Deborah Meier on redefining "preparedness"
I was sad to read Michael Sadowski’s article "The School Readiness Gap" promoting more structured and academic kindergarten and prekindergarten versus settings designed for play, imagination, curiosity, initiative and nurturance. The claim that middle-class white kids get more school-like childhood experiences is startling, and hardly conforms to my observations. That hardly proves I’m right, but the counter-evidence is not convincing. Our conclusions regarding the value of early childhood rest on short-term impacts and standardized test results. (On the latter see the work of Sam Meisels, as well as studies galore on the reliability of testing for young children; on the former—count on one hand the number of studies that follow kids into upper elementary or high school.)I’m also concerned at the frequency with which we continue to fall back on referring to disparities in performance as white/black differences, even after having demonstrated that a substantial, if not preponderant, factor is socioeconomic inequality. And we continue to be surprised—although the history of the world reminds us over and over—that advantage perpetuates advantages. Moreover, researchers rarely distinguish finely enough between poverty and near-poverty, near-poverty and low-middle class, etc., and completely ignore accumulated family wealth data (intergenerational advantages).
The idea that we must change kindergarten and first grade, rather than redefine “preparedness,” is misguided—especially since schools, with an increasingly white teaching force, are less and less likely to be places where children of color feel comfortable. “Preparedness” is defined as becoming docile, obedient, unmanly, and passive at ever earlier ages, plus knowing one’s ABCs, numbers, phonemes, etc. At an age when few males are interested in sit-down-and-look-at-books activities, we start earlier and earlier to classify the turned-off as disabled or recalcitrant, and their families as wanting in motherly skill. The extraordinary role of richly provisioned play is ignored—settings where youngsters' own initiative, agenda and interests dominate, and where strong bonds exist between children, teachers, and their families and communities. Families are increasingly seen as the root of children’s problems, not as a source of strength. It is not lost on children.
We have no long-term studies that support the current effort to introduce “academics”—meaning testable literacy and arithmetic skills, concepts, and vocabulary—ever earlier. We’ll wake up to the price we will pay too late. No civilization known to us has ever tried to do this before, and I suspect for a good reason.
All kids and all societies benefit from the imagination, play, fantasy-life and exposure to making, doing, and inventing that have been the hallmark of the years from birth to six/seven. The “American edge” in technology may be less due to strong academics than to our history of respect for ingenuity, for thinking out of the box. Imagine bridge-builders who never experienced the natural building-stages of childhood. Isaac Newton was an extraordinary model-maker in his youth, at a time in which even he did poorly in school subjects. It’s not only the occasional genius we’ll lose, but a society that welcomes and recognizes such genius.
Deborah Meier is director of new ventures at the Mission Hill School in Roxbury, Mass., and was the founding principal of the Central Park East schools in New York City.
