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.

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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.

Robert Epstein’s latest book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, was published earlier this month by Quill Driver Books.

In an April 3, 2007 Education Week article, Let’s , he explained that while writing the book, “he explored some ideas that go almost that far.”

“As a longtime professor and researcher, I got curious. Were our young people always required to attend school, and were their work opportunities always limited to babysitting, yard work, and cleaning the floors at fast-food joints? Were they always subject to so many restrictions? Are teenagers necessarily incompetent and irresponsible, as the media tell us? Is there really an immature “teenage brain” that holds them back? After all, past puberty, technically speaking we’re not really children anymore, and presumably through most of human history we bore our young when we were quite young ourselves. It occurred to me that young people must be capable of functioning as competent adults, or the human race quite probably would not exist.”

He investigates compulsory education in our country and how it came to be and he states that he arrived at some startling conclusions. Here are just a few of those:

Are young people really inherently incompetent and irresponsible? The research I conducted with my colleague Diane Dumas suggests that teenagers are as competent as adults across a wide range of adult abilities, and other research has long shown that they are actually superior to adults on tests of memory, intelligence, and perception. The assertion that teenagers have an “mmature” brain that necessarily causes turmoil is completely invalidated when we look at anthropological research from around the world. Anthropologists have identified more than 100 contemporary societies in which teenage turmoil is completely absent; most of these societies don’t even have terms for adolescence. Even more compelling, long-term anthropological studies initiated at Harvard in the 1980s show that teenage turmoil begins to appear in societies within a few years after those societies adopt Western schooling practices and are exposed to Western media. Finally, a wealth of data shows that when young people are given meaningful responsibility and meaningful contact with adults, they quickly rise to the challenge, and their “inner adult” emerges.A careful look at these issues yields startling conclusions: The social-emotional turmoil experienced by many young people in the United States is entirely a creation of modern culture. We produce such turmoil by infantilizing our young and isolating them from adults. Modern schooling and restrictions on youth labor are remnants of the Industrial Revolution that are no longer appropriate for today’s world; the exploitative factories are long gone, and we have the ability now to provide mass education on an individual basis.Teenagers are inherently highly capable young adults; to undo the damage we have done, we need to establish competency-based systems that give these young people opportunities and incentives to join the adult world as rapidly as possible.http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/04/04/31epstein.h26.html

In this day and time of Zero to Three programs that are said to assure that children are ready to learn, Universal Preschool and pressures from the Federal Department of Education via NCLB, I hope that The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every becomes a best seller.

Posted by Mary

Judy Aron over at Consent of the Governed (Feb. 22, 2007) has a good post up that explains why more institutional education at earlier ages is not the benefit for children that many assume it to be. She asserts

Studies are being skewed like mad to push this pre-k agenda, because there is HUGE money to be made. Quite frankly many are coming to the conclusion that it causes more harm than good for kids to be wrested from their homes earlier, or that it is causing young ones too much stress and makes them more aggressive, or that any gains made early on just dissipate later (the “fadeout effect”).

Judy answers “no” to the question that serves as the title to her blog post, Does Pre-Kindergarten Improve School Performance? Homeschoolers need to be aware of lowering school entrance ages because it affects when they begin to be seen as “outside the norm”. Additionally, this could increase proposals for changing regulations that govern homeschoolers state-by-state, requiring reporting or testing of our children at younger ages. And as taxpayers, why go along with programs that cost so much and do not have ultimate benefits for children? The evidence Judy links to even says there may be longer term disadvantages in terms of negative effects on children’s behavior.

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