Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an expert on early childhood education, has been an outspoken opponent of the trend to push academics into kindergarten, and even preschool.
In this post, she explains how play has been banished from many kindergartens by the misguided belief that starting academics early will close the achievement gap. It doesn’t help kids of any origin. The children hurt most by this pressure are children of color.
She writes:
Soon many of our nation’s young children will be starting school for the first time. What they will likely find is something dramatically different from what their parents experienced at their age. Kindergartens and pre-K classrooms have changed. There is less play, less art and music, less child choice, more teacher-led instruction, worksheets, and testing than a generation ago. Studies tell us that these changes, although pervasive, are most evident in schools serving high percentages of low-income children of color.
The pressure to teach academic skills in pre-K and kindergarten has been increasing since the passage of the No Child Left Behind act 15 years ago. Today, many young children are required to sit in chairs, sometimes for long periods of time, as a teacher instructs them. This goes against their natural impulse to learn actively through play where they are fully engaged–body, mind, and spirit.
Play is an engine driving children to build ideas, learn skills and develop capacities they need in life. Kids all over the world play and no one has to teach them how. In play children develop problem solving skills, social and emotional awareness, self-regulation, imagination and inner resilience. When kids play with blocks, for example, they build concepts in math and science that provide a solid foundation for later academic learning. No two children play alike; they develop at different rates and their different cultures and life experiences shape their play. But all children learn through play.
Many urban, low-income children have limited play opportunities outside of school, which makes in-school playtime even more vital for them. But what studies now show is that the children who need play the most in the early years of school get the least. Children in more affluent communities have more classroom play time. They have smaller class sizes and more experienced teachers who know how to provide for play-based learning. Children in low income, under-resourced communities have larger class sizes, less well-trained teachers, heavier doses of teacher-led drills and tests, and less play.
We’ve seen a worrisome trend in recent years showing high rates of suspension from the nation’s public preschools. The latest report from the Office for Civil Rights reveals that these suspensions are disproportionately of low-income black boys. (This pattern continues for children in grades K-12.) Something is very wrong when thousands of preschoolers are suspended from school each year. While multiple causes for suspensions exist, one major cause for this age group is play deprivation. Preschool and kindergarten suspensions occur primarily in schools serving low-income, black and brown children and these are the schools with an excess of drill-based instruction and little or no play.
There are many children who simply cannot adapt to the unnatural demands of early academic instruction. They can’t suppress their inborn need to move and create using their bodies and senses. They act out; they get suspended from school, now even from preschool.
Depriving low-income children and children of color of play will not make them better learners. In fact, it may turn them off school entirely. Let children be children. Let them grow up healthy, curious, imaginative, and free to experiment and dream. There is plenty of time to learn academics.
This is insanity! At that age let’s let education interrupt play. How will they ever enjoy learning if we don’t let them enjoy the world of play!
Because they apparently are not supposed to enjoy anything.
Let’s learn to play first!
This is such an important message, Diane!
Thank you for sharing it. I’m the “Sneaky Mom” who knows that “Children learn best when they think they are playing!” With more than 42 years of working with Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Church groups of children and 12 years of after-school classes and school presentations from K-High School; I know how that play is the best way to learn. As soon as we say, “Now we are going to learn about . . . ” many children shut their brain off. On the other hand, when fun is involved, they can learn ever-so-much without realizing it. Pressure inhibits learning. It is a form of fear for a child and that gets in the way of education.
Kas Winters
Kas,
You are correct that “pressure inhibits learning” and “is a form of fear”. The standards and testing malpractices are based in using fear to obtain compliance.
However, “I know how that play is the best way to learn. As soon as we say, “Now we are going to learn about . . . ” many children shut their brain off. On the other hand, when fun is involved. . . ” does not necessarily hold true.
One of my goals as a fairly traditional foreign language teacher (yes I believe in learning vocabulary through memorization and using grammar to relate the two languages to each other) was to have the students understand this very basic concept when it comes to the teaching and learning process:
Fun is a state of mind.
If you as a learner want to have fun (whatever that entails for each individual) and put in the hard work and effort, you can and will have fun in learning. If not you won’t have “fun”. It’s the student’s responsibility to him/herself to learn to bring a “fun” mindset to whatever they do. A huge part of growing and learning is to realize that it is our attitude towards something that radically determines our outlook and enjoyment of learning,
Procrustean measures.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
I could not agree more with Nancy Carlsson-Paige.
Play is essential for children. Anyone who has studied child development, who has worked with children, knows this.
Regimenting the instruction of young children (well, all children, really, the way it is happening in too many schools now), treating children like cogs in a machine, like little robots, amounts to child abuse. 😦
“Just another brick in the wall”! SAD!!! https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=just+another+brick+in+the+wall&ei=UTF-8&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-002
Using test scores to teach our nation’s poorest children that they and their schools are “failures” while stealing mental and physical development through lack of activity IS child abuse, plain and simple: a child abuse not only sanctioned, but nonchalantly funded, by governmental education policy for many long years, now.
This is an answer to the why question….
Teachers prepared as professionals did not banish play from the school day.
The responsibility must be shared by a very long list of pushers of test scores as the reason for going to school.
Amen!
Interesting news here, drop in Common Core support, EXCEPT among teachers!
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2016/08/support_for_common_core_continues_decline.html
No PLAY = It’s called developing GRIT in kinders. It’s all so sick.
The oligarchy really wants slaves to order around. Makes them feel good about themselves.
Love this post, Diane.
As to your last paragraph–not only will depriving young children of play turn them off to learning, but it will also will take away their opportunities for socialization: learning to share, to get along with others, to cooperate and to make friends. This short shrift will, in turn, give us a generation which will most certainly be less caring, more emotionally uncertain (perhaps unstable), leading to greater anger & hostility, larger gang recruitment and retention in areas in which the family structure is not intact (gang membership, for many children, adolescents and even adults, has been shown to be a substitute for the family unit).
The end result? More violence and destruction perpetrated upon our children.
But that’s what the deformers/oligarchs want, isn’t it?
Is this not the logical conclusion to a standards-oriented curriculum based on testing? Once we decide that learning is measurable, it is a slippery slope.
Yes, Roy. We can even measure the babies. Why?
“Once we decide that learning is measurable. . . ”
It is not “measurable”. And who has decided that it is?
Using measure as a fundamental concept can only result in falsehoods and invalidities served up as pseudo-scientific hogwash. One can assess, one can judge, one can gauge, one can analyze what a student has learned but one cannot measure it. It is an abuse and mis-use of the English language to contend that we “measure” anything at all in the teaching and learning process.
Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement (notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”):
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume, we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Now since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable” which is what all this standardized testing insanity, truly insanity if you think about it, is about???
So much harm to so many students is caused by the educational malpractices that are standards and testing or as Phelps contends in “measuring the nonobservable”.
How insane is this all???
Utterly beyond my comprehension!!!
I perceive the idea of standards to be even more pernicious at a more advanced level. We are pushing biochemistry down into the grades. My daughter is drawing pictures of cells with mitochondria in grade 5. If it were not for her mother, she would not know a chickadee from a toad. All across the curriculum, natural science is being penalized and lab science is being pushed. Why? Am I being paranoid to think that some would be glad if we wiped out a species and no one knew? The natural sciences belong. Ecology belongs.
We do not need uniformity. We need variety.
I have been visiting various preK’s in central-NJ as an enrichment teacher for 15 yrs. The change is palpable. Things really started picking up steam here in about 2010.
The primary driver is the state DOE (influenced by NCLB/ RTTT & Common Core). Since 2000 we’d had an excellent set of preschool learning guidelines — 2-3pp., clearly written by early-childhood devpt experts. They were developed in response to NJ’s admirable push for universal access to quality PreK, which had been going on since the late ’80’s.
With successive revisions aligning preK stds to NJ core curric stds, then CCSS, preK stds have morphed into a 111pp doct, exhaustively listing every jot & tittle of desirable classroom goings-on, replete w/dozens of assessment/ recording/ reporting reqts. Loads of great stuff, good for background reading & guidance. Except for the ‘accountability’ part where you have to prove you’re implementing every single good thought that occurred to the ‘stds’-writers.
So naturally ed vendors jumped in & lined up for state DOE approval with shallow, misguided canned curricula ‘aligned’ (NOT!) w/stds.
There’s not a thing in the stds which suggests cutting back outdoor time, removing most playthings, setting up lots of tables & chairs, using ‘worksheets’ and creativity-killing look-alike ‘craft’ activities. But check out any PreK w/even 1 student getting govt tuition subsidy, & that’s what you’ll see.
Today my daughter saw a preying mantis while she was out at recess. One of her friends taught her the difference between the male and female of the species. Hooray for recess!
In one high performing district I know that shall remain unnamed, I would not be surprised if the kindergarten students didn’t “learn” about the preying mantis from their science time on their tablets!
This is so fundamentally important. PLEASE share it with everyone you know. Print it out and give it out at a faculty meeting or put in in the mail boxes of your neighbors; hand it out at sporting events or ask your local library if you can leave a stack on their desk. This has to become common knowledge and the citizenry must be prompted to stand up and take action……Do it for the kids.
Ironic–I just heard a news story on Chicago radio about a large suburban school district
(not a rich one–middle-to-low-income) which proudly announced their “new” kindergarten curriculum, consisting of…play! Their purchases were proudly listed: blocks, Legos, kitchen sets, plastic play equipment (slides, child-sized house, etc.).
Oh, & at the END, they mentioned that reading & math would also be taught.
Congratulations, Elgin U-46! Thanks for some good news, for a change!
Now, can every district copy THAT model? (Or are you going to stay reformy, force 5-year-olds to sit at computers, write, compute math beyond their grade level & teach to “standardized” tests? How’s that working out?)
“. . . which proudly announced their “new” kindergarten curriculum. . . ”
Back to the Future-80s & 90s style kindergarten-B4NCLB and it’s bastard stepchild RttT with CCSS.
Meant to add–Einstein, “Insanity is doing the same thing over & over again & expecting different results.”
I always feel compelled to note that this an apocryphal quotation that we shouldn’t perpetuate. (Not to mention that it’s also not what insanity is.)
To the extent play remains, it’s increasingly “organized.” Many NYC elementary schools hire play consultants to be recess referees and to organize “activities.” There’s no question in my mind that my children and their peers at school are growing up with a large social-skill deficit compared to my generation and prior generations. My impression is that today’s children are kinder than my generation was. There’s less outright bullying, which is a good thing (although things get more complicated when they reach the intersection of middle school and social media). There is essentially no violence (again, I’m talking about my own children and their peers, but I think this is characteristic of a lot of elementary schools in the “zero tolerance” age). But I suspect their real-world problem-solving skills may be underdeveloped.
I just learned that LAUSD banned swings from playgrounds a few years ago because of lawsuits stemming from injuries. If the driving force of policymakers is fear of lawsuits, how can we expect them in any policy discussion to ask, “what do children really need in a place called school?”
I hope the Ed reformers from the tech side don’t misinterpret this message. They are so enamored with gamification, promoting learning through game play on devices, that I can see them using this as justification for giving these kids iPads to keep the learning going. One kindergartener was left with a tablet for 3 hours to work on a math game while the teacher worked with the 5 year olds who were “struggling” with math. Gaming does not equal play.
The problem with education at all levels, from early childhood development through post-grad, reflects how wrong-headed this notion is of eliminating play in early childhood development programs.
Systematically eliminating play and all forms of the arts, starting from 12th grade and meteorically working backwards, is that focusing solely or primarily on forcing students to “learn stuff” that only has pragmatic value in getting a job, is it KILLS creativity, innovation, and critical thinking. Ironically, these are the SKILLS employers are already finding lacking in college graduates, making them unemployable.
Ironic, right?