I was listening to a podcast on the way to work this morning. The First Reader’s commuter scooter is in the shop, so I made the run from home, to his work, and then back to mine. With a detour to put money in my son’s lunch account as my daughter had texted me to let me know he’d left for school without his lunch. Sigh. So it was a lot of driving this morning, more than enough to listen to a whole Freakonomics ‘cast on early childhood education.
I’ve talked before here about my dislike of the concept of moving the education age for children ever earlier and earlier. But after listening to the economists talking about various studies that have been done not only to study what works at preschool and earlier, but ways they are trying to help poor kids to overcome the gap they start school with, I realized I should expand on my issues with early childhood education. I don’t have a problem with education starting at birth. Even before. I talked, sang, and played music to my unborn babies. Studies back up that maternal instinct: a baby born having heard loving voices is going to develop better than one who had to deal with drugs, alcohol, and stress while in fetal development. Babies that are loved and wanted thrive, and one of the ways they thrive is that they learn better.
But the reason I snip and snipe at ‘preschool’ is that it’s not about the cognitive development. It’s about forcing very young children into an environment that is advanced beyond their capacity for non-cognitive abilities to handle. Things like sitting still, and paying attention. Boys, in particular, are not ready at 3 or 4 to do that. Boys are not ready for that often until 7 or 8, and it means that their non-cognitive development lagging behind girls can lead to a lifelong handicap on the cognitive development as well. It’s no wonder that we have a generation of suicidal and homicidal boys shuffling the halls of schools. The other thing that can handicap the educational progress of children is being in a single-parent environment. The ‘cast pointed out that a huge part of mental development in infancy is how many words they hear, how quickly they process them, the level of language they hear (rich vocabulary), and the tone of voices used around them. In a single parent home, the children do not hear as many words, do not interact as often with parents (caregivers are rarely as engaged as parents and willing to engage even very small children in conversations, which is important. I say this as a former daycare worker. It isn’t that you don’t want to, it’s that there’s one of you, and several of them, and you just can’t). As I was listening to the studies they were profiling, I was fascinated by the conclusions they drew. The takeaway? Being in the classroom very early isn’t the big thing for education. Parental care and concern about education is the vital key. Parents who talk to, read to, and even just interact with their kids make more of a difference than anything else that they looked at. For some parents living in poverty in Chicago, one effort focused on teaching them how to teach their kids, and that made a difference. It’s not about the classroom, it’s about the home.
I grew up in a home where my parents sacrificed so Mom could stay home with us. I’m not sure they intended all along for us girls to be homeschooled, but very quickly they did that. We lived at or maybe just above the poverty line. My sister has her Master’s degree, I have my Bachelor’s, and my baby sister is severely handicapped and too a lot of Mom’s attention while we were growing up (and to this day). Yes, we were all girls. But… Mom read aloud to us every night from the time we were… well, I can’t remember not doing it, and I can remember back to an encounter with fire ants in Homestead FL and I was about 3! I also can’t remember not being able to read. Mom thinks I was probably four and a half when I started reading. Mom and Dad never completed college. Dad is seriously dyslexic. But both of them are voracious readers (Dad’s just a bit slower than Mom!) and I grew up in homes literally filled with books.
On the other hand, the First Reader, who is not one bit more stupid than I am, despite never formally finishing a degree, has a pile of advanced technical education from the Army and the Air Force. He grew up in a home where one parent was functionally illiterate (brilliant, but lacked the education), one read magazines, and both regarded him as a bit of a cuckoo’s chick because he loved to read and buried his nose in a book from a very young age. You’ve read his work – this is not a man who is uneducated and ignorant.
The takeaway? encouraging kids to read, yes. But loving your babies, and talking to them, and engaging with them from an early age. Making sacrifices to stay home with them when they are babies, at least until they are three or four and have the majority of their brain development done. Set habits up of reading to them, talking about what you’ve read, and later, talking about what they are independently reading. Letting boys catch up to their non-cognitive development rather than retarding their development before forcing them into a classroom too early. I’m out of time and patience (I hate this keyboard!) for today, but I’ll be back tomorrow with more…
Comments
12 responses to “Begin as You Mean to Go On”
Hrmm.. fascinating. Ma was around a lot and read/spoke a lot. Pa read.. but mainly (trade/hobby) magazines rather than books (only *book* I recall seeing him read was written by one of the Wright brothers), but even if he got some terms… askew… the vocabulary… was non-trivial. Part was historical. A ‘flip-flop’ was that… but also it could be an Eccles-Jordan circuit. Ionosphere? Kennelly-Heaviside layers, and so on. And Grandpa… used words I’ve not heard (much?) since his passing, e.g. dasn’t. Not much was demanded.. but there sure was a lot of exposure to things!
Funny, when you wrote a flip -flop was that…I had them reversed in my mind until you clarified later in the sentence. 🙂
Flip-flop was… flip-flopped?
Flop-flipped?
Excellent thoughts, and totally true. I started reading to you almost as soon as you were born (maybe even before you were born); the book of Russian fairy tales was the first book I read to you.
I would expand on what you’ve said. I attended public school until I was seventeen (I graduated a year early); then I homeschooled you girls, mostly, along with a little bit of public school and some private school; and I taught at one of the private schools — a small, good one — for five years. My conclusion from all of that is that IDEALLY (and I know the real world doesn’t often allow us to do what is ideal) no child would attend a classroom school five days a week until they were around twelve or thirteen (even older in some cases). The behavior problems we had in the classroom school were a combination of immaturity and restlessness, and a lack of having been taught good behavior at home. The children, in my opinion, really weren’t ready to learn in a class-room setting until about the age our children traditionally start high school. And even then, it would probably be in their best interests to keep the boys and girls separated for a few more years, at least at school. They’d have more mental energy to devote to learning, instead of spending it on hormonal issues. Of course, many families can’t keep their children home, either because both parents have to work, or because there is only one parent available, but if it’s possible, it is by far the best thing they can do for their children.
So… When are you going to write some essays for me? Lol.
Your comment about lack of maturity reminded me of something. My brother Russell was born in last summer; he started school in September of his 5th year – on time. No Pre-school in those days, just straight into Kindergarten. Russ struggled through school even though he tested high on achievement tests. (It took her 5th grade teacher to pin-point that he was moderately dyslexic. )
I was born in mid-autumn; I missed the cut-off date to start school by a handful of days. I was almost 6 when I started Kindergarten. I had fewer problems in school than Russell did. ((Fwiw, we tested nearly the same on those silly tests.))
Mom swore unto her dying days that Russell was not ready for school, but the law said he was and that I benefited from being a year behind my peers.
There is something about the child being mentally and emotionally ready to start school.
I’d say this is a big It Depends. Thanks to already being a good reader, I skipped first grade, so I was always a year younger than everyone else. Was the best thing that could have happened to me — hit the best teachers all the way through, and had work at my level instead of being bored out of my skull. (I’d finished my entire 1st grade reader/workbook on the first day, and refused to do it again, which was how my teacher twigged to how for me it was needless and boring. Thank you, whoever you were.) I was never real social with other kids anyway (when I was 3 or 4, I complained that they were boring and dumb!), so that really didn’t factor in. If I’d been forced to stay with my age group, I’d probably have wound up as an angry little tyrant.
I attended an all-male high school, and while we certainly had behavior problems, (of which I was one) I shudder to think of trying to teach in a co-ed classroom. Later, for my sins, I taught middle school in Bogota, Colombia, which only reinforced my opinion that gender-segregated CLASSROOMS are optimal for educational advancement, at least in those ages where hormones are interfering with both the teacher’s goals, and the student’s ability and inclination to focus on crap like factoring polynomials are severely degraded.
I remain agnostic about gender-segregated SCHOOLS, and recognize the social benefits of integrated cafeterias and the like, but think it much easier for young brains to focus on academic minutiae without wondering what bra size Susie Sakakrakers is currently wearing.
With regards to parents’ involvement, importance, and responsibility for their kid’s learning, I could not agree with you more. Kids not yet old enough to attend public school are capable of learning immensely more than we either credit them for, or expect of them, so long as it is the parents teaching.
By kindergarten I could read at a more or less adult level, and had a sufficiently solid grasp of phonics to work out unknown words. How did I achieve this early education? From the time I could sit up my mom read to me, with her finger moving below the words. (Phonics was apparently obvious, at least to me.) But my mom’s generation grew up when reading was still the most common entertainment, so she merely did what everyone used to think was normal.
So I see in the photo a kid armed with what should be standard equipment. 🙂
Read to them every day until they’re two. When they’re three, they start reading to you.
Did that too. 🙂