“Early Childhood Education” is a phrase now frequently heard at State Capitols and education seminars. In the face of mounting public, private, and employer dismay at the failure of the public elementary schools to teach children the skills and knowledge necessary to function in a modern society (such as reading), the education bureaucracy is responding with the collective call, “Give us your children at an even earlier age.”
“Early” means “school” for 3-and-4-year-olds. The plan is to make it voluntary today but compulsory tomorrow; start in the ghetto areas, then extend it to all schools. One bill in the Illinois Legislature last year even called for schools to take children “from birth to kindergarten.”
Early Childhood Education was quietly inserted in the fine print of many comprehensive so-called “education reform packages” that were considered in 1985, and these proposals are very much alive today. Regrettably, these proposals sometimes passed and were tax-funded without any debate. The education bureaucracy wants to get them in place before the American people realize what is happening, especially since there is no evidence to support this expensive and revolutionary plan of action.
Absolutely no replicable evidence shows that putting children in school at an earlier age makes them brighter, or better able to achieve academically, or better able to socialize positively with their peers as they move along in school. The evidence indicates that it saddles tots with burnout, stress, and frustrations which inhibit later learning.
The American Academy of Pediatricians has expressed concern about the dramatic increase of “stress-related” symptoms now apparent in children in the primary grades. Would you believe? Some schools have put in “stress” courses for 1st and 2nd graders.
Tufts University learning psychologist, David Elkind, warns that early formal schooling is “burning out” our children. University of California’s William Rohwer urged that formal schooling wait until much later.
After extensive research, Dr. Rohwer concluded, “All of the learning necessary for success in high school can be accomplished in only two or three years of formal skill study. Delaying mandatory instruction in the basic skills until the junior high school years could mean academic success for millions of schoolchildren who are doomed to failure under the traditional educational system.”
All the learning that takes place in the first grade consumes a maximum of two hours per day. What do the little children do the rest of the day in school? They learn the bad habits of their peers and catch their germs. Recent findings show that children who attend preschool are 15 times as likely to be sick as children at home, and 15 times as likely to get involved in negative, aggressive acts.
Enormous evidence shows that children who spend more time with their peers than with their parents prior to the 5th or 6th grade will become peer dependent. They learn to knuckle under to the rivalry, ridicule, habits, manners, and values of their classmates rather than their parents. They are negatively socialized and become captives of social and moral trends.
Dr. Raymond Moore, nationally known advocate of not putting children in school at least until age 8, explains the sequence of what often happens to an average child put in school too early: (1) uncertainty as he leaves the family nest for a less secure environment, (2) puzzlement at the new pressures and restrictions of the classroom, (3) frustration because his brain’s learning tools cannot handle the scheduled, formal lessons and pressures, (4) nervousness, jitters, and hyperactivity resulting from frustration, (5) failure, and (6) delinquency.
The adverse effect is far worse on the boys than the girls. The “system” requires boys to enter school at the same age as girls, even though it is self-evident that they mature later. The entry of boys into kindergarten and 1st grade at the same age as girls means that many times more boys than girls will fail, become hyperactive, or delinquent. In American high schools today, there are eight boys for every girl in classes for the emotionally impaired, and 13 boys for each girl in remedial learning groups.
Early Childhood Education would vastly increase the harm to most children, and give the boys a near-insurmountable disadvantage. Washington State Senator Sam Guess, a miller, provides an analogy appropriate to Early Childhood Education: “When you grind green grain, you don’t get flour. You get gum.”
