[blparent] First Grade, Kindergarten, Pre-K, Preschool ...

[Jo Elizabeth Pinto]

My daughter started preschool a year ago; now she's in Pre-K. She goes two days a week and really enjoys her class activities. But I'm wondering about the trend of getting kids started earlier and earlier. When kindergarten came about, it was to prepare kids for the first grade. It was a half day a week, just sort of easing the kids into school and teaching them how to be students--share, cooperate, follow directions, the basics. Kindergarten isn't even mandatory in all states, but now there are year-long waiting lists to get kids into full-day kindergarten classes. And we have Pre-K programs at our preschools. And preschool is promoted to get kids ready for Pre-K, which will prepare them for kindergarten, which was meant to prepare them for first grade. The insinuation is that if your child doesn't have Pre-K, she'll not be on track for kindergarten, and if she doesn't do preschool, she won't measure up well in Pre-K. So when and why did everything get so competetive? When and why did we stop letting our kids be kids till they started school? What are we pushing them toward, and is it good for them in the long run?

As part of her Pre-K information, I was given a list of standards that most kindergartens hope their students will be on track with before they start.  They need to know all of their letters and numbers, as well as recognizing some common words by sight.  They need to know how to count to twenty and remember all the tens up to one hundred.  They need to know their colors and shapes by sight, and be able draw the shapes with a pencil.  They need to have basic skills with crayons, scissors, and glue.  It’s preferred if they can write their first and last names.  That sounds like first grade used to be.  I believe I remember learning my letters and numbers in kindergarten.

I just worry that our society has become too competetive with young children.  Besides that, if the standards are so strict for incoming kindergartners, then what are they teaching in kindergarten, and why isn’t the quality of our education system, particularly in America, rising when compared to that of students elsewhere in the world?

Jo Elizabeth

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.--Stephen Jay Gould