Seriously. Don’t. Because I will start like you’ve never seen anyone start in your life.
One summer during my babysitting years I was asked by a woman to babysit her two sons and tutor the younger one. They were sweet boys, and I was quite happy to oblige. But the ‘tutor’ part got a little sticky.
I was given a list of pre-requisites for kindergarten (seriously?) and a stack of alphabet flash cards. I looked over the sheet from the school: some things on the list were along the lines of “being able to wipe your own bottom,” and I can totally get behind that because I’m sure the funding available for staffing just does not afford classrooms the ability to send a few adults to the bathroom while someone else watches over the rest of the class. Sure, maybe that’s a travesty. Maybe we need more people in the classrooms. Maybe (I’m not sold on it). But that’s a whole other can of worms.
But the other things on the list were more like, “cut a circle, square, and triangle” and “know the alphabet.” I’m still not sure if it was intended as a list of guidelines, or strict “requirements.” It’s not that these tasks are so advanced for a four year old. It’s not that I don’t think we should engage our children and, even more so, find ways to engage them that ALSO teach them useful information like how to read or how gravity works. But to punish or admonish a child that young, in this manner, for not having reached certain goals is frightening to me. What do we think this will accomplish? I would bet a whole lot that all this will get you is a kid who develops a bad taste in his mouth whenever the word “school” is uttered. And the damage that will do to him and his life is epically worse than how far behind he will be if, at the age of 4, he hasn’t yet mastered writing “p”. Trying to force-feed knowledge of any sort is so obviously less effective than teaching to ready and willing pupils that I’m not even going to go there.
So there I was, asked to drill a four year old on letters and numbers and all manner of tediously boring things for a certain amount of time each day. And he was slouched across the table from me, eyes always wandering, looking so tortured it hurt to watch.
At this point I could digress into how the creation and implementation of our Prussian-modeled (compulsory) education system was formulated as a means to create a work force of physical labor to support factories in the industrial era. Or how many of the ‘uneducated’ in the 1800s were reading books at the age of 10 that we consider too advanced or too mature for our high schoolers. Or how our schools promote values that encourage us to see the world as potentially (if we are nice enough and wait our turn) without conflict and, consequently, teach our children that it IS possible for the earth to sustain the 6 plus billion people currently on it and, at the same time, that our Hummer and wide screen TV habits have no direct correlation to people starving in the third world.
I could. But you don’t want to get me started.
Where was I?
Oh. Right.
Lest this be construed as a rant in favor of hippie dippie childrearing wherein we let the kids decide what they want, when, and how, let me assure you that I can be a quite a hard ass; manners and responsible behavior are a must.*
But, ya, I think I that a different educational model is long past due.
I don’t know that I think taking kids away from their parents, as in the Summerhill model, is quite the way to go. And I’m not laid back enough to have complete faith that my child would flourish with no requirements or parameters in the Sudbury model. Truth be told, I’m not sure, practically, exactly what I DO think would work. But I can’t in good conscience give the current system my seal of approval just because I’m not genius enough to invent the solution. I simply think there needs to be more dialogue about this, more often, across a wider spectrum of the population.
Surely allowing our children to go untamed is not what we should strive for (children do need structure, I agree), but nor is our current system. It has devolved so far from what we idealize it to be that it has become a fiscal cancer on our society. We pour endless dollars into a system that pays wages to many, many deserving and hard working individuals (and otherwise), but overall still does not attain that which it has set out to. It is a system that assumes one prescription will fit all and ignores the fact that some households raise wealthy children who can afford to value knowledge for its own sake while other households raise children who know that their little brother won’t have any food to eat if they don’t ditch to work a shift at Taco Bell (and, of course, most households likely defy these stereotypes all together). It is a system that assumes it is possible to create a curriculum that is simultaneously effective and bland enough to refrain from offending any of the more than 300 million citizens of this country. It is all at once too unrealistically ambitious and entirely ineffectual.
This is a topic I encourage everyone to think a little harder about…
*As a side note, it will be very interesting to see what my child rearing skills are like when I leave the ideals of Hypothetical Land behind and actually have a screaming 2 year old standing in front of me, won’t it?
NOTE: Most of these opinions have been formed via classes and books and discussions more than anything I can point to on the internet, but I didn’t want to only point to book titles, so much of my supporting documentation was hastily complied via haphazard google searches; academic blasphemy, I know. I’d be more than happy to discuss the things that have led me to this pontification if anyone is so interested. Just let me know.
