“Preschool-age students”

Usually, school district releases don’t get any airplay here.  The articles appeal only to a limited audience, and that audience usually doesn’t homeschool.  But, a sentence in this article that caught Google’s cyber-eye provoked a need to squeak.

• The Call, Woonsocket, Rhode Island, 6 July 2006, Two potential candidates drop council bids for School Committee    

  The school department also eliminated its home-based school preparation program for preschool-age students, she noted.

“Preschool-age students.”  What a chilling description.

There are so many inferences wrapped up in those words, and no, I don’t mean implications, although they’re there, too.  The inferences are what the adults viewing the “students” made after they looked at them.  It appears the adults looked at ’children,’ but concluded, ‘school widgets.’

Apparently these adults who make policy, and others who report on it, did not see ‘children.’  They did not see little kids.  They did not see summer days with kiddos making mud-pies, or consider little ones having water-in-the-teapot tea parties with dolls, or imagine small children riding tricycles in circles in the driveway, or listen to shouts and squeals coming from slippery babies in a wading pool.  The adults concerned looked at threes and fours and distilled them into ”preschool-age students.”  

From this description, they didn’t see the children as they are, but only as what they appear to be when measured with straight backs against the yardstick of school, and that seems to be a viewpoint as dry as chalk dust.  The slippery babies don’t grow up to hunt fireflies, or spy fledglings in a nest, or battle a March zephyr with a paper kite.  In this view, “preschool-age students” are prepared to be ”school-age students” who, I suppose, will become “junior high students,” then “high school students,” then “college students,” then “employees.” Homogeni-sapians.

No, it’s not a big deal, hardly even blogworthy and using up as much time in finding the words as does ’something important.’  Still, someone, somewhere, has to notice and say something.

This entry was posted on July 18, 2006 at 3:14 pm and is filed under News-Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.