As the tentacles of Ed Reform reachdown into the earliest years, forcing standardized tests on young children, Defending the Early Years is there to block the monster from strangling the children’s loveof learning.
In this short video, early childhood educator Kisha Reid explains what young children need most to thrive.
Play. When children play together, they collaborate. They solve problems. No one fails. They work and play together, as equals. Good practice for the real world.
Or, you could lock them in a room with a computer and a proctor and make them do assessments and worksheets on a screen keyed to Lord Coleman’s bullet list. That would really build their sense of wonder and their intrinsic motivation to learn.
the sarcasm hurts most when it becomes actual reality in modem day school after modern day school
I differ re: Skinner’s approach to learning and life. Kids are not Pavlov’s dog. Rewards and punishments don’t work in the long run.
Bob, the “impact investors” have latched on to data-munching devices–play tables and slippers (yes slippers)–for monitoring the behavior of what Elliot W. Eisner once called the “wee folk.”
Here is a link to some examples of the non-stop tech-based surveillance systems for children. They illustrate why “Defending the Early Years” is not just about articulating the benefits of play but also putting down the influence of profit-seekers who say they want to “do well ($) while doing good.” Needless to say the purveyors of college to career readiness for tykes and lessons to build “grit” beginning with infants are also wrong-headed ideas ( in my judgment). Do look at this: https://wrenchinthegears.com/2018/06/21/childhood-captured-pay-for-success-and-surveillance-pre-k-play-tables/
Gates and others have poured a lot of money into game-based learning, rule governed and usually competitive, and for older students. In the following example for grades 6-8 Gates insisted that the game, Sim City Pollution Challenge, had to be “aligned” with the Common Core and Next Gen Science Standards, complete with a data-dashboard to monitor the activity of students. http://www.gamesforchange.org/game/simcityedu-pollution-challenge/
Work at NYU’s Institute of Play is almost exclusively about rule-governed games even if these are not of the zero-sum variety.
This is truly frightening, Laura!!! Once again (how often I find myself saying this!), thank you for the links!!!
A story of mine, about this: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/stories/he-sees-you-when-youre-sleeping-a-short-story/
As a white person, I know I am playing with racism to say this, but it’s very refreshing to see this coming from a black woman. The biggest resistance to progressive/play-based education for poor and minority children often comes from minority, especially black, parents. They see it (understandably, given their history) as yet another white attempt to deny their children education. The fact is that this is exactly how affluent white parents tend to educate their own children, but black families are often not willing to hear this information from whites.
One day Dienne, perhaps people will begin to realize just how little sense it makes to distinguish folks by skin pigmentation. From a WaPo article: “In fact, several scientists said, the new work shows just how small a biological difference is reflected by skin color. The newly found mutation involves a change of just one letter of DNA code out of the 3.1 billion letters in the human genome — the complete instructions for making a human being.”
Agreed, Duane! The very concept of race is without scientific merit. Take two supposedly “white” people and two supposedly “black” people at random here in the United States and sequence their DNA, and they will be as different from one another as “white” people are, on average, from “black” people. In other words, the very notion doesn’t have a scientific basis. It’s a mind-forged manacle, a cultural construction. Fortunately, a LOT of young people in the US have finally moved beyond this primitive superstition. My kids, for example, just didn’t see race when they were dating, and I never have either. So past time that we moved beyond this.
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But here we are still, in a country where people call the police on others for barbecuing while black, where there are more black men under correctional supervision (in prison, in jail, and on parole) than there were enslaved black persons in 1850, where black parents have to have “the talk” with their kids about how to keep from getting killed if they are stopped by the police, where segregation is almost as bad in our schools as it was in the 1960s, as though Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka had never happened, where the leader of the country has this sort of history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump
It’s so long, long past time that we moved beyond this superstition!!!! I do believe that we are going to get there, but it will take generational change to make it happen.
I belong to the HUMAN race. But in this day when a major news network will foment racial violence by running pieces, continually, about “white genocide,” I will stand, every time, with my brown brothers and sisters. The Faux News folks and IQ45 can’t stand it that the demographics of the country are changing. Ha Ha. Too bad, so sad. They are on the wrong side of history.
I agree that biologically race is meaningless. Unfortunately, socially speaking, whites have made it very meaningful by the treatment they have inflicted (and, sadly, continue to inflict) on blacks (and other minorities). Someday I hope we’ll reach a truly colorblind state, but before we can get there, we whites have to reckon with what we have wrought through the combined forces of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, sub-prime mortgages and other discriminatory and harmful practices. Whites are not now in a position to turn around and say that race is meaningless.
Robert and you are correct in identifying the difference between the scientific concept of race versus that of the social construct.
As it is, I didn’t say that race is meaningless, as we know it very much isn’t. I do say it would be good that folks realize how little the role of skin pigmentation plays in being a human being and that recognizing that fact is just one step in eventually having race as a social construct becoming moot.
I hope that DEY’s message spreads far and wide! My child has been the only child of color in a play-based school for some years now. It is very difficult to talk to other black parents about how necessary and important it is to allow OUR children to learn through play, but I get exactly where they are coming from. It does feel like whenever we (as black people) figure out how a game is played, white folks change the rules so we won’t ever win, so yes we can collectively be distrustful of any educational system that looks like it’s designed to “dumb us down” rather than propel us forward. I think this is exactly why no excuses charters have such a strong hold on many communities of color, especially poorer ones. (If the learning looks fun and the discipline is too relaxed and there are no tests, there’s NO WAY it will prepare you for this life!) It plays right into respectability politics of education.
Also, thank you dienne77 for your comments about race. I know that many white people are well-intentioned when they talk about belonging to the human race and not seeing color, etc. but as you and a few others here seem to know, it is NOT HELPFUL to black people (or other people of color) when they do this. It denies the reality of our lived experiences and absolves white America from reckoning with its past and present. The book “White Fragility” by Robin Diangelo is a great read and a good place to start for anyone who doesn’t “get” what I’m saying.
Funny, but I just listened and watched what went on to see how much sense it made.
this is how all people learn best. anthropology tells us this. so did dewey.
No question. Let the freaking kids be kids!!!
FYI Nice video
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My Lord, I love this video!!! Posting it on my social media!
My favorite:
“This is about self-initiated passion and drive for learning. And as children play, those neurons are firing, those connections are being made”
Our prime directive, as teachers, must be this: to build upon the intrinsic motivation to learn that kids are born with, to create students who are intrinsically motivated life-long learners.
Kudos to Kisha Reid for this lovely, important, inspiring video!!!
Or this GREAT phrase: “open-ended play materials like mud”
yes. yes. yes.
Yes, this video must be viewed by every person going into education, from pre-school to college. Take note Betsy DeVos.
Perfectly explained in the video!