The Education Pushdown: How Far Can It Go?

I have a friend who is starting a "social skills" psychotherapy group for kindergartners. when she told me about it, I asked "isn't that what kindergarten is for?"

As a public school teacher who retired after 31 years of teaching all levels from K-12, I must agree with many of you, especially Jessica Covington. Please do not blame the teachers or assume, as Summer did, that they "don't want to teach." Blame the politicians who think they know how to run the schools(e.g., NCLB), blame school boards whose members often are elected or appointed, not necessarily on the basis of their knowledge of education, blame the businesses who complain about the workforce, blame the media that has sucked our kids into believing that talking and behaving like thugs or "gangstas" is cool. I left teaching, not because I didn't want to teach-I loved it-but because I was fed up with lack of support, being sworn at by kids and their parents, being told to give and give and give of myself and my time as if I had no life outside of school. We are no longer educating children, we are training them. There's a big difference. What will you young parents do about it?

It's all about measurement, stemming from governmental involvement in schools. Funding is tied to test results because tests are easy to measure. It's easy to say that x% of kids passed a test -- much tougher to demonstrate that x% of students developed a lifelong love of learning or honed communication skills or found their career path. Kids are learning how to pass the tests instead of learning the broader social and intellectual concepts that actually make them productive humans. Even private schools aren't safe -- in fact, they may have it tougher. Since parents are paying for the education their kids receive, they want an educational "product" that exceeds the "free" schools -- they want more kids scoring higher on tougher tests. If schools were privatized completely, we could use various instruments for evaluating them and the education they provide...but that would require us to use our own higher thought processes (which maybe we didn't learn in school either).

I agree , these school systems are nothing like they used to be ! It seems the kids who need extra help , and dont get it the first time around get pushed to the side because the teacher doesn't want to take the time to teach!

I noticed this when I was tutoring my little cousin who is in the third grade and I had to pull out a calculator because even I couldn't figure out some of the arithmetic! Not to mention the fact that these little children are doing all this difficult schoolwork at school, but they also have more homework than I ever remember having. This is so exhausting for them and they have no time to be children. It seems like getting children ready to compete for spots in college has begun at age four!

My mom was a teacher for about 4 decades, and we've had discussions about this. I think it's crazy. She probably doesn't; she taught me how to read when i was three? four?, and i entered 1st grade with no nursery school or kindergarten when i was five. I did well in school. But it was really emotionally traumatic for me. I became a brilliant outsider with no social skills or friends. You decide.

And one more thing, at pre-K, kids need to learn how to socialize and play, not how to do math. That has to come later when their brains are ready. This is basic knowledge of brain development.

I fear that this country is going back in time regarding education. The irony of all of this is that we are not creating learners in this country with this pushdown system. When I taught children and adults in Thailand, I witnessed the outcomes of a system that taught students to "know the answer" instead of thinking out the problem to find the answer. My adult students were more concerned with getting the answer right than the process of knowing how they came to that answer. The kids were more concerned with how their books looked (if they were neat) than the answer. When I later worked at an independent school in San Francisco four years ago, I finally saw what education could and should be like, which is to teach the child, because every child is a different learner. To teach the child is the way that gets them excited to want to learn. This country is going to fail if we strive for standards instead of educating and growing problem solving learners.

YES! I have a 14-month-old, and feel constant pressure from people to show what he knows. Does he put puzzle pieces back in the right place? Know his colors? Know what sounds the animals make? How many words does he have? And how much sign language does he know? I want to yell, "He's one! Let him play like a baby!" So if it starts now, I can just imagine how intense the curriculum might be in pre-K.