The Alliance for Childhood’s new report, Crisis in the Kindergarten, offers a careful account of what's actually happening in early childhood classrooms across the country.
The news is frightening.
I've been seeing it myself and hoping I was wrong. I even see it taking place in schools that generally share my belief in play and childhood. It's a creeping phenomenon. When I began to teach in the 1960s I was stunned to see an absence of open-ended, imaginative play, and children's own art work (as opposed to teacher-prepared turkeys, rabbits, etc). But there were lots of traditional whole-group early childhood activities --like songs, finger play, rhyming and clapping games, whole-group art activities (cutting and pasting and coloring in), and even a little "free" time.
Still, these kinds of rich kindergartens recommended by Froebel had not held up well during the l950s, and "academics" (such a bizarre word for it) were creeping in to Kindergartens. The initial encroachments of the 1960s, however, seem paltry compared to the high-pressure classrooms of today, with their immense focus on rote learning of letter names, sounds, phonemes, and other "literacy activities". Children are still read stories, but for the narrowest didactic purposes. Listening for pleasure to wonderful books, songs or made-up stories is rare. Alas, the Alliance’s report tells us the facts. My worst fears have been substantiated.
The price may be heavier than we can imagine. At least in the "once upon a time" days of yore, children played a lot when they weren't in school, and school hours for young children were much shorter than they are today. Today they are more likely to spend a full day in school-like formal settings or at home watching television. "Child-initiated cognitive activity"-- a fancy to describe play, is, according to many teachers and parents, getting harder for young children to know how to do.
Is that possible? Can we literally have gone that far? We need some studies to see how reversible this is, and how it impacts children in later life. What we know now, thanks to the Alliance for Childhood, is that boys start out at even a greater disadvantage, are far more likely to be expelled and punished for inappropriate behavior, and that black boys will suffer --once again-- the most. But that's the tip of the iceberg -- at heart it is influencing the intellectual achievement of all children.