Better off in school?

Education is important.  It is nearly a universal statement of truth.  So it follows that the sooner a child starts school, the better off that child will be.  Sadly, with both parents working, there is passive support for that idea even when the overarching goals of education may be in dispute.  Parents need childcare and school is free childcare.  Both of these are working to begin the educational process in the lives of our kids far earlier than it was when I was a child.

Universal preschool is becoming a thing both because we have bought into the idea that if our kids read at an earlier age it is better but also because paid preschool is more free childcare.  Now you might think that since our congregation has a preschool, we might think along the same lines.  Ours, however, is a traditional preschool, emphasizing the developmental growth of the child through play.  This is even more a need today because our children spend so little time with other children, including in the homes where they are more likely to be single children without siblings.  Such a developmental approach works not on the mastery of subjects like reading or arithmetic but upon the life skills that were once learned in the family but now may not be.  

The skills and the learning once measured by kindergarten has become the domain of the preschool.  But some preschools are pushing to go further and teach a child to read and do simple math.  While these skills are good, if they come at the cost of the ordinary developmental skills once almost universally taught in the home, where will the children learn these things?

The image is from the 1950s, when kindergarten was just becoming a thing.  I wonder how many of these things are even noted much less taught.  Remember the book All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten?  In this book of short essays by American minister and author Robert Fulghum promoted life lessons that were profound but not necessarily the cutting edge for schools.  Though it was first published in 1986, its wisdom endures. 

It is for these things that our Church has a preschool.  It is sad to say that the life lessons that apply to all of life are now lacking, replaced by more important educational concerns like mastering subjects or social engineering.  The child is suffering because of all of this.  I am not at all sure that children are better off in school or that mastery of subjects or government imposed mandates often unrelated to the curriculum are more important than learning to skip, put your things away, to work together with others, and to follow directions.  In my mind, the world just might be better off if we paid attention to these more -- both at home and in school.