Primary Education

An article in the NY Times "When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?" by Elizabeth Weil (June 3, 2007) caught my attention today on the NY Times list of most emailed articles. There are several interesting points within the article about whether age really means anything about being prepared for school and school systems in other countries. Below are a few paragraphs that were interesting to me:

[Kelly] Bedard found that different education systems produce varying age effects. For instance, Finland, whose students recently came out on top in an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study of math, reading and science skills, experiences smaller age effects; Finnish children also start school later, at age 7, and even then the first few years are largely devoted to social development and play. Denmark, too, produces little difference between relatively older and younger kids; the Danish education system prohibits differentiating by ability until students are 16. Those two exceptions notwithstanding, Bedard notes that she found age effects everywhere, from “the Japanese system of automatic promotion, to the accomplishment-oriented French system, to the supposedly more flexible skill-based program models used in Canada and the United States.”

Friedrich Froebel, the romantic motherless son who started the first kindergarten in Germany in 1840, would be horrified by what’s called kindergarten today. He conceived the early learning experience as a homage to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that “reading is the plague of childhood. . . . Books are good only for learning to babble about what one does not know.” Letters and numbers were officially banned from Froebel’s kindergartens; the teaching materials consisted of handmade blocks and games that he referred to as “gifts.” By the late 1800s, kindergarten had jumped to the United States, with Boston transcendentalists like Elizabeth Peabody popularizing the concept. Fairly quickly, letters and numbers appeared on the wooden blocks, yet Peabody cautioned that a “genuine” kindergarten is “a company of children under 7 years old, who do not learn to read, write and cipher” and a “false” kindergarten is one that accommodates parents who want their children studying academics instead of just playing.

A friend of mine is a kindergarten teacher, and she claims that she is overwhelmed with meeting the requirements for end-of-grade testing. In fact, she'd prefer to teach grades without end-of-grade testing. She told me once of the things she would teaching in kindergarten. She was pulling out addition and even multiplication. Multiplication wasn't introduced to me until the end of second grade.

There is probably a huge problem with the current generation, because the school systems start feeding students more academic things too soon. Controlled development doesn't mean good development. It's too difficult with current classroom sizes for younger students to get the attention they probably need to succeed. At the same time, all the time in the world may not help a student who has entered kindergarten prematurely.