We Tried–and Failed–To Fix the Worst Part of Kindergarten at Our School
slate.com
slate.com
Where none of the people running these schools ever kids? Did they just magically appear from some portal from another, sad, apathetic, dimension? Or where they spawned out of eggs laid by depressed lizard people?
My school had 2 recesses, one 15 minute morning and one 30 minutes at lunch. They were absolutely crucial to social emotional development, and to just being outside.
6 hours of focused learning for 5 year olds? What type of massive idiocy is that. Ask the brightest college students how many hours of classes they sign up for, and unless you are talking to a crazy person, the answer is 4, with 3 being preferred by most (and considered a full course load!).
There is oodles of literature on how many hours a day a person can sit down and learn. 6 hours inside for a kid is wildly outside of recommendations.
* Project 2025 calls for eliminating the Office of Head Start, which would lead to the closure of Head Start child care programs that serve about 833,000 low-income children each year.
* In place of a federal Education Department, the it calls for widespread public education funding that goes directly to families, as part of its overarching goal of “advancing education freedom.” This is to enable the public funding of private religious schools which do not have regulatory oversight.
* The federal school meals program should be scaled back to ensure that only children from low-income families are receiving the benefit.
See also: Alabama ranks 47th among states in annual report on well-being of children [0]
But as the world industrialized it became more about how long you could keep the kids there and from what hour to what hour. In other words, day care. If we would just simply own the fact that school is part day care part education the kids would be a lot better off. There was a daycare near my grade school that would send a bus to pick up kids from school and drive them off-site.
The after school activities fill in a bit of this but we could probably do more here. Instead of torturing kids who hate crafts with craft days you could just have craftspeople and kickball people and jungle gym people.
Maybe once a month or a quarter you have a switch-up day where you have to do an activity you've avoided (but since everyone else is switching you can still avoid the people who may be the reason you avoided them) just for a check-in about whether you actually hate that activity.