Erika Christakis made Yale students feel unsafe by suggesting that they could wear the Halloween costume of their choice (previous posting). Now this person (I don’t want to be cisgender-normative and assume that Christakis identifies with a particular gender) is making the rest of us feel unsafe with “The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids” (Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2016). What are we getting for all of the money that we are investing in preschool?
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.
The author blames the attempt to teach reading at an earlier age than industrial child care operations in other countries. Yet bright children can read at 18 months (John Stuart Mill could read Greek at age 3! He then went on to learn a bunch more stuff.) and reading unlocks a lot of doors for a child. So perhaps the problem is more the way that American preschools try to teach reading, i.e., at a slow enough pace that even a child in the 25th percentile of ability could follow along.
[Separately, the Yale controversy is the gift that keeps on giving. A Facebook friend was complaining that, due to the increasingly bureaucratic and litigious nature of the U.S., United Airlines was now insisting that children through age 15 traveling solo be signed up for the $150 “unaccompanied minor” handholding service. In his view this was an unreasonable grab for cash. It was immediately pointed out to him that “Perhaps they will need to extend this out to 22 or 23 for Yale undergrads…”]
I’m sort of torn on this one. My 4-year-old doesn’t read and shows little interest in learning (although she likes books when they’re read to her), and my gut tells me that pedagogy is not the issue. (In any case, I don’t think her preschool teaches reading.)
For the most part my philosophy is “she’ll learn to read eventually, might as well wait until she’s the one driving the process.” At the same time, my life would be a lot easier if she could read to entertain herself.
Our experience with our two boys, now ages 12 and 16, is that reading should be done when they are ready, and not before. We moved to the UK when the older one was 4 1/2 and he was taught (forced?) to read in Kindergarden there. He could do it, but it didn’t come easily, and he would hit his head and say “daddy i feel stupid” and “my head hurts”. And since then he’s never been much of a reader (whether that’s due to being forced to read early is open for debate, but it definitely feels that way).
The second one learned to read at age 6 in First grade here in the States and he’s much more interested in reading.
I’ve read that a child ready to read can learn to read in a couple of months…so there’s really no reason to hurry the process along. And my mother has always been a proponent of the old wives tale that a child is ready to learn to read when they can reach over their head and touch the ear on the other side of their head…and not before!
Looking back, if I’d remembered that old wives tale, or read these articles at the time, I would have said “no thanks” to the early reading.
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/the-joyful-illiterate-kindergartners-of-finland/408325/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029435-000-too-much-too-young-should-schooling-start-at-age-7/
We got “Reader Rabbit” computer games for our kids and they were both reading at a level to enjoy Harry Potter books by about kindergarten (but probably not to get all the puns).
The games are great, because they take all the ridiculous exceptions in spelling and pronunciation of English and make games out of them. And then the kid feels like they’re winning the game when they get them right, rather than being stupid for getting them wrong.
I assume they still make these games, this was in about 2000 or so when our kids were about 2 or 3 years old.
I thought fully-funded preschools were supposed to be a major cure for America’s poverty and crime problems [http://www.highscope.org/content.asp?contentid=219]. Now, I learn that preschool reduces enthusiasm for learning and poor attitudes toward school? I’m starting to think that education researchers are just as reliable as medical researchers in their findings.
Also, while reading about the societal rewards of preschool, I read that every dollar invested in preschool yields $16 in societal rewards. That means that if GE is getting $145M in rewards for moving to Boston, then the Mass. taxing bodies need only to raise taxes by about $9M and invest it all in preschool to make up for the lost money given to GE.