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Kindergarteners Today Get Little Time To Play, and It's Stunting Their Development (qz.com)
Christopher Brown Associate professor, University of Texas at Austin, writes:Researchers have demonstrated that five-year-olds are spending more time engaged in teacher-led academic learning activities than play-based learning opportunities that facilitate child-initiated investigations and foster social development among peers.During his research and investigation, Brown found that a typical kindergarten classroom sees kids and one teacher with them almost the entire school day. During this period, they engage in about 15 different academic activities, which include "decoding word drills, practicing sight words, reading to themselves and then to a buddy, counting up to 100 by ones, fives and tens, practicing simple addition, counting money, completing science activities about living things, and writing in journals on multiple occasions." Recess did not occur until the last hour of the day, and only lasted for about 15 minutes. He adds:For children between the ages of five and six, this is a tremendous amount of work. Teachers too are under pressure to cover the material. When I asked the teacher, who I interviewed for the short film, why she covered so much material in a few hours, she stated, "There's pressure on me and the kids to perform at a higher level academically." So even though the teacher admitted that the workload on kindergartners was an awful lot, she also said she was unable to do anything about changing it.
I was in grade school in the 90s and I remember having a 20 minute recess after lunch and that was all. I think we turned out fine...i digress. Course I could also walk home from school without my parents being sued for child endangerment.
It isn't just Kindergarten, is is throughout all of school, K-12.
They also neglect soft education like Music and Art (often replacing with Social Conformity Drills).
The problem is, we have people in far away cities, who don't have any real interest in the education of any student, making all sorts of Rules and Regulations (see Common Core) about not only how, but what kids ought to learn by when. All, often without any clue how long it takes to teach a room full of kids who just want to play.
We don't live in an industrial world, we shouldn't be treating our education system like a factory.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I have an 8 year old son and have been appalled by the expectations placed on kids, especially boys that are naturally energetic. I took my son out of one private pre-school that was an arts and crafts factory. At the time he was 3 or 4. First I noticed the drawings were too dark for him. Then I observed how they assembly lined the kids while the teacher would fill out the art after the kids 30 seconds was done. The teacher said my son wouldn't stay on a task and I witnessed my son very focused on painting and then the teacher took the painting so the next kid could get their 30 seconds of painting.
I know I'm going off on the teachers, it's really the school system. I have teachers in my family that taught many years ago that retired or got out of the business. They too are appalled at what they saw in the final years of practicing their profession.
Leaving kids to "free play" with minimal interference also allows them to learn how to deal with each other and solve problems by them selves and together.
Problem solving when other people are involved is a pretty good skill to have. I wish my co-worker was able to problem solve at all, their default response to anything new is to ask someone else to show them, or start bullshitting something up about it to get someone else involved to do the problem solving for them.
When I was at school we were kicked outside at lunch time for an hour and left to our own devices pretty much. Teacher would only get involved if someone was being a complete ass, doing something dumb / putting others a unnecessary risk.
yeah uh huh...
Just saw a report about a college that had a "safe space" that had cookies, lemonade, play-dough and videos of kittens. And they want to have the public pay fore this ??? TANSTAFL
It's like putting a plant into a very bureaucratic pot, it will always be stunted by the limits of the crap curricula developed by bean counters. A child's imagination has no such limits and allows them to develop more fully. We are retarding are children with this crappy Prussian education system. Education is beside the point in that system as INDOCTRINATION is paramount for churning out corporate cogs.
We had only half-day kindergarten. We went outside at least twice a day. During the day, we sang songs, did water coloring, played with clay, construction paper and scissors, the sandbox, sock puppets. There was lots of arts and crafts. There was always story time, where our teacher would read aloud to us. The only academic work I can ever recall was studying the alphabet, learning how to count to ten, how to count money, and learning how to write our name.
I still work in a school, in Minnesota, and now kindergarten is full day. Kids are expected to learn how to read. They do lots of worksheets, spelling tests, spend time learning how to use computers, and learn basic adding and subtracting. There's also lots of social behavior practice (how to stand in lines, how to be quiet and raise your hand, how to take turns, not interrupt others, etc.) And writing...lots and lots of writing. Long story short, what I covered in 1st grade 30 years ago is now what is expected in Kindergarten. Play is a thing of the past.
At this rate, expect them to be bringing home Algebra textbooks by the turn of the century.
No time to play we have the test to learn or we lose our funding and college prep to do.
...is increasingly being dominated by people with little or no teaching experience, training, or knowledge about the theory and practice of learning.
Who has prescribed this academic curriculum for kindergarteners? What do they know about developmental psychology? Have they even read Vygotsky, Piaget, Bruner, et al.?
Something tells me that the people doing this don't have children's, teachers', and parents' best interests at heart.
I say this as an extremely high achiever in pre-University education (and, a regular high achiever after that). I had a perfect GPA in high school and was valedictorian. I was head and shoulders above the other kids in elementary. This is not about me personally. This is not me whining.
School today is simply not developmentally appropriate. No one ever thinks about the opportunity cost of more academic crap. In the quest to cram ever more curriculum into school, we are losing the ever-so important human element. Common Core will only make this worse. Kids need time to play. It's that simple.
So edgy, be careful you'll cut yourself with that snark.
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Doesn't matter how much or how little free time or work time or technology or math or science or music or whatever the kids get. The education system in the USA is 100% botched from its premise all the way through its execution. It the students it turns out don't know how to learn and worse, don't want to learn anything once they get their diploma.
Let the little kiddies play all day for all the good it will do, or set them free in a room full of baseball bats and hand guns. At least the survivors will learn how to defend themselves.
I'm a dad of a new kindergartener. They're not solving differential equations at this level; it appears that they're trying to get them on a level playing field, accounting for differences in background, etc. If a kid has spent the last 5 years doing nothing but watch TV and has never been read to, they really have to catch them up quickly. First grade is apparently where the "rigorous academics" start. My kid already learned to read and has a pretty good background in the basics, so I imagine it's going to be a less than engaging first year.
I know everyone hates the common core stuff, but I do see the point. Teachers aren't given a class full of kids with attentive parents who care about what their kid does in school. Maybe some are like that, but others are too busy, don't have the educational background, or the family is poor and education takes a back seat to living. Absent the nice home life, the schools have to do everything they can to ensure they give a kid a fighting chance education-wise.
Also, having recess is almost optional in my mind. Chinese, Indian, Korean, Japanese and other countries' students spend way more time in school than our students do. Education is valued in those societies and they make sure they turn out well-educated students. Look at some of the university entrance exams from countries on this list and compare it to high school curriculum in the US. Compared to these countries, we're doing nothing near that level of work with students. Visiting faculty from other countries send their kids to private tutors to ensure they receive a level of education on par with their country's system so the kid won't be behind when they return home. I think the school day should be longer and the school year should be year-round. Only 2% of the population works in agriculture anymore, so there's no excuse for students to be out the whole summer anymore.
In order to comply, the following will be added to junior and senior Kindergarten.
-Drooling 101
-Feces Based Painting 101
-Unintelligible Moaning 101
-Paste Eating 101
-Urinating Everywhere 101
Heck US kids would be in the top of the class!
They better get used to not having any free time. Especially in academia.
No-one cares anymore. Most of these kids are lucky to exist. Who has the fucking time to have kids anymore? They might as well learn to be busy little automatons when they're young. It will save on disappointment later.
An entire school day here in Texas means from about 8-3, minus 40 minutes for lunch, 20 minutes for recess, and 15 minutes for morning announcements. Seems pretty sparse and there's plenty of time to go play somewhere before dinner and bed-time (which some shaman are insisting should be 730p). Since my kids go to school very near where this yahoo practices his quackery, I can honestly say they goof off at school in epic proportions. I can say for a fact that they didn't cover such complex topics as "the alphabet" or "adding numbers" in kindergarten. Whatever they were doing, wasn't strongly academic.
All I see down here is more concentrated efforts to defund public schooling, pushing more interested parents into debt for private schools that still focus on academics. Public schools have always worked reasonably well, but it's clear that the more we defund and defocus them over the decades, the lower the quality of the graduates produced. In Austin they're talking about doing away with homework, and this fool is trying to provide the support needed. This is great way to cut pay to teachers who don't have to grade it, but whether we liked it or not as kids, there is is a time when you need to memorize certain things, and homework is the weapon of choice. Class time should be spent on questions and explanations, homework is the ideal time for reading new material and memorizing what things absolutely need to be memorized.
The entire topic of "child initiated" blah blah "social development" is saying happy words that people like to hear but has absolutely zero substance. If I get home another paper that my son "collaborated" on with his peers that contains mistakes that I know he is far beyond but he tells me "well if I tell her she's wrong she cries and we all get demerits", I will scream. Sure it's an excellent opportunity to teach leadership, but on the spot it isn't happening because teacher is busy with the remedial kids who still can't do their ABCs, but we can't have remedial/normal/advanced classes because it marginalizes someone (read: that budget was cut). At home it's out of context and contrived, particularly on a child who is not destined for leadership by its current definition (i.e. Zaphod Beeblebrox's school of CEOing). Whatever fantasy land this asshat lives in, he should retreat to, he couldn't handle the world he's shaping.
Let's keep school focused on academics, but when we get to the teenage years not be afraid to spend some money on kids who have no track record of academics, and help them with trade skills in a useful, non-profit, way. For now, if lack of play time is hurting children, it's probably all the after-school sports/band/dance/cheerleading/gymnastics/music/etc. stuff parents sign their kids in to as extended daycare. A friend of my son's has an after-school schedule that is full of more junk than my work calendar. Surely by the time they're done with all that they are exhausted and too tired for homework or required reading anyway.
Kindergarten, especially the new trendy "all day kindergarten" is just free daycare for people who have kids, subsidized by those who don't.
It isn't just Kindergarten, is is throughout all of school, K-12.
They also neglect soft education like Music and Art (often replacing with Social Conformity Drills).
The problem is, we have people in far away cities, who don't have any real interest in the education of any student, making all sorts of Rules and Regulations (see Common Core) about not only how, but what kids ought to learn by when. All, often without any clue how long it takes to teach a room full of kids who just want to play.
We don't live in an industrial world, we shouldn't be treating our education system like a factory.
Unfortunately when the politicians and education bureaucrats realize this, they will mandate an equally stifling "soft education" regiment.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I visited my son's Kindergarten for a day last year. When it's cold or rainy, they have indoor recess, which was in the media room that day, sitting in the dark, asked to sit still and be quiet while they watched a vouple Curious George videos. OK, so a cartoon monkey is jumping around on a pogo stick trying to make a painting that way, making a huge mess, and 5 year olds watching are expected to sit still and be quiet? No talking, we don't want to start any social interaction either... Weird... It it any wonder that kids are being judged as more and more unruly when you change the rules to be impossible for them to succeed in?
This story was originally published in April in TheConversation: http://theconversation.com/kin...
Yes because an obsession with athletics led to what? An army of fat armchair football fans?
John Stuart Mill was taught ancient Greek by the age of three. By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laertius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato.
My kids are way behind!
I will admit two laments about modern education:
1) Too much homework for young kids (pre-K, K, etc.) Not that homework is a bad thing, but when a kid can't even read, "homework" is really "parent work".
2) Too many public school fundraisers. I thought this was all socialist schooling paid for at the point of a gun by taxes? If they expect me to pay for school, I'll send my kids to private school and move to some place that has lower taxes. I don't remember any of these crazy fundraisers when I was in school...
My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and over the last four years there's been a push to 'play based learning', presumably resulting from the same kind of research mentioned in the article.
By and large it seems fine, though it doesn't alleviate some of the problems they mention; specifically my wife still feels the pressure to move through the curriculum, but it's a little less clear how. Part of the 'learning through play' initiative also pushes heavily on 'self guided learning', and while all of this seems great, there's not a lot of guidance given on how to execute. I think most of us would agree that it's better if the student is interested & wants to learn the subject, but there's no real help about what to do if the student /isn't/ interested. Presumably the teacher just forces the kid to learn what has to be learned, but all the material provided leans heavily on instructing teachers not to do that.
At any rate, this is mostly just typical of governments adopting something and not thinking through how to implement fully. Still, the impression I get from my wife & her colleagues is that the ideas are good (play-based learning) but it'd have been nice if there was better instruction on how to follow through.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
Society is continuing to advance. Kids should have to learn more, because WE have learned more. 200 years ago they weren't being taught what we were being taught and 200 years before that the same thing. The problem is this antiquated notion that school should start at 7:45AM and end at 2-3PM with sports taking up until 7-8PM. Of course that 7 hours has to include lunch, breaks, gym, and anything else that isn't directly "education" related. Children have more history to learn, more science, more technoloy, and they have to be better thinker/problem solvers/etc. Perhaps I'm strange, but I just think that's a natural progression. What needs to happen, instead of cutting back on necessary education, is adding another hour or two to each day (especially to the older grade levels).
The solution to the problem is already known and long ignored in the USA.
Michael Moore documentary clip of on Finland's school system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Unless they just made that up for the film.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
>There's pressure on me and the kids to perform at a higher level academically
Because more results gets more funding.
Which is just asking for shit. Begging for shit. ANY sort of automated yield is. People game the system if you chain them to one. Leaning on metrics is often a flawed equivalence right away, and if not it will be soon, by those affected.
I could be way off, but I believe it's a result of just a few things taken too far.
1. Everyone expects schools to make their kid a genius. It's fine if all kids aren't necessarily gifted, as long as yours isn't the kid that's not. 2. In an effort to prove just how much kids are being taught, metrics are administered (usually in the form of tests). Teachers, needing to eat and stay housed, begin to sway their curriculum to ensure they get good results on these "metrics".
BAM, U.S. school system.
Education is about indoctrination, not about improving humanity. You don't want people to think, but to spout out the right responses to stimuli so that they can function well in the totalized bureaucracy we have created. Indoctrination is easier the earlier you get them...
There is an economic factor to requiring more and more college to just go out and work, and it has nothing to do with actual qualifications. It has to do with an attempt to avoid the reality that there aren't enough jobs for everyone by keeping the kids in college for 4-8 more years. Whole cohorts of the population that do not require employment - pushes the problem off for about one administration.
On sort of related but unrelated notes:
Whine-fests about the lack of STEM graduates are irrelevancies. There aren't huge caches of smarter people that haven't been mined. The population is what it is and education has little to do with it beyond what we would mostly call vocational training - learning the rote tasks required for one trade or another. Forcing more people through a STEM curriculum is great for devaluing what that actually means, rather than producing more trained people.
If we were interested in efficiency, we'd ask how to get the maximum benefit from the brains we have rather than bemoaning the lack of better ones. So the hacks that advocate H1B programs are just that, hacks.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Kindergarten in these United States is only half a day long.
Cranks up antique horned vinyl record player with patriotic music repeatedly warbling higher than lower in proper pitch for background while the announcer proclaims, "The United States rose to greatness during era of one teacher/many grade school houses..."
You can play all you want when you're underemployed making minimum wage.
Yes because an obsession with athletics led to what? An army of fat armchair football fans?
The only country in the world with less than 1% of its population considered fit for military service...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
They're there to get job training. Companies are tired of coddling your kids. They want workers to come out the door ready to go. They sure as hell aren't gonna pay to teach em...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Ah, American public education: Where young minds go to die, and old mistakes live forever.
When I was a kid in the early 1990's, things were a lot different than they are now. We didn't have uniforms. If we lived close enough to the school, we were allowed to walk, and very few people thought that this was unusual at the time. Recess came twice a day, first in the morning, then in the afternoon after lunch, each session lasting about 15 to 20 minutes depending on the day's schedule. We went outside and played.
The curriculum wasn't terribly sophisticated but it did its job. Both phonetic and whole-word reading were taught. (The former was later dropped, and you can always tell if someone in my town came before or after the change. The folks that came later have difficulty with unfamiliar words to this day.) The math was basic, but appropriate for our age level. In kindergarten in particular we spent a lot of time with arts and crafts, but art class was still a part of our routine up until middle school. Reading, writing, arithmetic, art, music... All in a not-particularly well off school system.
I was a precocious reader and advanced through math quicker than other students as well. I was offered advanced material from the next grade up. Other students who moved along quicker had this opportunity as well. You weren't expected to know second grade material in first grade, but if you did, more power to you. It worked pretty well at the time.
The more I learn about how schools function now the more glad I am that I grew up before the new millennium. Less and less time outside, higher and higher requirements, and for what? I've been in this town my whole life. I work in a setting where I meet new graduates constantly. They aren't getting smarter, I can tell you that much. What they're getting is meeker, fatter, and shockingly less literate. I'll just say it - they're getting dumber by the year with no bottom in sight. Things have not gotten better, they've gotten worse.
In our zeal to close gaps with the educational systems in the rest of the developed world we adopted a surface level approach to correcting the deficiencies of our own system, without addressing the underlying problems which more than ever before set our young people up for failure in school and beyond. We fooled ourselves into believing that if our schools resemble our idea of what a Japanese, Korean, or Chinese school looks like, then the problems will solve themselves. (Surely, our students will become fine young Asians in no time!) We fooled ourselves into thinking that throwing more money, more man-hours, and millions of dollars of computer equipment into dysfunctional schools would cause them to magically transform into bastions learning. None of this ever happened, and I think it's fair to say that we have never known less how to run a school and administer education. Everything we do, everything we try in schools is based on fantasies and assumptions, nearly always flawed assumptions, not on evidence or any kind of actual understanding of the students, their families, and their needs. Delusions have won the day.
Now they're trying to take summer away, so our students can spend even more time indoors, spend even more time not exploring the world around them, spend even more time consuming educational resources that the taxpayers provide, all for less than no benefit. Traditions are dying. Play is dying. Childhood is dying. Families care less than ever before whether or not their children perform well in school and most people have grown to resent the education system. Too many kids don't know where they'll sleep next, when they'll eat next, whether or not they'll get new clothes. As for the teachers, they're almost universally overworked and underpaid, and the constant changes - driven by the delusions of an utterly useless administrative class - have left the entire teaching profession in chaos. School itself is dying. We've never spent more on it, we've never committed more time to it, and we've never had less t
I have an incredibly advanced 2 year old toddler that is an absolute learning sponge, He already knows the English alphabet, can identify upper case as well as lower case numbers, count to 100 forward as well as backwards, identify 15 colors, properly name 12 different shape, point out 30 different animals and much more. He is an absolute chatterbox that knows hundred of words. Okay, self gloss over.
We enrolled him into a class that that was supposed to be for kids to eager to learn and develop skills for kindergarten. We pulled him out within 3 weeks after seeing what an unhealthy and growth stunting experience it was to be in "baby boot camp." The fully structured day centered around rote learning did more to hurt than help, We were told he was "behind" because he could not independently and unassisted put on his own shoes. Apparently he was forced to try for two hours and was deemed a "failure" because he needed a helping hand. He was also called "underdeveloped" because he could not memorize and repeat a set of vocabulary words. These were random words like "dream" that a kid could not identify or tie to anything specific. There is little free play and the kids are tied to "circle time" most of the day. We told the teachers it was useless if a kid could repeat words but not be able to use them in daily conversation. The final straw came when he was forced to sit in a chair by himself with food because he did not clean up within the allotted time in the rigid schedule. When my wife found out, she lost it on the teacher and told her to cram the lesson plan up her birth canal.
We have since enrolled him in another preschool where the kids get to be kids. He is learning organically by doing, seeing, and touching. The is some structure for activities but the kids are free to go with any number of choices. He gets to be social and has already made several friends. The pace of his learning has only picked up when he is allowed to explore and indulge in his curiosity. Most of all, he gets to run around and be happy. I agree with what others have said. Rigid and structured environments simply create kids that can pass tests and repeat what they are told. Many will end up functionally illiterate and unable to cope with real life. Other parents in our community agree as well.
That means next year he starts Kindergarten. I just assumed Kindergarten involved a lot of playing, not to mention time outdoors. I'm concerned as 4 isn't that much different than 5, and I can see that learning and play aren't entirely separate for him. Often, when he's learning well he's in the zone playing. It's how I think adults learn best. Little boys focus the most energy on learning whatever interests them the most, say, dinosaurs, monster trucks, and insects. Then they'll add something to the list, maybe drop something maybe not.
Some of my best learning opportunities came from play. I played in the woods and road my bike around town with friends (those big scary places that today's parents tell their kids to avoid). I had to fix my dad's computer after breaking stuff because I messed with IRQ settings to get my mouse and my sound working at the same time (and I had to do it before he got home from work and found out!). I played Axis and Allies, Risk, Chess, and other games that required thinking. I pieced together civilizations and learned how people react when playing Sim City and Civilization games. I tinkered with electronics. My parents let me build a fort. I planted seeds I found and watched them grow. I moved spiders to different parts of the yard, watched them build a web, then observed them eating mosquitoes.
This is where I learned the most. Play keeps learners engaged. Strictly academics is boring. I think society is too focused on maintaining the status quo and it is killing the fire of desire for learning that burns in the hearts of young children. Without play, and with an overemphasis on memorization (as opposed to experimentation) you make dull, lifeless people who lose the ability to be more than cogs in the machine of society.
Small children need more science and math. They should be learning calculus and quantum physics by the time they are 3 years old. Fuck this physical activity and life scenario play shit. Pump them with drugs and teach, teach, teach. They need to be more intelligent, so we can gloat to the rest of the free world.
If the rich want to make the world safe for capitalism, they can fight their own battles.
Well now that was a long time ago. One of the things I remember about high school was that the library was off limits unless you had a class that used it. Before school? Closed. Lunch? Closed librarian takes lunch same time. During class? I only ever had one class that used the library and that class only used it twice. After school? Closed.
So when are you supposed to use it?
As for kindergarten I just remember the neat little school play we did and all the toys that were always in varied states of missing. I vaguely remember having to recite a-z and 1-100 and getting punished for things other kids had done. I don't remember if we had a recess or not.
One more question. Would you think it ok if in the workplace today your boss said hey you know how bob broke the $5 lamp in the break room? Well because of that we are docking everyone a day's pay.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
We don't live in an industrial world, we shouldn't be treating our education system like a factory
If you like public education you'll love what Congress will do with socialized medicine. Remember, Pelosi's goal was to put insurance companies out of business:
“Well of course I wanted single-payer, and I wanted a public option. But that not being in the mix, uh, you have to prioritize what it is you want to get over the finish line.” - Nancy Pelosi
Put the kids out for proper two hours of play at the brightest time of the day and the eye glasses shopping parents will thank you in a couple of years. Also, more play, physical and social development.
Don't be silly. They'll introduce a military equivalent of the H1-B.
Hey, it worked for Rome. A bit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Younger kids have a harder time focusing, are more active, have a shorter attention span, and require smaller class sizes. If you can choose between 1 year of teaching a 5 year old, or a 19 year old, I'd choose the 19 year old. Shove the 5 year old outside frequently to burn off their energy, and stick inside with some educational TV program. The 19 year old has a large amount of socialization, and low income, to be made suitable for abuse by their lecturer.
Could this be a side effect of the "No Child Left Behind", that even though Bush signed was written by Ted Kennedy.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Seymour Papert, inventor of Logo, and an inspiration for Lego Mindstorms, had this simple theory of education - Children learn more by doing than by studying. A basis education is important, but free time is important, too.
If they let the kids go out and play, and while playing they get hurt, the school gets sued. It is easier and cheaper to keep the kids in a controlled environment.
Lots of great comments by slashdotters, many with children in the trenches. Educational policies will continue as is until you get rid of the Progressives. Unfortunately their death-grip on policy will be very difficult to break.
Don't be silly. They'll introduce a military equivalent of the H1-B.
Hey, it worked for Rome. A bit.
I've often wondered how single countries, such as Japan or Germany or UK managed to occupy such huge swathes of land and colonies given their population. Surely they can't have actually had their own national forces doing the occupation. So yeah they must have done some outsourcing!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
because in HS now, they don't do anything. A friend teaches at a underperformer school. No homework, name your grade, text, neck, whatever you want in class. So now kindegarden teaches and high school baby sits. Crazy world.
We built a rocket out of cardboard boxes in kindergarten. No reading, no writing, no cipherin'
I learned multiplication in kindergarten. I read The Hobbit before kindergarten.
Then I got into 1st grade, and every year after that I had to prove that I already knew the shit they were having me do. By the time I proved it, I had to prove the next thing on the list. And when I didn't cooperate because I knew that shit already and was getting ahead they drugged me to slow me down. No child allowed to exceed.
On the Wildness of Children
http://carolblack.org/on-the-w...
From the above essay:
--
At the turn of the twentieth century educational theorists were quite open about the fact that they were designing schools for the purpose of adapting children to the new industrial order. Children must shed their "savage" wildness, these pedagogues maintained, and develop "civilized" habits like punctuality, obedience, orderliness, and efficiency. As Ellwood P. Cubberley, Dean of the Stanford University School of Education, put it in 1898:
Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw materials -- children -- are to be shaped and fashioned into products... The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of 20th century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.
--
SK and Japan school their youth to hell, so that they can make cheap, excellent electronics and cars for America and some other places. I say hell because many of these people are then unable to have children themselves.
The economies and societies of these US vasalls is broken to the point of collapse in something like two decades.
Germany is not better, they (Merkel and her fellow elitists) try to replenish the ack of kids by importing Arabs.
While it was mentioned in a post from someone from Denmark, folks here in the US should look no further than their closest Waldorf school. My daughter, who is now 9, has been in either a Waldorf-influenced or Waldorf proper school since going to school when she was 3 and a half. I highly recommend it to everyone I meet. The heart of the early childhood school is play. There is no homework, which has been shown to be useless so early. Please, save our children, reintroduce play into their lives, they will thank you for it I assure you. See Why Waldorf at www.waldorfeducation.org, and it will explain everything. Trust me, our kids lives will be better the more Waldorf schools we have.
I've been teaching for 35 years here in Japan, and it is so bad here that the American Public School System is a shining light of progress!
Most local authorities have given up persuading/bullying/coersing children who refuse to come to school. It looks bad on the records, so if they are recognised as a 'refuser' they are marked as present, and they graduate anyway.
But you guys are running towards a cliff, no doubt about it.
The USA is where the most funding exists.
The USA has massive corporate welfare scheme which pays for risk taking (bankruptcy being a little known one.) This unnoticed part of the welfare system costs more than most other programs (S.S. and Medicare are never included in a fair minded analysis; those are directly funded separately; purposely isolated from everything else.)
The USA does not do much of anything today except higher end design work; where they still pay quite well globally and brings in people.
Massive research/education system the USA has is often overlooked because corporations successfully get credit for "innovations" that are largely the work of others. You might hear about some MIT invention because of their great PR but 5 years down the line when it ends up in some product you most likely do not make the connection (plus the company will patent their implementation of it.)
Finally, the USA used to have an education system which promoted free thinking and creative thinking. Today other nations use the research and past experience to improve their education systems while the USA models 3rd world failures in their system - if it were not for cultural and institutional momentum it would be so much worse. Part of this is ignorant ideology which drives both parties too much; the other is the GOP plan to purposely foobar public education (I've heard this from a top party official) so long term privatization can finally get enough public support (so this scheme is also ideological.) What amazes me is how arrogant they can think decades of failure can be made up for by our inherent superiority to the world. The rest the world progresses while we go backwards; in the end, every well run system will be very similar and "competing" within slim margins that are meaningless.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Damn, no Pink Floyd reference? You have already been stunted.
All of you! Fools!
And you don't even know it.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
If you can't afford private school you're lumped in with the rest of the 99%.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Aren't they supposed to be out getting JOBS, already? Being productive members of our Consumer Services Economy?