Two hundred years ago children went off to school when the parents and teachers felt the children were ready, typically around eight to ten years old. Children's character was primarily shaped by their parents. (Interestingly enough back then the literacy rate was over 90%.)
Over the last hundred years there children keep being pushed off to school at an earlier and earlier age. At first kindergarten was supposed to be a fun nurturing environment. There was no push for academics. Now the claim is academics in kindergarten will help children, and the literacy rate of those graduating from public high schools drops every decade.
There is another push for getting children out of the home and into schools. The claim is preschool will be good for the children. Ashley Herzog writes that there may be another reason, the real reason:
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Its proponents were also clear about their larger goal. “Day care is a powerful institution,” Democrats Walter Mondale and John Brademas wrote to constituents in 1970. “A day care program that ministers to a child from six months to six years of age has over 8,000 hours to teach him values, fears, beliefs, and behaviors.”
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I am sure there are many who truly believe that preschool is a good thing, even though studies show that it doesn't help children in the long run.
But I'm also sure there are many who don't really care if preschool helps or hurts, they just want a chance to influence how children think, what they believe, and what they do.
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Technorati tags: preschool, kindergarten, parenting, children, education, government schools, children, public school, public education
7 comments:
Preschool is a great thing for our children. However I trully believe it is just another form of Governing over our children. In sense another form of control for the government.
To speak look at right now, How well are our schools doing? Not well at all. How much have they changed up to now? How much control did the government have before now and now?
Right now it is the governments goal to form the one world. In order to accomplish this goal, our children have to be mindwashed in to believing this one way. How else can they do this but get all of the kids all ages out and in to a school. Once the government gains control over all education to children it will be down hill from there. Preschool is not necessary and certainly does not make the child smarter. It is just a form of Governing & Control. All it has been about since Government lost control of the real meaning to Govern, and stick to the Contstitutional Rights of All American Citizens.
Thanks for your post!
I'd like to start out by saying that my 3 year old is doing K math right now (the kind they'd expect her to be able to do). I see no problem with little one's doing academic things, at all-- IF they are interested and want to go for it. If not, we'd not push it, at all.
The problem I see, again and again, is that it's less about academics and more about money, money, money.
I think that's why they push it.
No, it's about money, jobs, and indoctrination.
They aren't teaching the kids to read, they're teaching them about global warming and recycling and and stuff like that.
It was bad enough when I went to school and it's a ton worse now.
(Luckily, I was and am very close to my parents, and I just shrugged off a good deal of the stupid indoctrination and ridiculed it while I was there. Unfortunately, not all -- I've had a great time in my late 20s and early 30s realizing just how much they "got to me".)
"Preschool is a great thing for our children."
In what way is it "great" for kids? I can see the benefit for working parents, but not for kids.
All the literature I'm aware of on the positive benefits of preschool refers to studies done with broken families. These are often single parent families, families living on welfare, and families in ghettos. The studies do seem to find that preschool is a benefit to children from these families.
The message then gets shortened to "Preschool is a benefit, period."
The same logic applied to foster care would be: Foster care is sometimes good for children in neglected or abusive situations, therefore let's put all children into foster care.
When my oldest was old enough for preschool I talked to a kindergarten teacher I knew and asked if her if she saw any benefit from it. She said they are a little more used to working with other adults besides their parents, and maybe a little better at following classroom rules, but she said everything evens out within the first week. 'Nuff said, no preschool here.
My kids (before we pulled them out to homeschool) were always the top readers in kindergarten. I thought it very funny when one mother in our neighbor snidely made a comment that she can easily tell which kindergarteners went to preschool and which didn't. Riiiiiight.
I had never thought about there being a Grand Plan about preschool, but this post really makes sense to me. Taking control of little ones' socialization and education away from the home and giving it to the government--or even to the church (i.e., private preschool)--does not work for us.
Interesting post, thanks.
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