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Education

Preschool Is Not A Panacea

President Obama wants to expand pre-K nationally. Erika Christakis says it's not necessarily a good idea. In this photo, children run along a hallway illuminated by ultraviolet lamps at the Blue School in New York. The private preschool and elementary school was founded by original members of the Blue Man Group so they could send their own children to a school that was creative enough for them. (Mark Lennihan/AP)

Why should we expand subsidized preschool when children from Finland don’t start school until age 7 and yet exceed their American peers on international achievement tests?

As an early childhood educator, it’s a puzzle I’m frequently asked to explain. How can preschool be so essential for some children and unnecessary for others?

The answer is simple but we don’t talk about it for fear of causing offense or stating the obvious: a young child’s environment is her first and only teacher.

There is no prescribed curriculum of facts and skills that small children need to cover by a certain age if they are to succeed later in school.

Of course, we all grudgingly acknowledge in some abstract way that the young child’s environment — parental love and stability, material comfort, cognitive stimulation, and so on — is a key predictor of healthy development. But I’m going to go a step further and say for a 3- or 4-year-old child, it is the only educational curriculum that matters.

Unfortunately, the ersatz curriculum we’re so obsessed with these days — the dull, isolated, uni-dimensional skills and “outcomes” we compulsively track on check lists — is just a proxy (and a bad one) for the “real” early childhood curriculum: the playful environment that supports higher order cognitive and emotional development such as hands-on exploration, emotional connection, curiosity, inquiry, imagination, complex language structure and vocabulary, problem-solving, and self-regulation.

And that curriculum can be found anywhere. The authentic early childhood curriculum isn’t necessarily contained in the word we reflexively call “preschool.” It doesn’t need to be in a school at all. You can find it under a moss covered tree stump in the woods, or in a parent’s arms. On a noisy playground, or hiding behind a book in the library.

Once we accept that the environment is the curriculum, we can begin to understand how Finns still manage to outpace American students on virtually every academic achievement test. Because they have avoided the narrowly defined curriculum rabbit hole that we’ve hurled ourselves down headfirst in the last decade, they are winning and we are losing.

It’s high time we faced the fact that there is no prescribed curriculum of facts and skills that small children need to cover by a certain age if they are to succeed later in school. The fixed belief that such a pedagogy exists and is necessary for children to master by, say, the end of kindergarten fuels our current American “standards” fetish for narrowly defined measures of success, such as the ability to recognize a certain number of words or vowel digraphs by a particular date in the school calendar.

In this photo, a pre-K student plays grocery store. The author says this kind of pretend play requires more cognitive complexity than learning isolated skills. (Erika Christakis)

In this photo, a pre-K student plays grocery store. The author says this kind of pretend play requires more cognitive complexity than learning isolated skills. (Erika Christakis)

This is dangerous nonsense that obscures the real learning we see in the photo to the right of a child carefully creating a pretend grocery store: number sense, spatial reasoning, motor control, letter-sound and print awareness, as well as the ability to categorize, plan, cultivate imagination, involve peers, take turns, express generosity, and experience joy.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting isolated academic skills don’t need to be mastered. Only that there is no reason — no reason at all — that we should think they need to be accomplished within a certain time frame or within a certain educational format. All typically developing kids (and most atypically developing kids too) can eventually learn to read. By age 9 or 10, you can’t tell who started to read at 4 vs. 7 — but you can tell immediately who lacked a rich developmental education.

Our love affair with the early mastery of lower-level skills disconnected from real life context is terribly misguided. And that’s why I’m both thrilled and worried about expanding our publicly funded pre-K programs within the public school infrastructure. Expanded preschool access holds promise to level the playing field and close ability gaps for millions of disadvantaged kids, but only if we are more honest with ourselves about where we can find curriculum that supports the young child. Regrettably, it’s not always at school.

Related:

Tags: Barack Obama, Environment, Family

The views and opinions expressed in this piece are solely those of the writer and do not in any way reflect the views of WBUR management or its employees.

Education
  • Barb G.

    There is only one thing I am missing in your article and that is the focus on socialization. Not having grown up in the US, I was terribly annoyed by preschool of my children, since everything was just centered around numbers, letter, shapes and colors, something a kid would learn in a day two or three years later anyway. What children need to learn at the early ages is to be with others and how that works, how to be in the world without having every movement and thought funneled into one small direction. Maybe this is one of the reasons I notice that the children I visit in Europe are often socially mature, self confident and independent. I think there is nothing wrong with sending kids to a place a few hours a day to be with other kids, but it should not have any academic curriculum, but play, because that is how children learn. There are many things broken in education here and it appears to dig further into the hole – a big change in attitude and approaches is needed.

  • Becky

    Thank you so much for this article – it validates what I have instinctively felt from the moment I became a parent. Maybe it was instinct because I am a Finn. I did send my children to private preschool, mainly for the purpose of socializing with other children.

  • Brooks

    Yes, but preschool can offer the wonderful creative enriching environment of imaginative play with peers.

  • mom

    I am afraid that author is misleading readers. Finland is not very good example. Childcare in Finland is heavily subsidized. 97% of 6 y.o. in Finland attend high -quality and publicly funded childcare centers. More public subsidies extend even to much earlier child care.

  • md

    I have two teenagers. Thirteen years ago when I was
    considering which pre-school to send my children to, and was looking for
    guidance on what exactly I wanted of a preschool, I did some research on the
    matter. I wanted to know what constituted a good school from a pedagogical
    standpoint. In addition, I have a child with a developmental and learning disability,
    so I had some specific concerns…this was 13 years ago, but the only literature on
    the matter—actual longitudinal studies–was on head-start programs. The
    literature on the head start programs indicated that the best early education
    programs were those that best simulated a warm, inclusive family environment, and
    from what I could gather, there was no doubt that head start helped
    disadvantaged kids because those kids were unlikely to get the nurturing, etc.,
    at home. In addition, I came across literature that cautioned too much results-oriented
    education too soon had a really deleterious result on cognitive development …hmmm,
    that made me think…

    I also learned a couple of other things about elementary
    education in general… First of all, know your child (and if you have a child
    with a learning disability, the sooner you have this diagnosed, the better.) There are various schools of thought
    concerning the teaching of any subject. For examples: In math there are
    programs that are primarily problem solving with manipulative and programs that
    are primarily problem solving on paper. In reading there are programs that
    focus on learning phonics before learning to read, programs that focus on
    learning the rules while learning to read, and programs that focus on just learning
    to read and letting the rules come later. Each school of thought has produced
    excellent mathematicians, readers, and spellers. Realize that there is no
    perfect school with a perfect curriculum. What works with one child won’t
    necessarily work with another…but the best schools mold the curriculum to the
    child, not the child to the curriculum.

    Now that I am a single parent, I view the discussion
    somewhat differently. Early childhood education is childcare, and if it’s
    state-subsidized, then its free childcare…

  • http://www.facebook.com/emily.antul Emily Barrett Antul

    We need to allow parents to be at home to raise their children and not see the stay-at-homes as “unemployed”. This would mean restructuring salary scales so they actually can support a family without requiring a second income earner.

  • Lauren

    I agree with much of what is said here, especially the idea that “a young child’s environment is her first and only teacher.” As a parent, I feel that my husband and I — not their classroom teachers — are the ones responsible for exposing our children to “the “real” early childhood curriculum” about which you write: “hands-on exploration, emotional connection, curiosity, inquiry, imagination, complex language structure and vocabulary, problem-solving, and self-regulation.” All of these things are vital to a child’s growth and development.

    As a teacher, however, I understand the fact that far too many children do not have homes that can provide such supportive, learning-conducive environments. I think this is the reason behind the push for more early childhood education. Yes, children should be developing these skills first and foremost at home, but the reality is, many of them are not. And while it is also true that this kind of curriculum “can be found anywhere,” (“under a moss covered tree stump in the woods, or in a parent’s arms. On a noisy playground, or hiding behind a book in the library,”) too many children do not have access to those things. How many parents out there can never take their children out to play because they have no place to go, or worse, fear for their safety? I agree that there is oftentimes too much emphasis on the academics when it comes to preschool, but children deserve a warm, supportive, safe environment in which they can play, explore, and interact with others.

    The question, then — and it’s a obviously a big one — is whether we attempt to provide that environment for kids in the form of expanded preschool. I’m not necessarily in favor of making pre-K programs part of public schooling across the board, but I do believe that such programs could stand to benefit a large number of disadvantaged children. This would need to be done the right way, of course, with more, quality early childhood educators able to provide the ideal educational environment, not just a room of babysitters. Obviously, there are also many social issues at play here that are equally worthy of attention and improvement to ensure that parents can actually be there for their children in the way we so desperately need them to be. Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed provides a good analysis of that, and I agree with Barb and Emily’s comments below, too.

    As with so many things in education, there is no easy, all-encompassing answer. At the end of the day, educated children will grow to be educated parents, who will then be better teachers to their own kids as a result.

  • Lindsay

    I think you are arguing in large part against strict curricula and a “teaching to the test” mentality, and I think you’re right. Your whole argument about what young children do and don’t need is right on. But your larger conclusion that preschool may not be helpful is not supported. Finland has an extremely low poverty rate and few immigrants. America doesn’t. In America, poor parents or those who don’t speak English are at an enormous disadvantage to provide their children the attentive, enriching environment and basic language learning that really are important at preschool age. Try taking your kid out to see moss under a tree or even sit on the couch and laugh together over a book if you’re a single parent, live in a degraded urban environment and work two or three jobs. That’s who most urgently needs preschool. And anyway, they have preschool in Finland and it’s widely used — it’s just called “kindergarten,” and attendance is not mandatory, but is heavily publicly subsidized and is a legal universal right for all children.

  • Paul T

    Take a look outside of any residential area in almost all of the united states. Are there any kids running around playing, socializing or interacting? better yet do you see any parents walking around? Sadly there is a eery silence on our streets. The kids are home playing video games or watching tv. The exhausted parents are busy cooking something, cleaning, washing clothes, paying a few bills, making sure their kids are ready for another day. That wonderful Finnish culture will never take hold here as long as our obsession with working hard and long parents and maximizing productivity continues. We don’t make time for our kids because we don’t have time. For millions of families across this nation this is a reality that is repeated over and over again. Both parents must work to earn a living and raising a family is a much harder adventure than it may be in Scandinavia. So I do see the wisdom in what the president is proposing. It is not about the kids knowing calculus at grade 2 or some strict adherence to curriculum. It is about the kids minds being ready for calculus when the time comes.

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