Schools Should Just Let Children Be Children

The purpose of early childhood education should be to open and expand children’s minds, to broaden their experiences and interactions with the world before they are introduced to the more rigorous academic school routine.

Touching, tasting, playing are what preschool and kindergarten-age children crave, need and deserve.

Since discovering that children learn at rapid rates between birth and 6 years old, however, we have replaced the old-fashioned notion of early childhood education and kindergarten with expensive, more formal programs.

The No Child Left Behind Act offers $900 million for Reading First programs, i.e., early academics for preschoolers. Even though compulsory schooling in California does not legally begin until the first grade, the California Department of Education includes educational standards for kindergarten.

There are movements in California and throughout the nation for universal preschool -- some funded by tobacco taxes -- that would most assuredly include academic standards.

Just days ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District voted to expand kindergarten from a half-day to a full day in its 432 elementary schools.

Early formal education is expensive. And contrary to popular belief, its effectiveness is still unproven. Head Start alone costs taxpayers about $5 billion per year. Yet the early educational gains demonstrated by Head Start students evaporate by the second grade. The L.A. school district’s full-day kindergarten plan is dependent on passage of Measure R, a $3.87-billion school facilities bond measure on the March 2 ballot.

Studies conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment and assessments by the Third International Mathematics and Science Study have demonstrated that students who start school early do not consistently do better than peers from other countries who started school at later ages.

Students from Finland, Japan, Korea and Singapore have some of the highest test scores worldwide, yet none of these countries offer fully developed early childhood education programs.

A major goal of the No Child Left Behind law is to eliminate the growing disparity between children who are ready for school and those who are not. Another is to have all children be successful in school.

Nationwide, our knee-jerk response to these issues has been to lower the age at which children are exposed to curricula and/or to lengthen their school days.

But our myopic solution only ensures that children whose parents cannot afford preschool will be forced to attend extended kindergarten programs later on. It guarantees that the initial school experience for non-English speakers is doubly stressful. They must learn a second language in addition to keeping up with educational expectations from the very first day of kindergarten. It tempts middle- and high-income parents into believing that their children are better off attending preschool than staying at home building mud pies.

Why have we been spending so much money on early childhood academics when its effectiveness is doubtful? Because teachers want to believe that preschool and kindergarten attendance will make the impossible task of uniformly instructing diverse student populations more manageable.

We haven’t asked what children should be learning during these early stages of development.

Contrary to what many think, building blocks, finger-paints and recess would be not wasting preschoolers’ and kindergarteners’ school time. It is through play that children teach themselves to be eager learners.

Limiting children’s early learning experiences to academics, only to have them disillusioned with school by the third grade, is cruel and ineffective.

Ultimately, preschoolers and kindergarteners need to learn how to skip before they can read, learn how to hold a crayon before they can write and experience play before they can become the lifelong learners we claim to want them to be.

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Regina Powers is a writer and children’s librarian.