The Death of Preschool
December 1, 2011
Don't go selling the hide as long as the bear remains in his hole.
-Yugoslavian Proverb
This dramatic title appeared on an article in the latest issue of Scientific American Mind (November/December 2011). It was so provocative that I feared that the article itself would also be way over the top. However, I found that this was a well-reasoned, well-documented case for keeping play as the central focus of the preschool years. Here are some excerpts...
• "Early childhood educators are turning to a method known as direct instruction, which the National Institute for Direct Instruction, an advocacy group, defines as 'teaching that emphasizes well-developed and carefully planned lessons... and clearly defined and prescribed teaching tasks.'"
• "'Scientists are baffled,' says Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at University of California-Berkeley. 'The more serious science we do, the more it comes out that very young children are not designed to do focused, goal-directed behavior we think of [as appropriate] for older children, but are to a phenomenal degree very sophisticated about learning from things and people around them.'"
• "Running around in circles, playing with blocks and climbing on a jungle gym may seem like exercise or goofing off to an adult, but several studies have shown that children infer a basic sense of physics through these activities. The possession of fine-motor skills — learned through activities such as drawing and cutting, which coordinate finger movement with visual perception — is one of the strongest predictors of academic success, according to a study by David Grissmer... at the University of Virginia's Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning."
