The Death of Preschools - Article for Discussion

[ShenLi]

There's an interesting article in Scientific American the Death of Preschools

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-death-of-preschool

Unfortunately, you can't read the article in its entirety unless you buy it. I have a copy of the entire article and I don't really want to infringe copy-right rules, but I really want to table it for discussion. Since we're allowed to reprint stuff for educational purposes, and this forum is essentially an educational site that helps parents learn how best to educate their children, could we say that my reproducing the article here is for "education"? Forum moderators - what do you think?

Anyway, it's a very long article that argues for play in early childhood rather than directed learning. While I agree that play and self-directed learning is important in early childhood, what does bother me most particularly is this paragraph towards the end:

"Perhaps most disturbing is the potential for the early exposure to academics to physiologically damage developing brains. Although the brain continues to change throughout life in response to learning, young children undergo a number of sensitive periods critical to healthy development; learning to speak a language and responding to social cues are two such domains. Appropriate experiences can hone neural pathways that will help the child during life; by the same token, stressful experiences can change the brain’s architecture to make children significantly more susceptible to problems later in life, including depression, anxiety disorders—even cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Bruce McEwen, a neuroendocrinologist at the Rockefeller University, notes that asking children to handle material that their brain is not yet equipped for can cause frustration. Perceiving a lack of control is a major trigger of toxic stress, which can damage the hippocampus, a brain area crucial to learning and memory."

Thoughts anyone? Maybe *cough* Daddude *cough cough* could share his Benjamin Franklin's worth on this?  

[MonkeynoseMomma]

I am not an expert on anything. But I am full of opinions
I am sure that repeatedly stressing your kid isn't good for them. We certainly don't want to cause frustration.
That being said, who is stressing their kids by playing learning games with them, or gently teaching them to read? If you want to see a happy baby, show him/her some dot cards.
It isn't the learning that's the problem it's the methods. Maybe a baby isn't ready to read starting with logic and reasoning and left brain techniques. Who would want to teach it that way if you can teach so much easier by flashing.
babies calling gotta go........

[DadDude]

My attitude toward preschools is informed much more by my stance on homeschooling than my stance on early learning versus play.

First, though, I think the psychologists have a point: play is important, and if you're constantly having a very young child doing parent-directed learning, and not deciding what he wants to do for himself, this can have a variety of problems.  They make the case that play is important fairly convincingly.  I wouldn't want any sub-five year old of mine not-playing for any three-hour stretch.  That's way, way too much.  H., who is now five, seems ready for longer stretches of learning.  A year ago, he wasn't.

On the other hand, the psychologists come, I think, from an ideological position that is hostile toward early learning for reasons other than their commitment to play.  They are egalitarians and they (and the journalist who wrote the article) no doubt hate the idea of rich people's kids learning stuff that poor people's kids don't know.  So I think they might be overemphasizing the importance of play to argue, fallaciously, that all early learning is out, and children should only be playing.  None of the researchers seem to consider seriously the possibility of doing a modest amount of flashcards and such, with most time spent on play.  This is probably a feature of the black-and-white mentality one finds among theory-driven academics.

The article is extremely biased, and the implication at the bottom--that children who are taught early, to any degree and by any methods, risk becoming stressed out, neurotic, and even diseased later on in life--looks way overstated to me, so borders on the ridiculous, and anyway is pretty obviously not supported by research evidence.

[fma001]

I think too much pressure to learn at an early age is likely harmful. The mistake is assuming that young children are incapable of learning without pressure. I'm teaching my 3.5 year old to write. Some days she practices a dozen letters. Other days, she'll practice only a few. Some days she doesn't want to practice at all. I let her decide how much she wants do. She actually started practicing a few letters without being asked. She decided she wanted to learn them herself. At this rate, she will likely be able to write all upper case letters by the age of 4 without any pressure to learn at all. She often writes letters for fun on her magna doodle.

DadDude is also write about egalitarianism. There is this tendency to try to dumb down children from more privileged backgrounds to create more equality with underprivileged children. Rather than trying to bring underprivileged children up to the level of privileged children. It shouldn't be surprising that the USA has gone downhill in terms of social mobility. A child who is born poor in America is far less likely to make it to a higher economic class than a child born in France and other Western European countries. France is well-known for its academic preschools. Children there can start preschool as early as age 2. A French study found that the earlier a low income French child starts preschool the better they do academically in 5th grade. So, early academics do work whether the experts like it or not. Unfortunately, their ideas are keeping a lot of people mired in poverty.

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