Defending the Early Years is an organization of professionals who have devoted themselves to early childhood education. DEY has just published a new report by Lillian G. Katz, Professor Emerita of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois, called Lively Minds: Distinctions Between Academic Versus Intellectual Goals for Young Children.
This comes from DEY’s website:
Dr. Katz argues that the common sense notion that “earlier is better” is not supported by longitudinal studies of the effects of different kinds of preschool curriculum models. Furthermore, her report maintains that a narrow academic curriculum does not recognize the innate inquisitiveness of young children and ultimately fails to address the way they learn.
“Young children enter the classroom with lively minds–with innate intellectual dispositions toward making sense of their own experience, toward reasoning, predicting, analyzing, questioning and learning,” says Dr. Katz.
“But in our attempt to quantify and verify children’s learning, we impose premature formal instruction on kids at the expense of cultivating their true intellectual capabilities – and ultimately their optimal learning.”
While the report concludes that an appropriate curriculum for young children is one that focuses on supporting children’s in-born intellectual dispositions, some basic academic instruction in early years is needed. “Academic skills become necessary for students to understand and report on their own authentic investigations,” explains Katz. “These skills can then serve as a means to the greater end of fostering and advancing children’s intellectual capabilities.”
The report begins:
The extent to which academic instruction should be a major goal of the curriculum for preschool and kindergarten children is a constant topic of debate among the many parties concerned with early childhood education. The introduction of local, state and national standards has exacerbated the complexities involved in resolving these issues. I am suggesting that perhaps one approach to resolving some of the dissention concerning curriculum focus in the early years and about the potential risks of premature formal academic instruction is to examine the distinctions between academic and intellectual goals – perhaps during all the years of education.
Some participants in these debates assume that we confront a choice between a traditional preschool curriculum that emphasizes spontaneous play plus many simple activities, (e.g. creating objects with clay, building with blocks, listening to amusing stories, and other pleasant experiences) versus introducing and emphasizing formal instruction on basic academic skills and knowledge (e.g. the alphabet, days of the week, names of the months, the calendar, counting, etc.).
The main argument presented here is that the traditional debates in the field about whether to emphasize so-called free play or formal beginning academic instruction are not the only two options for the early childhood curriculum. Certainly some proportions of time can be given to both of those kinds of curriculum components. But in the early years, another major component of education – (indeed for all age groups) must be to provide a wide range of experiences, opportunities, resources and contexts that will provoke, stimulate, and support children’s innate intellectual dispositions.
ACADEMIC GOALS. Academic goals are those concerned with the mastery of small discrete elements of disembodied information, usually related to pre-literacy skills in the early years, and practiced in drills, worksheets, and other kinds of exercises designed to prepare children for the next levels of literacy and numeracy learning. The items learned and practiced have correct answers, rely heavily on memorization, the application of formulae versus understanding, and consist largely of giving the teacher the correct answers that the children know she awaits. Although one of the traditional meanings of the term academic is “of little practical value,” these bits of information are essential components of reading, writing, and other academic competencies useful in modern developed economies, and certainly in the later school years. In other words, I suggest that the issue here is not whether academic skills matter; rather it is about both when they matter and what proportion of the curriculum they warrant, especially during the early years.
INTELLECTUAL GOALS. Intellectual goals and their related activities, on the other hand, are those that address the life of the mind in its fullest sense (e.g. reasoning, predicting, analyzing, questioning, etc.), including a range of aesthetic and moral sensibilities. The formal definition of the concept of intellectual emphasizes reasoning, hypothesizing, posing questions, predicting answers to the questions, predicting the findings produced by investigation, the development and analysis of ideas and the quest for understanding and so forth.
An appropriate curriculum for young children is one that includes the focus on supporting children’s in-born intellectual dispositions, their natural inclinations. These would include, for example, the disposition to make the best sense they can of their own experiences and environments. An appropriate curriculum in the early years then is one that includes the encouragement and motivation of the children to seek mastery of basic academic skills, e.g. beginning writing skills, in the service of their intellectual pursuits. Extensive experience of involving preschool and kindergarten children in in-depth investigation projects has clearly supported the assumption that the children come to appreciate the usefulness of a range of basic academic skills related to literacy and mathematics as they strive to share their findings from their investigations with classmates and others. It is useful to assume that all the basic intellectual skills and dispositions are in-born in all children, though, granted, stronger in some individuals than in others…like everything else.
SCHOOL READINESS AND THE INTELLECT. There are two further points to emphasize in connection with the importance of intellectual goals. One is that it is widely assumed that because some young children, especially those of low-income families, have not been exposed to the knowledge and skills associated with ‘school readiness,’ e.g. have not had experience of using books, etc., that they lack the basic intellectual dispositions such as to make sense of experience, to analyze, hypothesize, predict, as do their peers of more affluent backgrounds. Such children may not have been read to or to have observed adults habitually reading, or perhaps have never yet used a pencil at home. But I suggest that it is reasonable and perhaps also helpful to assume that they too usually have lively minds. Indeed, the intellectual challenges many children face in coping with precarious environments are likely to be substantial and often complex. It is incumbent upon the school to connect with them in terms of the unique aspects of intellect and dispositions that they bring.
Secondly, while intellectual dispositions may be weakened or even damaged by excessive and premature formal instruction, they are also not likely to be strengthened by many of the mindless, trivial if not banal activities frequently offered in child care, preschool and kindergarten programs. I visited a school district in one of our Western states not long ago in which the kindergartens had adopted as a theme for the year “Teddy Bears” – a whole year!! In the classroom visited, the children were to take turns “showing and telling” about their own teddy bears, to count the number of them in the class collection, to measure the lengths and weights of the items, define their colors, and to make up stories with them as main characters. While such activities are probably not harmful and may even – at least briefly – be fun for the children, they are unlikely to be intellectually provocative, engaging or stimulating. By contrast, when young children engage in projects in which they conduct investigations of significant objects and events around them, for which they have developed the research questions and by which they themselves find out how things work, what things are made of, what people around them do to contribute to their well-being, and so forth, as can be seen in many reports of project work in the early years (see reports of projects in each issue of Early Childhood Research and Practice http://ecrp. uiuc.edu)1, their lively minds are fully engaged. Furthermore, the usefulness and importance of being able to read, write, measure and count gradually becomes self-evident (See also Katz & Chard, 2000; Helm & Katz, 2001). We need significant meanings as the center of education. Significant meanings through action-based learning environments provide reasons for children to represent experiences through many formats and deserve to be the center of education.
If you care about children and the early years, read the entire report.
I have not found anything to indicate Legg’s position on the capital outlay issue. Hopefully, he will stay out of it. His charter school is in the spotlight right now. His wife is principal, and an administrator has just been arrested for having sex with 14 and 17 year old boys. What a world. Sue
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Thank you for this article. I have watched as parents have opted to send their children to a more academic daycare. I do not begrudge their choice as each parent must do what they feel is best for their child. However, I cannot help but think part of the impetus behind this shift has everything to do with today’s academic climate. I have a 31 year old and now a 4 year old so I view things through a different lens. Daycare and Pre-K for my daughter were seen as a place to have fun and learn through their sense of discovery. That seems to be lost today and if I am honest it is hard not to get caught up in the fray, especially if you don’t do your homework. A child’s discovery of the world should not be done through a heavy handed academic lens. They wind up renting rather than owning the information.
Reblogged this on Kmareka.com and commented:
The importance of cultivating innate learning and exploration in young children.
“They wind up renting rather than owning the information.” May I use this quote when talking about reform and the Success Academy “teaching” methods? Great quote.
I took my grandson to an ECFE classroom with a younger teacher and overheard her asking 2 year old kids which was a hexagon and which was an octagon. We spoke later about why and she stated that the principal wanted our preschool students more ready for Kindergarten. My grandson is interested and curious about everything and I want him to continue to be that way. Quizzing him about shapes I taught to fourth and fifth graders is not, in my opinion, improving early childhood education.
We call this pushing down the curricula. It may not result in children that are smarter, but they may be more neurotic. EQ (emotional intelligence) is important.
The extremism in the current focus on strictly academic learning is not just an issue for young children.
Strictly academic learning is for students who aspire to be academicians, academics, workers in the proverbial ivory tower or perhaps as clerics.
The purging of current policies in education of any references to learning other than “academic” is the work of people who are frightened about the possibilities of the human mind and heart to work in tandem with the human body in gaining an understanding of the world and acting in it with intelligence.
As a worker in the visual arts I am acutely aware of this great purging–one that will not honor the affinities of children and young people. Too many are learning to ace a test and to hate the subject and to dread the whole idea of learning under the auspices of school and in the company of others. The “others” are now competitors in a zero sum game, winners and losers, same for their teachers.
Once viewed as a safe haven and place where “intellectual currency” was shared, our schools are treating “academic” knowledge and if it must be contained in a bank vault, with stress-testing under conditions of high security. Heaven forbid that academic knowledge escape and seek some connection with life beyond that vault and thereby become contaminated, diluted, watered down.
Better to have strictly academic instruction. That means truncating the curriculum to the 3 R’s and the current version–expressed as the Common Core Standards, all 1,620 of them and all of them firmly attached to specific methods of teaching. In English language arts the “arts” are nearly banished in favor of, “close reading and argumentation from evidence in the text and only the text.” This is the primary work of lawyers and clerics, and some literary critics in vogue mid-century last. Analyses of tests has some utility in many occupations but hardly the most inspiring ways of grasping the wonders of the printed word as a means of communication and expression.
Within the visual arts, “academic” has not been a term of praise for a long time. It is customarily used by scholars to refer to artwork created in European academies according to a fixed set of rules, with these intended to qualify artists for commissioned work from aristocrats. The education of youngsters in this tradition often began with a series of exercises in drawing straight lines without the aid of a ruler….endless exercises, vertical lines, horizontals, diagonals; same lengths, different lengths; evenly spaced, variably spaced and so on, according to the examples provided.
These and other “exercises” were valued as a way to do a triage on students, sorting them into groups–those who had talent qualify for further study in the academy system. Others might be judged well-suited for learning a trade or craft. “The rest” included girls and teens for whom the major occupations were repetitive work at low pay, specifically sewing and weaving. For boys, the same, but in the emerging economy of mass production.
Along with all of that, there might be some exposure to “great looks”–works of art (usually paintings or reproductions of these) selected to teach lessons in moral virtue and depict “famous” events in history. And for the well-off young ladies there might be some introduction to the fancy arts and crafts, especially for personal and household adornment. This is one version of art as “enrichment,” a frill, a bonus, with some social groups in need of that more enrichment than others. Different strokes for different folks.
That “academic” legacy lives on in countless ways today, and it is not usually recognized as problematic. Thus, the larger educational establishment simply accepts that outcomes from the “chance” to study art in schools are often statements of self-confidence in one’s incompetence. Examples? “I can’t draw a straight line, even with a ruler,” or the assertion that knowledge is not necessary in judging art, as in in ” I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.” And in the early years, we live with the the mistaken belief that art should/must improve reading and math skills, or be used to teach those skills, and not be introduced as a source of multi-sensory and mindful discovery, wonder, and delight.
Off the soapbox for now. Thanks for the invitation to comment.
Thank you Laura for your precious time to articulate academic learning beautifully.
I love and enjoy reading every word in your post.
A big yes to “Different strokes for different folks.” with mutual respect and appreciation for WHO WE ARE with wisdom, compassion and courage in doing whatever we do for what is right. May
They will make children hate school and learning.
But
they are too ignorant and/or intellectually deficient to understand how and why children learn.
Just another way that our politicians are betraying our trust.