Posted in Standards and EvaluationPhilosophy of EducationTeaching on Nov 18, 2009 - 02:02 PM
This week I'll be asking the question. Here it is:What ever happened to Kindergarten?
This past weekend I found myself in Western Massachusetts for an old fashioned Timber House Raising. Now I have to be honest, before this weekend I had no idea what a Timber Hose Raising was. Living in Brooklyn it's not so often you come across someone who decides they're going to build their house and then invites the whole neighborhood over to help. It's even less often that you get to watch a house being build with no metal. But that was exactly what happened. Over the last two years pieces of tree were cut, shaved and carved into lumber, each piece measured and chiseled to fit exactly into the puzzle that was to, in one day of assembly, become the frame of a house.
It was an incredible sight to come upon in the middle of the woods: 20 guys carrying large pieces of lumber up to a platform, hoisting them up, sliding them into place and locking them together with wooden dowels. It reminded me of imaginings from my childhood playing with Legos and Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs. There is a picture of me at age 4 sitting in a model car that I built out of giant Tinker Toys. These guys, I thought, out here in the woods, must have had childhoods full of similar imaginings.
Then I had another thought, one that I haven't been able to shed all weekend. It came from a conversation I had last Friday night. I was out to dinner with some fellow educators and it somehow came up that in the elementary school that one of them works at, the kindergarten classrooms don't have blocks. I was absolutely shocked when I heard this. No blocks! What is kindergarten without blocks? Surely this was some kind of mistake. So I started going down the list of what a kindergarten should look like. Is there nap time? No. Dress up? No. A sand table? No. Legos? Surely there must be Legos. No. No Legos! What do the children do all day?
I suppose that's a rhetorical question. There is only one thing that they could be doing. I was just really hoping it wasn't true. But in fact kindergarteners today, instead of playing with blocks, or Legos, or dress up, are spending their days doing test prep. Test trep! Five-year-olds doing test prep! Sure, they get 30 minutes of recess to run around a fenced in piece of pavement, but then it's back to your desks and take out the pencil.
What kind of world are we preparing these children for? What message are we sending a 5-year-old when we tell her, no you cannot play with your toys anymore, play time is over, your life from this point on is about tests, and sitting still, and doing what you are told? What message are we sending to our children when we take away their childhood because we are afraid they won't be smart enough to compete in the workforce? What message are we sending our children when we show them that all we care about is how well they can fill out a bubble sheet?
What are we doing to our children when we show them that we do not trust them to have the childhood that we so took for granted? And even without thinking about what we are doing to the individual children we are depriving of a childhood, this destruction of kindergarten raises questions for society at large. Where are we going to get our creative thinkers from? Where are the innovators of the 21st century going to come from? Certainly not a kindergarten classroom dedicated to test prep.
Keep the questions coming,
Jonah
I'd rather know some of the questions than have all of the answers.
Tags for this entry:
play,
creativity,
standardized tests,
kindergarten,
questioning,
childhood,
recess
Comments
Nov 20, 2009 - 11:12 AM
My wife was a teacher at a kindergarten in Texas for a year or two. Her school stressed academics so strenuously that she became more and more uncomfortable with the effect it was having on the children and the school culture (and the family cultures connected to the schools) as time went on. And back then she hadn’t really developed the progressive take on education she has now.
Parents who put their confidence in professional educators at well-funded schools using the most up-to-date, albeit anemic, thinking about early childhood education cannot help but have their home lives influenced. I imagine them thinking that if that’s what they are doing at my daughter’s school, then it must be what’s best for her. So we should follow some of their thinking. . .
Nov 20, 2009 - 11:03 PM
My response?
Going ahead and making the supposition that having people trained to participate in a work force is actually valuable (not that I really buy that, but for the sake of pointing out other issues with it), from what I’ve noticed, if you want people to be optimized around basic educational skills like math, and to really master the kinds of skills we teach in public schools, the answer isn’t testing, it’s study groups. The whole, ‘‘Asians are smart’’ thing, as I understand it, arises from the fact that at their schools, it’s the norm to arrange study groups so everyone learns side by side.
Dec 16, 2009 - 02:42 PM
“Asians are smart.”
Japanese kindergarten is all about catching cicadas, playing in the mud, planting seeds, and going on community field trips at least once a week. Japanese teachers do not touch “academics” until first grade.
Academics in kindergarten is simplistic education reform. Want instant academic achievement? Just teach first grade in kindergarten.
Melia Dicker
Nov 18, 2009 - 07:43 PM
I clearly remember the wooden building blocks in my kindergarten classroom in California. We would make forts and boats, or pretend that we were camping and taking food supplies with us. I also liked the play kitchen, with its little pans and fake food. In my kindergarten class back in 1985, we learned by doing: by listening to stories, singing songs, practicing movement, and running around on the play yard. Any testing—if I remember that far back—was minimal.
Last fall, I visited the kindergarten at my elementary school, and there is now a state-mandated rubric that teachers need to follow. They need to show how each activity teaches a state standard that the kids will be tested on in a couple of years. The teacher read a story about The Gingerbread Man and had to justify exactly what knowledge it was teaching kids. Come on! Can’t five-year-olds just enjoy the story, and let the learning come naturally?