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posted by n1 on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the or-send-'em-down-the-mines dept.

The New York Times reports:

As school reformers nationwide push to expand publicly funded prekindergarten and enact more stringent standards, more students are being exposed at ever younger ages to formal math and phonics lessons [...]. That has worried some education experts and frightened those parents who believe that children of that age should be playing with blocks, not sitting still as a teacher explains a shape's geometric characteristics.

But now a new national study suggests that preschools that do not mix enough fiber into their curriculum may be doing their young charges a disservice.

The study found that by the end of kindergarten, children who had attended one year of "academic-oriented preschool" outperformed peers who had attended less academic-focused preschools by, on average, the equivalent of two and a half months of learning in literacy and math.

"Simply dressing up like a firefighter or building an exquisite Lego edifice may not be enough," said Bruce Fuller, the lead author of the study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you can combine creative play with rich language, formal conversations and math concepts, that's more likely to yield the cognitive gains we observed."

U.S. News published a related piece recently arguing for more attention to preschool curricula and specific content, in addition to other measures of preschool programs. In contrast, a story in the Atlantic last year pointed out new "academic" approaches to preschool may actually be doing more harm than good. And any immediate gains (as cited in the new study) frequently turn out to be temporary. One oft-cited alternative is Finland's approach, which delays formal schooling until age 7, after a year of relatively unstructured government-mandated kindergarten.


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:11PM (4 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:11PM (#521393)

    The children should be playing with blocks, but that play should be structured in a way that naturally gets the child to focus on some aspect of critical or geometric thinking.

    They called them manipulatives and charged a lot of money for the fancy name although presumably 1st graders cutting out circles and squares from construction paper would have worked just as well or maybe paper cuts would have turned that educational lesson into a tragic slaughter.

    The real puzzle is more or less relative to what exactly?

    So a decade ago my kids suffered thru early childhood education and the instructors or baby sitters or whatever you call them were pretty hot for manipulatives at that time. Now is the point of the news story that they're hotter or colder for manipulatives than ... last years conference presentation .... when my kids were preschool ... when I was preschool ... when grannie was in preschool ... I donno and it seems a kinda important aspect of the debate.

    Thats before we get into bigger issue problems. What does outperforming mean in a school system that is propagandized as a failure yet is actually pretty top tier?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:32PM (#521401)

    What does outperforming mean in a school system that is propagandized as a failure yet is actually pretty top tier?

    Willing to accept highly technical work for peanuts once we turn them loose in the work-"force."

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:38AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:38AM (#521762)

    What does outperforming mean in a school system that is propagandized as a failure yet is actually pretty top tier?

    What? Either you don't know what a good education looks like or you're deluding yourself. Most of our K-12 school system is based on rote memorization and it's essentially one-size-fits-all. The standardized tests mostly just test for rote memorization because that's the easiest thing to test for and it can be automated quite simply. I'm not sure how such a school system qualifies as "top tier", unless you're using the 'X is better than Y and Z, so X must be good!' fallacy. Sure, maybe you can point to plenty of countries that have even worse school systems, but that still doesn't mean ours is good. Or maybe your standards are simply pathetically low, and you think that being able to churn out literate people who can do basic math and several other simple things qualifies as a raging success. Care to explain?

    • (Score: 2) by rondon on Wednesday June 07 2017, @12:54PM (1 child)

      by rondon (5167) on Wednesday June 07 2017, @12:54PM (#521865)

      Tiering, by its very nature, is a method whereby one compares one thing to other things of the same nature for classification as "more" or "less" of something. Which is exactly what GP did.

      Just because you have an ax to grind that is on topic, doesn't mean you should go about building straw men on other folks posts. It is a bit rude.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @10:46PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @10:46PM (#522272)

        Just because you have an ax to grind that is on topic, doesn't mean you should go about building straw men on other folks posts.

        I don't think it's a straw man. In fact, I directly addressed the issue of 'X is better than Y' in my post. At best, what he said was useless since one thing merely being better than something else is not by itself meaningful, and at worst it was fallacious. I take issue with calling our school system "top tier" because it gives people the idea that it is overall good, even if that was not your intent.

        Tiers are often useless and misleading, especially in this case.