Evansville Courier and USI Professor

In Patricia Swanson’s Courier and Press article on June 6, 2005, she writes USI Education Professor Robert Boostrom believes a main goal of education is to teach children to think. The very next paragraph denounces standardized tests.

I agree with Boostrom about the curriculum deficiency, but I’ll unabashedly add that independent, creative, active thought begins about age three. That’s where ideas take hold. That’s where the love of ideas forms, and from what I’ve seen, it’s not happening.

Ideas will naturally draw in a thousand fascinating facts, but you can’t reverse that because a truckload of disconnected facts will never amount to anything. Ideas don’t start in the college classroom any more than they begin with standardized tests.

Teaching very young children to develop the habit of asking questions about things they want to know about begins in the early childhood classroom. Questions make teachers think too and should.

The crisis of education doesn’t begin with standardized tests; it begins with poor early childhood education and bad habits.

Judy Lyden
The Garden School

This is the letter I sent to the editor of the Courier and Press. I wonder if they will print it?

When you read what is generally written in the paper about kids, you realize how few people really know about kids and how they grow. It’s easy to copy copy and publish a lot of trendy half truths and clichés that fit into a particular agenda or headline, but putting oneself into a child's mind is not so easy. The big questions begin with "why" and "what" and the answers are slow in coming.

In a recent audio press conference I did for a study that came out of Yale, the professor could not tell his interviewers (press) just why a four year old is more likely to be thrown out of school than a three year old. Duh. I wanted to scream into the phone that a three year old is probably misbehaving for the first time; it's easy to curb, but the four year old is a practiced veteran who knows he's not even allowed to be put in time out. Makes a difference.

Children perceive the world differently than adults, and few adults realize just how differently that view is. Their reference points are first, innocent, and secondly limited. What is true to a child is often not true to an adult. A child's truth is often more concrete. Therefore, when an adult plants his fist with the demand, “believe it, darn it,” a child might look with horror and resentment because it just doesn’t seem true, fair or real. His innocence is shocked, hurt and he loses respect for the adult who is insisting.

Understanding how children think means perceiving with a child’s eyes, and that means remembering one's own youth; it means seeing innocently again; it means a kind of unconditional love that throws all prejudices away. It means seeing each child as Christ and giving up a piece of yourself every day in every way. That's what I see at the Garden School, and that's why the Garden School is just a little different kind of place than most, but that's just more traditional nonsense.