American School System is Stealing Childhood

What in the world are we doing to our poor children. They are behind if they didn’t start at age 3 in preschool and we seem to feel the need to make up this academic slacking with all day kindergarten. Somebody stop this madness and realize that kids should be allowed to be kids for a good long time. What a tragedy.

Researchers at the University of Virginia, led by the education-policy researcher Daphna Bassok, analyzed survey responses from American kindergarten teachers between 1998 and 2010. “Almost every dimension that we examined,” noted Bassok, “had major shifts over this period towards a heightened focus on academics, and particularly a heightened focus on literacy, and within literacy, a focus on more advanced skills than what had been taught before.” In the study, the percentage of kindergarten teachers who reported that they agreed (or strongly agreed) that children should learn to read in kindergarten greatly increased from 30 percent in 1998 to 80 percent in 2010. (TheAtlantic.com/joyful illiterate kindergartners)

Bassok and her colleagues found that while time spent on literacy in American kindergarten classrooms went up, time spent on arts, music, and child-selected activities (like station time) significantly dropped. Teacher-directed instruction also increased, revealing what Bassok described as “striking increases in the use of textbooks and worksheets… and very large increases in the use of assessments.”

Blueprint Homeschooling: How to Plan a Year of Home Education That Fits the Reality of Your Life by Amy Knepper

But Finland—a Nordic nation of 5.5 million people, appears to be on the other end of the kindergarten spectrum. Finnish children start compulsory, government-paid kindergarten—or what Finns call “preschool”—at age 6. And not only that Finland’s kindergartners spend a sizable chunk of each day playing, not filling out worksheets. Finnish schools have received substantial media attention for years now—largely because of the consistently strong performance of its 15-year-olds on international tests like the PISA. Hhhhhmmm. Read the rest of the story here: Happy Kids are those that play

My favorite Video on why we homeschool by a “hackschooled kid”.