Newsweek magazine has cautiously opened the door to public controvery about how children age 5 through 8 are taught in public schools today and how new research indicates that most schools are using an entirely wrong approach. Newsweek phrases its criticism very timidly, but the meaning is clear.
The upshot of Newsweek’s cover article called “How Kids Learn” is summed up in this quotation: “The idea of putting small children in front of workbooks and asking them to sit at their desks all day is a nightmare vision.” Indeed, it is.
Children under age 10 need to physically active. They are simply not ready for the long periods of physical inactivity, sitting at a desk, which is the routine demanded by teachers.
Normal children age 5 through 9 develop at a different pace, and a child’s pace is almost impossible to predict. That pace bears no relation to the intelligence or competence of the adult.
Will we see this new research reflected in public school practices? Don’t count on it. In a giant understatement, Newsweek admits that “changing the way schools teach isn’t easy.”
Let’s be blunter about this subject than Newsweek dared to be. The entire public school system is built on forcing little children into classrooms at age 5 or 6, where they sit at desks for many hours every day, trying to perform repetitious verbal and pencil-and-paper tasks under the supervision of a teacher, usually female, who tries to require them to be quiet, orderly, and attentive.
If they are not, the teacher cites them for behavioral problems or “attention deficit” and refers them to the school counselor, the principal’s office, or a doctor who sometimes prescribes a powerful drug called Ritalin to keep them quiet.
Forcing small children into a structured school environment is much more harmful to boys than to girls because boys’ maturity level lags behind girls’ by about a year at the age of school entry. The result is that, a few years later, boys outnumber girls 13 to one in learning failure classes and 8 to one among the emotionally disturbed.
Yet, there is not one of the 50 states that allows a differential for this late maturing of boys in mandatory school entrance age or in curriculum of the primary grades.
The teachers’ unions and other education establishment groups are constantly lobbying state legislatures for a reduction in the mandatory school entry age and for mandatory kindergarten. When they cannot get the legislature to pass a law making kindergarten mandatory, in some states they accomplish almost the same result by the devious rule that a child cannot enter the first grade unless he has previously attended kindergarten.
In recent months, these same groups have raised a ruckus demanding “early childhood education.” That means putting little children in formal schooling at age 3.
There is no replicable research to prove the advisability of putting children in school at age 5 or 6, much less at age 3 or 4. Research shows that, when children are put in school at an early age, that is before age 10, they become peer dependent, which in turn induces bad habits and a loss of self-worth.
Developmental psychologist Raymond S. Moore, who has testified in dozens of states in defense of parents who homeschool their children rather than put them in structured institutions at an early age, believes that early formal schooling is burning out our children. He thinks that, because the child’s various maturity levels – senses, cognition, brain development, sociability, etc. – don’t come together until after the age of 8, the learning tools of the average child enrolled in school at ages 4, 5, 6, or 7 “are neither tempered nor sharp enough to cope with the academic litter that increasingly is tossed at them.”
Dr. Moore says that mandating little children into formal, scheduled, structured work before they have had a chance to grow up naturally “can from one perspective be considered a form of child abuse.” He adds, “The sheer dereliction of states that mandate little boys into school, and subject them to the same constraints as they lay on the more mature little girls, says something about the ignorance of selfishness of those who make laws.”
Dr. Moore is scornful of those who say little children of this age need to be “socialized by their peers.” He believes that such socialization is an undesirable, negative factor.
Dr. Moore cites a mountain of research to demonstrate that a late-starting child, given time to mature, will quickly catch up and usually pass children who have entered school earlier, and do so with less likelihood of insecurity, depression, neurosis, failure, and failure’s twin – delinquency.
The current proposals to get children into school at a tender age should be recognized for what they are – just devices to create more jobs for the teachers’ unions. If we are truly interested in the well-being of children, we should be talking about deinstitutionalizing them under age 10, not trying to institutionalize them starting at age 3.
