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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.
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.
I didn't get glasses until I was 30. I was told that I should have had them as a child, but I didn't know any better. Sure you turned out fine, but what if things were different? Could you have been better, more creative if you had more time to play? Or maybe the schooling you did have made you more focused? We will never know.
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.
I used to regularly walk home despite living 7 miles from school, usually after clubs and such.
The real problem is that too much time of the kids' day is structured and rote, which means that when they eventually reach college or post-school they're not going to be able to handle unstructured time well. Recess was more than just a time to mess around on the playground or shoot hoops, it was a time to learn how to deal with peers in a neutral environment. A child who can help form teams for a pickup game and keep everyone playing by the same rules is learning much more about leadership and diplomacy than any lesson in the classroom can effectively teach.
Granted, we shouldn't entirely dispose of more traditional learning techniques (understanding math takes quite a bit of rote memorization and repetition), but children need to learn more peer-driven social lessons. I used to work for a charter school system that operated on a system close to the article's setup, and while it worked to get the kids accepted into colleges (which was more or less the only goal), it rarely kept them there.
...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.
Oh, please. The whole "you cant leave your kids alone for 2 seconds" thing was well and firmly in place by the 90's. It was in the 80s when everyone started wetting the bed about kidnappings and child safety. By 1990 that part of the culture was exactly the same as now. What's changed is Tigermomism now translating into no free time for kids at all and all their free time now being consumed by structured activities which no adult would put up with for 5 minutes. If someone made me play soccer after work, learn an instrument, learn chess, and do random volunteering on the weekend too I would do physical harm to that person, but then I'm 30 and get a choice.
We don't let kids be kids and all because we forget that humans have piss poor retention anyway and the dumb kid wont remember even half the nonsense you are trying to cram into his head when he grows up.
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.
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.
I was in grade school in the late 60s and had at least one 20+ minute recess all the way up through 6th grade. I remember having two recesses a day (morning and afternoon) in the early grades and being disappointed that there was only one recess in the later grades. I also remember in kindergarten we put mats on the floor and took a nap every day. There are many millions of people who are my age and who experienced the same things and grew up to be great leaders, engineers, scientists, etc.
The irony of today's situation is we are pushing kids harder and harder, younger and younger, based on the belief that this is necessary to 'compete with the rest of the world', and yet, we are producing far more functionally illiterate high school students than back in the bad old days when things were more relaxed.
I see you don't recognize that they're talking about kindergartners.
None of this is good for 5 yr olds.
But you probably have no idea about that.
I feel a little bit better about the future of our great country today
Only because you're fucking ignorant of childhood development.
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?
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
What gave us the edge in the past was more than academics. It was the creativity and willingness to take risks. Those are things that are learned when kids are allowed to be kids. They need recess and play time to learn social skills, learn leadership, learn problem solving, learn independence and learn to take risks. Pushing academics too soon and regimenting their day too soon destroys the qualities that made this country a leader in innovation.
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
But ... but then not everyone would be a winner!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My 5 year old was coming home from Kindergarten with an hour of homework more than three days a week.
http://www.edutopia.org/no-proven-benefits
"It may surprise you, as it did me, to learn that no study has ever demonstrated any academic benefit to assigning homework before children are in high school."
There have been many studies that prove that homework not only does not help the young, but can harm them.
Also, this lovely chestnut that happened to my normal 5 year old boy. No recess... AT ALL.
Why you may ask?
We asked the teacher. The twenty something childless lady told us that our 5 year old son had trouble sitting still and filling out his math and sight word work sheets. So to 'help' she decided that the best course to deal with a fidgety 5 year old boy was to keep him in class during recess every day and have him sit quietly at his desk.
Really, you remove all chance of physical activity and wonder why a small child can't sit still?
We asked if it helped.... She said his 'restlessness' was getting worse and wondered if we needed to enroll him in special education... Really?
We took him out of that nightmare and enrolled him in an 'IDEA' school. You can read up on it but basically, as far as we can tell, it is simply the same kind of school I went to in the 80's.. No more problems, good grades, and 3 recess times a day and gym every other. Minimal 10 min home work once a week and most is the same type I had; Name you family members, ask what grandpa did/does for work, read a simple book with a parent, etc.
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindergarten
"A kindergarten from German, which means literally "garden for the children"[1]) is a preschool educational approach traditionally based on playing, singing, practical activities such as drawing, and social interaction as part of the transition from home to school."
NOTE: "transition from home to school"
Kindergarten, when I went to school, was mostly about lining up for recess, sharing toys, and learning colors and the names of the letters.
Some counting perhaps. But mostly just how to get along, raise your hand if you need to ask something, and wash your own hands after using the bathroom.
That was the entire idea from the start.
My child came home with and hour of math worksheets and sight words (not phonics, but rote memorization). Children in his class had trouble sharing, playing nice, working in teams, and being good losers... Because they are no longer allowed to do what Kindergarten was intended for in the first place. To learn all the basic social norms needed to actually be ready to be a student. He was hating going to school... AT 5 YEARS OLD!
He is now doing great at the new school.
Is it such a wonder that letting small kids play helps them to behave and learn how to get along with others? Is it strange that a 5 year old will resist busy work?
We need to go back to proper early childhood teaching and allow our children to be children.
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.
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 was in Kkindergarten in the 60s. Half day only. First grade was the real start of normal school, and kindergarten was the get-ready-for-school program really. We did a little bit of learning the alphabet and basic counting, but nothing like what was described. We turned out ok.
Today though I think we have too many panicked parents. Their child *must* succeed, *must* get into the best schools, and so forth. Every hour of the child's life is now scheduled. Plus too many panicked school officials and watchdogs. Test scores *must* go up, parent complaints *must* go down. There's a drive to keep the students on a very narrow curriculum, teach what's on the test (even though it may hurt later college entrance when there's nothing to put on the application except SAT scores).
It was in the 80s when everyone started wetting the bed about kidnappings and child safety.
It was much more than that. The 1980s were also the time of Satanic Ritual Abuse when the nightly news reports were filled with stories of thousands or even millions of children being tortured and murdered. Thousands were accused, and hundreds of people were prosecuted for these crimes.
Of course, the number of known victims was later revised down to zero, but there was no way to know that at the time, unless you actually considered the lack of any actual evidence, but you don't get votes and ratings by pleading with people to stop and think in the middle of a moral panic.
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.
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.
What part of the world you were in? Where I was we had a 45 minute class, followed by a 15 minute break, and after the 3rd and the 6th class (if there were more than 6) the break was doubled to 30 minutes. At most we had 8 classes of 45 minute each a day. And about 2 to 4 hours of homework, depending on how good you were at it, or how many essays, analysis, retellings, etc you had to write. Also sometime we were asked to read the next chapter from the textbook, so the teacher can actually give us entertaining and memorable facts in class, rather than regurgitate what was written.
I couldn't read at all when I went into the first grade. By the end of second grade, I was reading 5 books per week. Forcing little kids into academics in kindergarten serves no purpose.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
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:
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