Vermont

If we're honest with ourselves, none of us want to institutionalize education at all. The personal touch is what teaches best.

Times Argus
Drawbacks to Preschool
February 21, 2006

Before approving (S.132), free early education, an expensive and teacher-friendly program, Vermonters should ask themselves several important questions:

Do we want to institutionalize education at this early and crucial age when children form their first emotional ties, acquire moral values, social skills and develop basic cognitive skills?

Do we want to delegate our basic privilege and right to shape our children in our own image (according to our cultural and personal preferences) to the state?

Preschoolers learn in many different ways: through modeling, imitation, exposure to a nurturing, and stimulating environment etc. Formal schooling (class-teacher encounters), technical devices and fancy equipments do not play a major role at this age. Actually, they might be counterproductive — establish rigid and uniform patterns of thinking and inhibit creativity.

State-run preschools will subject children to educational experimentation, testing, special education testing and labeling. Children will accumulate "files" and records which will predetermine their future schooling.

Parents should not be intimidated by "professionals," "experts," etc., but try and think for themselves and answer these basic questions: Do you think that you yourself would have preferred to be enrolled in school at a much earlier age? Do you think that you, who did not have free early education, are somehow less capable, and were more prone to fail in school? Do you think that if little Albert had free early education he would have become an Einstein? My answer is a decisive "No" to all these questions.

Ahuva Dafni
Williston