The rat race of preschool applications to get the “best school” must be nothing short of exhausting.  Observing a two year old’s parents resorting to résumés and other slick tricks portraying their little ones as evolving Einsteins stresses me out.  The absurdity of a school “allowing” parents to write a huge check to attend seems ‘other world’ to me now.  Kids should be kids and babies should certainly be allowed to be babies.  It’s a shame our government doesn’t reject the pressure to institutionalize our little ones, instead promoting Zero to Five/Preschool for All programs. Parents need to count on their common sense to protect their child’s well being and uniqueness.

Rachel Figueroa-Levin posted in the Urban Baby Blog that her two year old will remain a two year old, not a model of the perfect student.

(more…)

While not specifically about homeschooling, an article by Brian Gresko, a stay-at-home dad and writer, explains his view that childhood is under attack by the very people who should be protecting it: parents. His article In Defense of Childhood: Let Kids Be Kids! explains:

Many of the most important skills are untestable — imagination, general optimism and lightness of heart, the capability to love another creature, to empathize and demonstrate compassion. These are things a child can’t bubble in on a Scantron sheet, and yet cultivating these attitudes matters more in determining how my son will exist in the world and what kind of contribution he’ll make with his time on Earth.

Read the entire article at the link above.

Not so fast: Home schooling trumps full-day kindergarten Jun. 18, 2009 The Globe and Mail Amira Elghawaby
Research shows home-schooled kids outperform their public-school peers. So why so is there little or no financial encouragement for parents to take it on?

Seated beside a mom with coiffed hair, polished nails and an elegant suit, I listened wide-eyed as audience members talked about a world I had totally misunderstood and stereotyped.

They talked about children who weren’t being challenged at school – one daughter came home crying, begging her mom to let her stay home and “teach” herself. Another parent described a school that just didn’t know what to do with her rambunctious boy, so she decided to take over. He excelled.

While I’m not so interested in governmental “financial encouragement” (strings are always involved), I’d rather ask, why is there little encouragement for homeschoolers from the official educational world? Home education means parental involvement is at its max, children are interested in learning….everything a teacher would want in their classroom. That is the point, right?

It works at home, so why the attempts to interfere, as in Graham Badman’s Report to the Secretary of State on the Review of Elective Home Education in England ?

Headcounts via compulsory national registration, along with vested interests monitoring and analyzing why families home educate seems oppressive. As Badman acknowledges “England is the most liberal in its approach to elective home education“, he’s doing everything in his power to change that with his recommendations.

His suggestion of a “statutory definition of what constitutes a “suitable” and “efficient” education” seems very limiting and unimaginative, at best. Following that recommendation with a demand for “the right of access to the home” and “the right to speak with each child alone if deemed appropriate ” would be formidable to one’s personal living space. (That space also serving as the safe place for families to land.)

In Elghawaby’s article, she asks a logical question about the Canadian government’s Early Learning Advisor wanting drastic governmental actions such as daycares moved into the schools for a “seamless day” . (By the way, what would sustain and improve an employee’s chances of staying in the government industry? Could it be more “Early Learning” programs funded by taxpayers? Just sayin’….) From The Globe and Mail:

In England, a three-year study concluded that home-schoolers achieved better results in both literacy and mathematics. Home-schooling movements are growing there, as well as in Germany, Japan and Switzerland.

So why isn’t any of this mentioned in Charles Pascal’s report on full-day kindergarten?

That question should be asked since there is a persistent drumbeat for birth to 5 year old programs by world leaders (and other interested proponents). If the agenda is for government oversight of babies and little ones prior to compulsory attendance ages, then families can start touting the glories of not starting academic training too early.

Much Too Early!
by David Elkind, Ph.D.

Although David Elkind is a professional educator rather than a “homeschooler,” his writing offers the wisdom of experience and research that can be of great benefit to any parents concerned about providing the right start for their children.

“Children must master the language of things before they master the language of words”
—Friedrich Froebel, Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, 1895

It works well when our little ones are nurtured by their families and other loved ones to live and learn. Those young ones have questions by the mile. They deserve the freedom to seek answers outside a classroom.

Lillian Jones’ thoughts ring true in her article: A Homeschool Curriculum for Preschool and Kindergarten

If you’ve been raising a child up to the age of “pre-school” or “kindergarten,” you’ve already begun homeschooling. In those early years, the most appropriate homeschooling activities are things that gently introduce a child into the wonders of his immediate world and the imagination. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge” – and those early years are the perfect time to provide an atmosphere where the child can freely dream and play and explore and grow in both body and imagination.

These are lots of things a parent can do to help a child develop a love of learning and searching – things that will carry through as a foundation for a life of joyful and successful learning. Most of these are things a parent does at one time or other anyway. A bonus is that your child will be getting a good foundation for later studies, even picking up some elements of reading, writing, and math!

If you read on in her article, her suggestions are educational and positive fun! As she concludes, childhood is short, fleeting, and so very important. Families can (and should be able to) do what works for their children’s learning needs. It should not be for a bureaucratic stranger’s satisfaction.

Hat tip to for the link to Diane Flynn Keith of UniversalPreschool.com

Protect Our Kids from Preschool, 22 August 2008, The Wall Street Journal

Our understanding of the effects of preschool is still very much in its infancy. But one inescapable conclusion from the existing research is that it is not for everyone. Kids with loving and attentive parents — the vast majority — might well be better off spending more time at home than away in their formative years. The last thing that public policy should do is spend vast new sums of taxpayer dollars to incentivize a premature separation between toddlers and parents.

On email lists, I’ve seen my share of messages from parents with younger children who want a ‘preschool program’ for the little ones. The schooling model is so well established in our way of viewing ‘how to raise children’ that parents feel that if they aren’t using a ‘program’ then they are frittering away precious learning time. This viewpoint is underlined by supporters of mandatory preschool. It’s as if some people won’t rest until each person’s life, from cradle to grave, supports some service industry that all the other persons are employed in: never do anything for yourself that other people can be paid for.

As it is, I think that the money proposed for mandatory preschool would be better spent on existing K – 12 schooling. Preschool as a part of the public education system …

• will divert funds from private preschools that already have a structure in place, but who then lose their customers to the ‘free’ programs
• will also divert funds from the rest of the public school system
• or will collect funding from taxpayers after taxes are raised to cover the additional cost of lowering the age of compulsory school attendance

There is no free lunch, and the mandatory preschool system will be paid for one way or the other unless, of course, all the teachers work for free, the construction firms and materials manufacturers donate all the buildings and materials, and cities absorb the costs of water, electricity, purchasing the land.

In the meantime, to ensure society doesn’t go to hell in a handbasket because the 3-year-olds missed out on mud pies (Ctrl+F to look for “mud pies”), parents can find ideas for a ‘preschool curriculum’ (otherwise known as ‘raising little kids’) in June Oberlander’s book, Slow and Steady, Get Me Ready.

‘While looking for something else’ I found an article about what used to be pre…schools (and that earlier were known as ‘nursery schools’) and are now called “preK.”  I think the change in wording from “pre[before]-school” to ”pre[before]-K[indergarten]” is significant, but I will leave that point alone this time, as I will the point about education as an industry.

Campaign Watch: Spotlight on Two Early Education Laggards, 3 June 2008, The Early Ed Watch Blog, New America Foundation

Today’s final Democratic presidential primaries have focused public and media attention on South Dakota and Montana, two largely rural western states that get the last vote in the 2008 primary season. Here’s something else these two states have in common: They’re both early education laggards

…

Debate over the measure illustrated that “culture wars” opposition to preschool, from conservatives who view it as a gateway to government intrusion in the family, is still alive and well in some states, particularly those that lag on early education.

The name-calling caught my interest – I don’t find anything neutral about ”laggards.”  I did a search for “New America Foundation” and found many items in my email alone.

• Charter Schools: An Important Partner Supporting Quality Pre-k, 2 April 2008
• Pre-K Advocates of a Certain Age, 25 March 2008
• Let’s Count: Boosting Math in PK-3, 18 March 2008
• Continuing the Investment, 19 November 2007

That last item, “Continuing the investment,” has some strong statements, so I pause here in listing the emails for “New America Foundation” – Google says I have “21 results stored on your computer.”

Advocates of universal pre-K are nothing if not visionary. They view universal pre-kindergarten as not just an end in itself but also a first step toward much more comprehensive public social welfare programs for preschool-age children and their families: prenatal care, parental leave, universal children’s health care, and quality child care. For these advocates, the case for universal pre-K is also the case for new state-level systems, policies, and institutions that would serve children from birth through preschool.

The universal pre-K movement isn’t just about offering another social service: Pre-K advocates are actually building a whole new system of public education, and that has implications for the existing K-12 public education system.

Put a “whole new system of public education” together with compulsory schooling laws, and add in the “vision” of the advocates of “universal pre-K.”  The picture I see is of parents delivering babies and children to wherever it is that the visionaries see the cadre of professional child-raisers bringing up the babies and children.  That place sure does not look like home.

The writer explains that contrary to conservative opinions, and despite conservatives ‘fretting’ about sending children to school at increasingly younger ages:

By working together to build high-quality pre-K programs, education reformers and pre-K advocates can also open the door for improvements in the elementary and secondary education system. 

This means that the schooling experiments on little kids can lead to better schools for bigger kids, so the people in South Dakota and Montana had best get with the program.  It doesn’t matter that these states have low numbers of citizens – Montana is #44 in population and South Dakota is #46 — and that the number of children not schooled as toddlers must also be low, everyone must participate.  

The tertiary system — colleges and universities  — isn’t neglected either. 

States must also build new systems of teacher preparation and professional development to help experienced preschool teachers who lack a bachelor’s degree meet new, higher education standards.

That reminds me of something a drill sergeant told us recruits, “There’s the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way.”  Apparently, the “experienced preschool teachers” are to learn the Educational Industry way.  Their vision is of people either as students or teachers, with the teachers teaching the students to be teachers.

I understand that the article is about schooling, but given the amount of time taken from the lives of people as they grow, do these visionaries see infants, babies, toddlers, children, teens, young adults, and adults doing anything other than living at school?

In Illinois, Kwame Raoul, Presidential candidate Senator Obama’s replacement as State Senator, has once again introduced a bill to lower the compulsory attendance age. Even as there is some controversy in Illinois as to whether this is a homeschooling issue to contend with, Senator Raoul’s bill to lower the compulsory attendance age 2 years ago was defeated by homeschoolers who did call their representatives. Even after it sailed out of the Rules Committee, passed through the Senate Education Committee and Senate and thankfully died in the House.

This current bill appears to have the appeasement amendments that were added to the last bill in hopes that it would pass. And it also includes a mandatory establishment of kindergarten in all Illinois school districts. Currently, kindergarten is not mandatory in Illinois public school districts, despite the understandably common misconception that it is. This is a concerted effort by various groups in following up with the Preschool for All initiatives trumpeted by Illinois Governor Blagojevich. Below is the synopsis of SB 541 :

Introduced 2/8/2007, by Sen. Kwame Raoul

SYNOPSIS AS INTRODUCED: Amends the School Code. Beginning with the
2007-2008 school year, lowers the compulsory school age from 7 years to 5 years; makes a related change. Beginning with the 2007-2008 school year, requires all school districts to establish kindergarten for the instruction of children who are 5 years of age or older. Adds any child attending a non-profit or for-profit child care center that provides kindergarten where children are taught the branches of education taught to children of corresponding age and grade in the public schools and where the instruction of the child in the branches of education is in the English language to the list of children who are not required to attend the public schools. Beginning with the 2007-2008 school year, provides for an exception to the compulsory school age provision for any child who has not reached the age of
7 years by September 1 and whose parent or guardian notifies the school district or school that he or she does not wish the child to attend school until the following school year because the child, in the opinion of the parent or guardian, is not mentally, physically, or emotionally prepared to attend school. Provides that in such cases, the child’s attendance may be delayed for one school year. Effective immediately.

In testifying at the Senate Education Committee, Senator Raoul said this in his last attempt: “I wish this bill was lowering the age to 3!” In his good intentions, he also leaves little to the imagination with the following quote, as he stated in the Chicago Sun-Times last year. (This article is in the archives.):

Ready or not? Should kids be in school at 5?: Kindergarten? Preschool? Parents wrestle with decision

Author: Maudlyne Ihejirika The Chicago Sun-Times Date: July 30, 2006

“The home-schooling lobby also fought the bill sponsored by state Sen. Kwame Raoul (D-Chicago). It squeaked out of the Senate but died in the House. A 2003 effort by state Rep. Mary Flowers (D-Chicago) saw a similar fate. “Logically, it doesn’t even make sense to talk about preschool for all if we don’t say you have to have your kids in kindergarten,” Raoul said.”

I’d like to pursue his and others’ thought process a little further observing the educational path of those who haven’t been served well by the public schools within the current compulsory attendance age range.

My kids and I took a field trip to Springfield in 2005 to observe our legislators in action. We didn’t hear anything at the House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee Hearing concerning Senator Raoul’s 1st bill SB 409 that day, but we saw many people filing in to the Capitol with t-shirts and banners for some type of rally. The t-shirts and banners displayed slogans about adult education and literacy.
How ironic that on the same day that a bill was to be heard in Committee making demands for more mandatory seat time for little children 2 years younger than the current requirement, Adult Education proponents were pursuing more funding with their rally. If the public schools were serving these very people well from kindergarten up to 17 years of age, then there wouldn’t be this tremendous need for adult education classes. There is no rationale for children’s sake, to increase compulsory attendance age mandates for younger or older ages. Perhaps too many times, and notwithstanding public school successes, compulsory attendance laws don’t assure an education but instead it only assures warm bodies in the well funded building. That visit inspired me to write a letter to the editor that was published in the Sun-Times along with a few other newspapers thanks to some help from a family advocate with a fax machine set to Media.

These legislative policies can certainly be lucrative for the education industry. How could someone so fresh into the Senate at the time, (six months), be able to ride this bill through the Senate into the House reducing the compulsory attendance age not just one year but 2 years? Maybe it was the same type of ride that increased the compulsory attendance age to 17 years January 1st of that year, (with little resistance from homeschoolers). One can only look at the number of sponsors added onto the 2005 bill to see there was a definite agenda in support of the freshman Senator’s actions. Despite the individual good intentions, the general picture is this is rationally not “about the kids”.

Senator Raoul and others ignored hundreds and hundreds of calls and requests to withdraw the previous bill, so it isn’t surprising now that Senator Raoul is back again with the same. One can only assume these were parents making these calls. And one can immediately see the regard given to these parents and constituents by legislators who rebuked them with the message that our representatives wish it was for 3 year olds instead of the proposed age of 5.

If you follow Senator Raoul’s hopes, it’s not surprising to see that the National Conference of State Legislatures includes a plan for Early Childhood via Zero to Three initiatives. (“From the time of conception to the first day of kindergarten“. What they describe is what I would call infancy through toddlerhood through not being able to climb bus steps without help, but that’s just me.)

Are proponents of these initiatives thinking that homeschoolers don’t need any of that? I would seriously wager that just the opposite is the case.

It appears that the current bill to change Illinois compulsory attendance age to 5 from 7 is in the Rules Committee at this time. It’d be great if it stopped there.

Posted by Susan

The push for more preschool continues in Virginia. Despite Virginia’s recently being named the state where a child has the best chance for success in life, those in political and education ranks used the publicity to lament the Commonwealth’s low score on preschool enrollment.

“It’s a timely reminder that we must ensure that more children have access to high-quality preschool,” Kathy Glazer, director of the Governor’s Working Group on Early Childhood Initiatives, said in an e-mail.

“Virginia has much to be proud of in terms of the excellence of its educational system,” Glazer wrote, “but the zero ranking we received on enrollment in preschool is a sobering reminder that we’re not tapping the full potential of early education.”

Emily Griffey, director of research and advocacy for Success by 6 at the Greater Richmond Chamber, agreed.

“Of course preparation for success in life begins with preparation for success in school,” she said. “We’d like to see increased access to preschool programs, both public and private, and even before preschool it’s important that all parents understand their role as their child’s first teacher.”

That’s from the Jan. 4, 2007 Richmond Times Dispatch article Virginia Best for Child’s Chance for Success by Lindsay Kastner. I guess it doesn’t occur to anyone that some of the other factors that contributed to the state’s high scores allow many parents to choose private pre-schools or to provide high quality care for their own children in their own homes. In fact, what if the “zero” score on the preschool enrollment number — in the midst of a study about how successful the state’s children are compared to every other state in the nation — is actually an indicator of how not going to preschool benefits Virginia’s children? Maybe the low enrollment in preschool is in fact a REASON for Virginia’s high employment rate, relatively high rate of family income, and high percentage of post-secondary degrees. Perhaps all those children nurtured at home during their early years have gone on to do well creating jobs, working, and getting college degrees. No one knows and there is no way to know, but policy continues to be proposed based on the assumption that people believe more preschool is better for all children.

The Universal Preschool website has some excellent information about this issue and why it is important for homeschoolers and at-home parents to monitor public policy that is proposed for preschools.

Meanwhile, Examiner.com says this about the politics of Virginia’s preschool proposals:

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine’s administration is finally admitting the real reason he wants his taxpayer-financed preschool proposal to be universal ” and it has nothing to do with children.

“Public programs for just at-risk students don’t have the broader constituency of support as one that includes all children,” Secretary of Education Tom Morris told a Charlottesville public forum last month.

In other words, it’s all about the politics: The more you expand a program, the more support it will generate .” even though it will cost taxpayers a lot more.

The article goes on to note that there are studies that have shown how preschool is beneficial to a small segment of especially disadvantaged children, but that the same benefits have not been found to exist for other children.

Still, the Jan. 17, 2007 Examiner.com article Universal Preschool More about Politics than Education by Chris Braunlich explains, preschool-for-all continues to be advocated:

. . . the pilot (program) simply assumes that universal preschool is desperately needed by everyone.

Why should homeschoolers care? Well, the amount of tax dollars that preschool-for-all would require is breathtaking. But more than that, acceptance of the concept that children must be universally placed in institutions during their tender years further undermines the understanding that children are well-nurtured within their homes and families. Keeping children at home, living and learning in a family, when society is placing the rest of its children in institutions, will take homeschoolers further out of the mainstream (okay by me) and possibly subject to more scrutiny and proposed regulations (not okay by me).

Finally, it’s a vast experiment with our country’s children. In Virginia, if we give credence to the recent study, we can believe that children are likely to do better than children in any other state in the country, despite the fact that Virginia was awarded a “zero” for its rate of preschool enrollment. But it sounds like the state’s policy-makers are willing to risk this status, proposing vast changes in how early-years children are nurtured, even though, as Examiner.com says, “. . .there’s never been a study of Virginia’s current preschool program to determine whether it’s actually accomplishing what it’s supposed to do.”

by Jeanne Faulconer

The article I read over my oatmeal this morning was titled, “Pre-K is gaining favor.” The headline (above the fold in the “Local” section, and in large, all-caps font) really took the shine off my brown-sugared breakfast. As is usual with writing short missives (150-word limit for our paper), which of course I did, it took a long time, and I included links for the newspaper editor to check, to buttress my point of view. It’s now supper time and I’m finally getting off the computer.

• Kansas City Star, Kansas City, Missouri, 15 June 2006, Pre-K is gaining favor

  They dont have the self-control to wait in line or take turns, and dont get on well with other children. Although its just kindergarten, theres evidence that children who are behind before they get to school tend to spend a lifetime lagging.

  Now a potential solution is gaining traction across the country. Its known as universal pre-kindergarten. The idea is to provide high-quality preschool, free, for every 4- and possibly 3-year-old, with the goal of getting the children better prepared for formal schooling.

Note the change in terminology concerning the schooling of young children. No longer does the newspaper speak of “pre … school,” now the terminology is “Pre … K.” With school being integral to the enterprise, continuing to call the children’s time in the institution pre “school” would be a misnomer. But including the “pre” prefix, links the two in the public mind, and the switch will be made from calling the schooling of little children “preschool” to calling it “pre-kay,” just as “preschool” replaced “nursery school” in our national speech.

Preschool isn’t something that homeschoolers usually concern themselves about. Often, our children are past the ‘before school’ age, and so the decisions made for that age group no longer affect us. But just as the work done by pioneering homeschoolers benefits contemporary homeschoolers now, our support for the social expectation that young children stay home will benefit those who follow us — our very own grandchildren perhaps.

The legislation for compulsory attendance followed the development of children attending schools. As more and more young children attend preschools, the mind-set seems to be developing that all young children should attend preschools. For homeschooling families this would make the age-of-compliance lower than it is today.

What is voluntary today may become compulsory tomorrow.

• Stateline.org, Pew Charitable Trusts, 16 November 2005, Preschool gets record boost in ’05

  At least 180,000 more children have access to preschool this year after lawmakers in 26 states boosted pre-K funding by $600 million during 2005 legislative sessions, the largest single-year increase for preschools in five years, according to a report issued Nov. 16 by Pre-K Now, a national advocacy group that supports universal access to preschool.

The ‘religious’ cast to education (meaning education-as-a-religion, not the focus of one religion on education) continues its downward march toward birth* (and beyond?). The recognition that it is better for parents to actively live with their children and guide the development of their life skills from an early age, as contrasted perhaps with tying them to a tree so they can’t wander off, achieved formal recognition through the work of people such as Maria Montessori, Johann Pestalozzi, and Friedrich Froebel. Since then schooling of young children had turned into a long rite-of-passage akin to the long-slog schooling of older children, teens and young adults. Catechism classes never lasted this long.

As for education being a religion in an of itself, a quick internet search for "education-as-religion" (Results 1 – 10 of about 63) brought up a link to the book, The Case Against College, written in 1975. The author is credited with writing, ""The liberal arts are a religion, the established religion of the ruling class. The exalted language, the universalistic setting, the ultimate value, the inability to define, the appeal to personal witness … these are all familiar modes of religious discourse."

It’s not just me.

But, that was 30 years ago when college was the focus. Now the ‘age of first communion’ for more and more small children has dropped to three.

• Cato Institute, Casey J. Lartigue, Jr., 17 May 2002 Does More Schooling Equal Better Results?

  Is compulsory education really necessary for D.C. preschool children? Raising that point can get you labeled "anti-education." But now is the time to ask such a question because D.C. city councilman Kevin Chavous wants the District to lower the compulsory school attendance age from 5 to 3.

The belief in preschool isn’t limited to ‘the educational priesthood’ and the econocrats in government, but it is also embraced by the laity in general, and homeschooling laity as well. Another online search for "homeschooling preschool" brought up the first page of, "Results 1 – 10 of about 1,200,000," and that leaves me cold. Granted, I think that ‘preschool-at-home’ is preferable to ‘preschool somewhere else’ but the weight of the concept bows my shoulders. Now the ‘school process’ will take another two to three years off the lower end of the halcyon days of childhood. Imagine, two years of preschool, thirteen years of K-12, four years undergrad, and perhaps two for masters. 2 + 13 + 4 + 2 = 21 Twenty-one years of ‘being schooled.’ I don’t even want to add on time for a PhD.

I don’t have a specific point, here, only an amorphous sense of unease that we’re losing more than we’re gaining. I look in the 1950s-era Childcraft and Book Trails volumes in my bookshelves and I wonder what the early childhood inspiration for future artists and writers will be, given that our dominant social religion, education, has taken long periods of reflective time away from children. I think about who will write the next classics for children along the lines of The Wind in the Willows, stories about Winnie the Pooh, Mary Poppins, The Borrowers, Pippi Longstocking, the Edward Eager books, Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series, and my favorite Beverly Cleary book, Ellen Tebbits. I look in the bookstores for books for my grandchildren, and sigh. The old books are great, and I’m happy that they’re mostly still in print, but, Potter aside (a series that takes place in a school), where are the new classics? Has the education-religion (in tandem with our instant electronic gratification) made gentle imaginative literary adventures as foreign-to-the-faithful as homeschooling?

* Article seen on email list after posting this entry:

• BBC News, 9 November 2005, Mixed response to toddler plans

  Under the Childcare Bill, childminders would teach the curriculum to children "from birth" – with some worrying that it might be too prescriptive.

  The National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations called the proposals "bizarre".

  But the children’s charity I Can said there was clear evidence youngsters’ communication needs were not being met.

  Parents’ associations spokeswoman Margaret Morrissey said: "We are now in danger of taking away children’s childhood when they leave the maternity ward.