Letters to the Editor
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read John Gatto
Anyone truly interested in education, and American education in particular would do well to read John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education. It all makes depressing, horrifying sense after you read it.
The sad thing is these kids will be 'high achievers,' but they won't be independent thinkers- they'll have been groomed to succeed in the very system that is destroying humanity.
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We should be doing what is best for all kids
Kindergartens have a very tough curriculum and many kids are simply not ready, biologically/psychologically. Putting a kid into a situation where he is overwhelmed and destined to fail is a huge mistake. My district evaluates kids and if they aren't ready, they put them in a publicly funded "Young Fives" program. While my daughter was ready for kindergarten at 4, I knew my son was not. I was extremely relieved he was recommended for young fives. My reaction was unusual, I was told. Most parents are angry or perceive the recommmendation as an insult to their kid. We need to recognize that age span, 4 to 5 is a critical transition for kids that has nothing to do with intellect. My son is a smart kid and is graduating from kindergarten a happy kid, proficient in every he needs as the base to move on. Young Five programs should be mandatory for all school districts and the stigma removed.
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Nonsense
It's a case by case thing. Two of my kids started K @ age 4. Bad idea. The other started @ 5. Good idea.
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Sometimes this is a good idea.
My friend, who is now in his 20s and doing fine, was "kept back" in preschool for an additional year, and I'm sure did much better than he might have because of it.
But it depends, I guess, on the reasons. He was a summer birthday so went from being one of the younger ones of one class to being one of the older ones of another. He was also attending a preschool which was locally popular but... well, my mother was not thrilled. For the next year she pulled him out of that one and put him into another that was more into preparing for school than being daycare.
What that says to me is that he probably would have done fine if he'd had a better preschool. And honestly. Making kindergarten too academic? It's school. It *should* be academic. At a very early level, sure. But treating it like some sort of day care or social hour is unfair to the kids who really are prepared to learn. Preschool is just the same way, though. If all the preschools were really serious about preparing kids for school, there probably wouldn't be this problem.
Of course, sometimes it's not academic. A girl I know was always a little behind her class, maturity-wise. She did very poorly. Mid-elementary, she failed one year. After that, while she was never a straight-A student, she had much less trouble because she was in a classroom with other kids who were at her level. If she'd been "redshirted", she probably would have been happier in the long run, because she wouldn't have had that failure behind her. Yes, maybe only people with more money have the cash to do this, but that doesn't make it bad. That means that we should be doing something to provide that same opportunity to kids from all sorts of homes who need it.
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Why I'll be unschooling
I was infuriated by that article. While I commend the author for illuminating the practice and varying definitions of what "readiness" for kindergarten is, depending on the motivations of who's doing the defining, I think she completely missed a crucial point: we have an educational system built on pitting children against each other.
"Redshirting" not only widens the achievement gap between rich and poor, but between the biggest and the smallest children, the more confident and the quieter, the oldest and the youngest. And it broadens opportunities for teachers to further coddle the oldest, more able kids, to the express disadvantage of the younger and more awkward. The saddest, most sickening part of the article for me was to read quotes from teachers admitting that they enjoyed the older kids in their classes more because they were easier to deal with.
Redshirting makes something "wrong" with both the red-shirted kid--stigmatizing him for not being ready for kindergarten at the typical age--and the younger ones, because it makes their normal 5-year-old developmental levels a disadvantage.
That it's even possible for parents to cheat the system like this to advantage their kids to the detriment of others should be an alarm that our system is NOT designed to give each child an individually appropriate education, but rather to make sure that the strongest beat the weakest in an ever more complicated contest for teacher approval, test scores, etc.
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what should kindergarten be for?
I think that was the scary part of the article: kindergarten, instead of being a place where kids learn how to become students (activities that encourage focus, curiosity, taking turns, hearing other ideas, following directions to achieve a particular result, experimenting to see what happebns next, plus getting ready to read, write and add), kindergarten is now a place where kids start prepping for their first standardized tests.
Kids will be ready when they are ready: and that will be different for each kid. Some kids will do best when they are younger (the older kids show them where the bar is being placed, so the younger kids know where to reach). Some kids will do better waiting a year, when they feel more confident about themselves (and those 4y power struggles are largely over).
But I fear this practice of "red-shirting" has much more to do with the parents' self-esteem than the kids'. I think it's equally damaging to push kids too hard, too soon, and to hold kids back so everything is easy. Not every kid can be "above average." And I think the high-achievers are often in for a rough landing when most of their peers catch up to them. Life gets hard. Those of us who have had to struggle cope far better than those who found everything easy.
And I think redshirting for the sake of creating a false 'high-achiever" damages the other kids in the class. Why compete with the girl who can run so much faster than everyone else because she's 4 inches taller? At 5 (or nearly 5) it's hard to realize we all have value, even if we arent' all stars. It seems such a shame that kids could start first grade feeling that they don't measure up to their older, more confident, more capable peers.