By: Trisha Knueven
Today we feature Nanny Trisha’s personal response to the article Fast-tracking to Kindergarten (article in the New York Times) . Please click on the link and read. What is your response?
After reading this article my heart goes out to all the parents and children who are sucked into this mentality. Yes, you read that right they are being sucked into it thinking that this is the latest, newest, perhaps best way for their precious child to have the added advantage in life. That could not be the farthest from the truth in my opinion!
I have been in the childcare field for going on 17 years now and I know that the age between birth and kindergarten (around age 5) is a special time in a child’s life. This is the time children learn a great deal about how to function in every domain: language, physical, social, emotional, intellectual. They are very busy learning through play that they create based on what is happening in their lives. To that note I would like to add that a child cannot thrive and excel to the best of their ability if they are left in an environment that is not stimulating or not interactive to the extent that they need. That is where preschool and every learning through play enter the picture. The Kumon approach is not learning through play like children need. It will not allow them to become inquisitive thinkers with the imagination and spontaneity that children need to solve problems.
This article, I strongly feel, is starting a trend of entering children into school once they are 2 and potty trained. All the more pressure to start schooling children at even younger ages. Yes, the United States as a country has a true problem with the educational system. I couldn’t agree with that more. If our education system was healthy and doing what it should I would be a happy elementary school teacher by now. I have spent time in the classroom setting in traditional schools and have been able to even compare them to the Montessori system. I still feel that a blended approach will reap the greatest results. However, I strongly feel that Kumon is not the answer! Just like “Teach Your Baby to Read” is not the answer. Children are very naïve and gullible especially when they get a feeling that they are a “big” kid earlier or that they are so much better than their peers. It’s based on the early superego stage that children of this age are passing through. Small, appropriate introductions to language, writing, reading, and math can be made during these years in a way that does not drill and pressure child into learning. For many parents this is uncharted waters because what children need today looks much differently from what parents were raised with. The gap is closing though! Drilling children like their parents were drilled as children is not the answer. Yes, it brings about early skills and perhaps inflates the image of super life-long achievers, but if children do not learn all the skills of the social world before they are placed in a school setting they will not know what to do when faced with it in traditional classrooms. I have recently personally discovered this with the child in my care. She is very bright and intelligent and for the first time she is learning hard lessons in peer pressure. Perhaps she was never socially challenged as a preschooler and did not learn the skills to deal with life in a productive way. She is finding it very hard to navigate and now she is stumbling over and over again to learn and put into practice basic social skills. I mostly fear that with young children, granted they are eager learners, they need to learn things that are not on charts, worksheets, and in books during the preschool years so that they will have that under their belts when they open the books.
Rewards systems and grading systems set children up to feel like inadequate failures. This is an old-fashioned way of encouraging and evaluating the learning that takes place. This ruins a child’s ego and sense of accomplishment. Any literature you could read about why Montessori education models are working over the traditional classroom will show you this. Just pull out some literature from Alfie Kohn and read it with an open mind. The long term damage outweighs the short term gains! The focus needs to be on what happens long term! Do you want to help a child develop a feeling of life-long failure? Of having to be drilled by a smarter person and not know how to function once a smarter person leaves the picture? There is a great debate about which education system is the most beneficial and I can for certain say from reading this article that a Kumon approach just brings the traditional way into preschoolers lives with a long-term potential harm factor.
Preschoolers need to learn how to handle friends, peer influences, peer pressure, etc. that is not and cannot be explicitly taught like reading, writing, and math. The preschool years are the best time for children to learn these things. The words of a young school agers keep repeating in my mind, “My teacher says not to tattle tale.” For this child the teacher fails to teach a student the social skills that this child has lacked and needs desperately in order to be successful in school life. Why does the teacher ignore the needs of this student in this particular way? Because the teacher is not held accountable for how a child feels emotionally. Teachers are only graded on the output: how much a child learns according to the state’s curriculum guidelines. If children are turned away from learning the fundamentals about how to live and function in our world by early book learning, I fear that children will lack the social skills and possibly the physical skills to gain life-long achievements. I understand that Kumon is only a few times a week in short spurts, but I caution everyone to really think about the message this is sending young children. Already technology has stolen a great deal from everyone and at the same time we have seen obesity soar. What will this steal from our innocent, naïve children? There is so much time for learning in the school years. I strongly feel that those years are where the worksheets, drill chart, etc. belong!
What do you think?