am concerned, the people who built that school are responsible for all the deaths and trauma. If you build a prison, whoever you put in it will act like prisoners.
Control is poison. Both for the person being controlled and also for the person made to do the controlling. It is in fundamental conflict with our nature and biology, and it harms both sides. Peoples responses to it are really predictable on a large scale. They exert control over themselves (tattoos in prisons, wearing edgy shit in high school), they form alternative power structures (cliques in high school, gangs in prison), they engage in conflict interpersonally (fights), they engage in inter-group conflict (gang fights), and eventually they will go to war against the system controlling them (prison riots, revolutions, etc). This is not because the people involved are bad. It's because the people are put in a system which MAKES them bad by making them do things that, little by little, poison them. I will eat my hat if neuroscience doesn't verify this within the next 20 years, there's already a bunch of very suggestive evidence in that direction. Prison guards really shouldn't have one of the highest suicide rates of all professions you wouldn't think.
I'm sure standardized tests do not help, but the fact we know what actually WORKS and we simply aren't willing to make teachers put in the effort to DO it is stunningly sad. Everywhere that the solution is education and empowerment, whether its schooling, child abuse prevention, drug abuse prevention, wherever, nobody wants to hear it. They're comfortable with control and want it even if it is transparently ineffective.
Yes, absolutely. They do. Teens enter high school full of life, and leave it bored and hating existence. Schools have progressively become more and more like prisons, and consequently students have begun to act more and more like prisoners. Schools were optimized to produce workers for repetitive manufacturing jobs which no longer exist.
> Is every single high-schooler in living hell?
Many of them are, yes. Perhaps check out the stats on how many use drugs to escape the hell? Or commit suicide? Or take to violence or shooting the place up? The harder you squeeze, the more people you will push over the edge.
>Everyone stops learning after school because they hate it? Nobody learns to code on their own, because they learned to hate learning?
I said almost (or was it essentially? It was some weasel word) because I knew someone would be bothered if I made an absolute statement. You're not going to get me to pretend like it is at ALL common for people to do those things because it flatly is not. The vast majority of people never read another book after leaving high school. They never sign up for an e-learning course. They don't even go Wikipedia-wandering. They limit their focus to their immediate environment, maybe taking in some sports or celebrity news on occasion, and everything else disinterests them.
If high school was an enjoyable place for students where learning is emphasized, would there be metal detectors on every door, police roaming the halls, surveillance cameras everywhere, lockdown once the schoolday starts, no leaving campus for lunch, dress codes enforced arbitrarily, people prevented from receiving a diploma because they wore something too edgy? Are these things conducive to producing a question-asking authority-challenging person who feels the world is theirs to engage with?
Have you ever watched TV? Like, any of it? Perhaps watched isn't enough... have you ever examined the fundamental basis it is produced against? For instance, take any sci-fi show. Who are the heroes? The researcher, the scientist, the intellectual, the one who sticks to their guns and the facts against the folks who want to just swing in with a gun and follow their hearts? No, those are the arrogant guys whose hubris drives everyone into the danger that the hero, the muscle-bound guy who isn't smart but follows his heart or 'instinct', can swoop in and save them from. See a character pick up a book in a sitcom and sound the seconds until someone makes a joke about them never getting a date. To be honest, that is all a bit of a wider topic than schooling and I don't know how much crossover there actually is between the anti-intellectual movement that's been growing since society saw science built tanks and mustard gas for WWI and horrible school environments.
Lets just relax and not worry about global warming until a few hundred cities are flooded.
Lets just relax and not worry about antibiotic resistance until all antibiotics are useless and a few million people die of common infections.
Lets just relax and not worry about the financial system until a crisis like 2008 hits.
Fuck it, don't worry, be happy, the world will automatically take care of itself right? How about being proactive in shaping the world and fixing things BEFORE somethings on fire?
And you can lighten up on the ad-hominem attacks and the clickbait cry-foul.
this was an example once used by rd laing to show that from as early in our lives as preschool, much of the "nice" things we do because we care about others can still cause them to feel great distress
- teacher asks her students "which one of you nice children knows what 2 + 3 is?" & many children go "I do!" and raise their hands
- teacher pretends to not notice the ones who have their hands raised and instead gives her attention to a boy she thinks has not been participating very much as of late
- says "Billy, can you tell me what it is?". he dreads the embarrassment of being laughed at for making a mistake. he also doesn't like it when other students would immediately jump on the opportunity to demonstrate they could tell the teacher what they were supposed to tell her.
- after a silence following the teacher's question intended to encourage him, Billy answers "um 4?". the comedic effect of the long silence while the classroom waited watching billy answer ended by a meek mistake unfortunately proves hilarious to some of the students. others yet raise their hands even higher than they already were, restlessly trying to get the teacher's attention.
would it be fairly common for preschool children to personally feel they disappointed the teacher when they can't perform what the teacher asks?
if Billy is doubtful he can make the teacher proud and Billy wants to move the unwanted attention onto a student who wants the visibility (and grows restless without it), then Billy's subject to irreconcilable demands. Of course it's possible he'd grow petrified because he would associate "the opportunity to learn something I didn't know" with being singled out according to the demands of everyone else in the room.
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.
The line you're thinking of goes, "The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too." It's how the rose became a socialist symbol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Roses
>This shit makes my blood run cold.
It makes mine run hot with rage and fire, but honestly, what doesn't?
Running the mainstream worker ragged does nothing to ensure that the poor have access to necessities.
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.
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.
(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.)
"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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
Interesting point on finishing what you start in relation to a limited quantity of time. I'll have to see if that's something we do or not.
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".
How can we make the 2 hrs of actual free time he has feel like 3? That's what I'm asking.
Give them more unstructured play time and stop scare-quoting "feel" as if your kids can't tell you're lying to them.
I think you misunderstood my question.
See this link for more information on this approach to learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggio_Emilia_approach
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.
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.
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!".
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/nyregion/as-ranks-of-gifte...
> 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.
> A German family was recently threatened with deportation for homeschooling their kids.
I assume you mean the case from 2013 in which the asylum status of a German family was challenged? While it's true they seeked asylum in the US to homeschool their children (in 2008 or so), the deportation issue was about the validity of the initial asylum grant, not the homeschooling. It appears they were not deported in the end: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/german-home-school-family-wont-....
You both have incredibly biased, prejudiced and ignorant views regarding the US and Europe. Please stop.
If you're religious, you'll have no trouble finding other homeschoolers for your kids to socialize with. If you're not religious, move near one of the liberal coastal cities (I'm in Portland) and you'll have lots of secular homeschoolers for your kids to socialize with.
Seems a lot easier than having to deal with immigrating to another country and learning a different language.
Raising children is the most important work that most of us will ever do. After even the most accomplished lives, children are, with rare exceptions, the only creations which remain. So if the world around you isn't working for your children, then change it.
Steve said it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvEiSa6_EPA
Denmark would honestly be ideal.
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!
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-...
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/. 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.
If we North Americans want to compete with them, we have train for it accordingly.
Shouldn't we be demanding at least a certain amount of uniformity in our society to ensure we are a society?