Every week I read a dozen articles about Early Childhood Education. I pass by hundreds that say the same thing over and over that we need more classrooms, more teachers, more time learning and taxes should pay for this and it should be mandatory and every politician supports this. But what exactly are they supporting? Do they even know?
What is Early Childhood Education? What is the more they are expecting or looking for, and where?
For as long as I have fought the status quo on Early Childhood, there have been two ideas that dominate the world of the young child: day care and kindergarten.
By its very nature the very idea of day care is to provide a safe, secure and rather dull ten hours of primary care for a child who can't be home. Day care providers are not paid to teach, and they are not equipped to teach. Tell a minimum wage employee that you expect her to teach, and she will run away and hide. Twenty-five years ago, when I first started in Early Childhood, my idea was to be a "whole" place, a place where kids could come and play and learn and eat well and have a good time. I was blackballed by every other "day care" in town and hated. But I persisted and I have beaten this drum and been ignored until last week when someone at the top of the Early Childhood mountain wrote to me and said, "I'm glad you can't find the box - never find the box."
Following day care, a child enters kindergarten. Day care kids can more easily adapt to kindergarten because they've never had the one on one, but they don't know as much because nobody has taught them. Most day care kids we get at the GS can't wash their own hands, sit for a story or do they know what a letter or a crayon are.
In kindergarten it's easy to teach kids their letters and numbers and reading comes quickly to the bright kids who really want to know. Then they go on to first and second grade.
So what's my beef?
Pulling kids into a learning environment is a good thing with all the talk about Early Childhood Education, but who is going to do this? Is it the same people who have done the work so far? What's the plan everyone is pushing? Has anyone ever thought about a curriculum for Early Childhood?
Over the years, our faculty has found that the learning preferences and differences in very young children can't be standardized. In my preschool class, I have 3,4,5 year old children. They are all basically at the same ability level. In Miss Amy's class, she has just turned 4 and 5 year old children who are all at the same ability level. In Miss Kelly's class she has 5 and 6 year olds who are reading or nearly reading. If we standardized the GS into age grouping, we would never be able to teach anything, because some of our five year olds are still not capable of learning their letters, and some of our threes are ready to learn to read. It's that complicated.
But reading and math and hand writing are not the only things that need to be taught during the Early Childhood years. Play is learned and play is mastered and through play young children learn to live in the world. Social skills, eating skills, listening skills, follow through skills, and independence are all part of the project of the Early Childhood scheme, and that rarely happens in day care and it only happens in big school when the big school has a low ratio.
Before Early Childhood is standardized and paid for by tax dollars and shoved into the public arena as the savior of the child, I think it's necessary to examine the status quo and see if public schools and private schools are actually accomplishing what they set out to do with the students they have. Saying "If they had gone to preschool, they wouldn't have dropped out of high school" is ridiculous. Saying, "He had a good start in every conceivable way. He had a good home, and parent who saw after his education, and that's why he's a success," makes a lot more sense.
I'd like to see the public arena look at successful Early Childhood places and ask what they can do to slowly and gradually incorporate a younger program for some children in time. I'd like to see day care be upgraded to be teaching places.
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