The Search for Intelligent Life
Un-standard Learning
Recent visitors to deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, may have noticed a young crew of naturalists, sculptors, contractors, painters, poets, musicians, journalists, and curators exploring the museum’s woodland campus, all collaborating with one another but deeply engaged in their own particular work: sketching images, surveying grounds, researching archives, interviewing artists, consulting administrators, building models, and talking with a wide range of community members about age-old mysteries concerning personal identity, the existence of God, and the place of humans in the natural world.
These children are not freakish prodigies, but ordinary four-year-olds from Lincoln Nursery School, whose unusual partnership with a contemporary art museum, on whose campus the preschool is located, serves as a kind of breathtaking wakeup call to what very young children are capable of when we take them seriously as learners. It shouldn’t surprise us that preschoolers are capable of boundless intellectual sophistication. The real surprise is that we subject them to testing and performance standards that often highlight the very dullest parts of their special minds.
My children outsmarted me from infancy. I would spirit dangerous things away from them and then watch in amazement, a year later, as they toddled nonchalantly over to the closet, asking to have the Mylar balloon back. Starting at two, my daughter reliably beat me at the memory game and, when asked for her strategy, was able to blithely rattle off tactics such as connecting the unique grain of wood on a particular memory tile to its animal image on the opposite side. At the same age, her brother had memorized all the words to his favorite Madeline picture books (“In an old house in Paris that wah-cubboard-da-vines . . .”). By kindergarten, he could make up songs on the piano that sounded, at least to my ears, like real music, and my other son made uncommonly detailed maps of friends’ houses and even a vacation rental property months after we’d returned home.
I assumed I could be forgiven for thinking my kids were—well, if not geniuses, at least a little special. Then I started teaching preschool and realized not only that there was nothing virtuoso about my children but that, on the contrary, their stunts were completely bog standard. The late, great movie critic Roger Ebert once put it really well in his own context: “Kids are not stupid. They are among the sharpest, cleverest, most eagle-eyed creatures on God’s Earth, and very little escapes their notice. You may not have observed that your neighbor is still using his snow tires in mid-July, but every four-year-old on the block has, and kids pay the same attention to detail when they go to the movies.”1 Of course, it’s not just the movies.
Outsmarting parents must be a survival tactic. Why we adults are so baffled at being outsmarted is unclear. Alison Gopnik explains that even developmental giants like Jean Piaget tended to dismiss little children’s “solipsistic, illogical and amoral” cognition, whereas twenty-first-century research is finally revealing it to contain “implicit learning methods that are as powerful and intelligent as the smartest scientists.”2
Paul Bloom, a Yale psychologist at the Infant Cognition Center, argues that babies were long underestimated because scientists hadn’t found reliable ways to reveal their mental life.3 We can’t exactly test a baby’s ethical sense by asking if she would be willing to save five people from a runaway trolley by deliberately killing just one person, but Bloom has devised some ingenious approximations of moral thinking. He found in his lab, for example, that infants as young as six months old can differentiate good from bad by showing them a sequence in which a puppet tries unsuccessfully to climb a hill and is eventually met with either a “helper” who guides him up the hill, or a “hinderer” who pushes him down.4 After watching the sequence, the babies overwhelmingly reached for the “helper” puppet over the mean one. Whether or not this early grasp of right and wrong is innate, as Bloom argues, or learned at a very young age, is actually immaterial to its implications for early childhood education and care: very young children bring their own surprisingly developed sense of the world to their learning.
In another experiment, a toddler observes a stranger failing to open a cabinet.5 After watching the stranger (who is a member of the research team) fumbling several times, the child walks over to the cabinet and opens it himself. This might be mistaken for idle curiosity, not compassion, but for a key detail: the child looks up carefully at the stranger as he opens the door, giving the unmistakable impression of a person saying, “Here, let me help you.” (Perhaps also followed by the thought: “You fool. Any baby can open that.”)
Babies can easily recognize when foreign languages are spoken to them.6 Infants as young as ten months have been shown to understand social dominance7 (recognizing not only that bigger is better in social conflict but that there are perceived winners and losers in such contests). And long before a baby knows the words for “cat” or “dog,” he can recognize that dogs all belong to a category of furry, four-legged animal that doesn’t include cats.8
Young children have untapped mathematical ability that we are coming to appreciate, too. Yale professor Karen Wynn showed more than two decades ago that five-month-old babies could do math problems using Mickey Mouse figurines.9 Her research, variations of which have been replicated in many other settings,10 suggested that the infants weren’t simply recognizing when something more was added to a set of items but seemed to understand simple addition and subtraction of objects in a set. Cognitive psychologist Melissa Kibbe has found, in a series of experiments involving a magic cup full of pennies, that children as young as four have an intuitive sense of algebra and can solve for x (in a problem like 5+x=17).11
If there is any potential downside to the explosion of child cognition studies, it could be the temptation to use the findings as justification for upping the academic ante in our expectations of young children. Gopnik cautions that “when parents, or even policy-makers hear about how much babies learn, they often conclude that what we need to do is teach them more. Parents spend literally millions of dollars on ‘educational’ toys, videos and programs that they hope will somehow give their children an edge. Armed with this idea of untapped capacity, parents and policy-makers pressure teachers to make preschools more and more academic, with more reading drills and less time for play and pretend. But the science suggests this is also wrong.”12
So here we have a bizarre development in the world of preschool learning: the more good news we discover about children’s innate intelligence, the more anxious we become that children aren’t achieving enough. In an effort to capitalize on this apparently limitless potential, we set up various processes to harness it—new curricula, program philosophies, outcome measures, and actual pen-and-paper tests for four- and five-year-olds—the result being that we undermine the very thing we are so concerned with. How so? By spending time measuring learning when we should be spending those hours fostering the learning itself. This is one of the oldest tricks in the educational reform book, substituting diagnosis for therapy, and we keep at it because it’s cheaper and easier than the reverse. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that it’s going to improve children’s long-term outcomes any more than we can stop the rising incidence of diabetes by administering more blood tests.
I want to turn now to how, specifically, children’s intelligence is so often undermined by our desire for measurement and accountability. We could fill scores of books with documentation of children’s cognitive processing skills and, indeed, many have done that. But our twitchy reflex to amp up the work sheets and software makes it hard to translate these findings into effective educational practice when children are increasingly afforded neither adequate time nor the appropriate infrastructure to build on their own natural cognitive capacities. This happens for two reasons. Many children, as we know, attend suboptimal programs. But there are also excellent preschool programs that are being asked to meet increasingly nitpicky, decontextualized standards that drive children and teachers up the wall. If they refuse to comply, on the grounds that the standards (and attendant bookkeeping requirements) are inconsistent with good developmentally based practice, they run the risk of losing their licensure and/or access to public funds to support at-risk children, the children who most need what they are offering! Needless to say, the vast majority of these preschools decide to toe the line. But it’s hard to value young children’s enormous potential when it’s trapped within the hundreds, if not thousands, of discrete learning metrics mushrooming all over the place.
A few caveats are in order. Being frustrated with current standards is not the same as not wanting any standards at all. I fully support the idea of objective learning and teaching goals and, in fact, an early concern of some of my colleagues was that the much-maligned Common Core standards13 for kindergarten might be less vigorous than the state benchmarks with which I was familiar as a teacher in Massachusetts, one of the very highest-performing states in the country. The notion of accountability in the teaching profession, or in any profession, is, in my view, uncontestable. In fact, a basic tenet of teacher training is the idea that every child deserves a full year of progress, no matter his or her baseline, a goal I think should animate both the spirit and the letter of all early education. But I share the worry of many eminent early childhood educators that the Common Core was rushed to market without adequate testing or scientific basis for some of its assumptions about how young children learn.14
The Common Core standards for kindergarten have garnered the most attention, but many states have their own preschool learning standards as well, and there is some worry that the pushdown from the Common Core kindergarten standards is already being felt in the shift in expectations of our youngest children. However, it’s also important to understand that the Common Core standards are not a curriculum per se but, rather, a set of objectives around which any number of different curricula can be designed. For this reason, some of my respected colleagues do support the Common Core standards for kindergarten as they are written, but they nonetheless worry about how they are carried out in practice.
The real question behind the standards movement is, as I’ve argued, whether or not the standards measure the things we care about. Are they supporting good teaching and learning, or are they simply shifting the focus from therapy to diagnosis? For reasons we will see, I think that we need to be very cautious about the rush to more and more standards-based solutions.
To understand just what is missing in many of the current state early learning standards, consider how one child wrestled, quite literally, with the complex concept of numbers as he played with giant tires on a playground in the highlands of Guatemala. In a recent TEDx talk, educator Nancy Carlsson-Paige described this child, her young grandson, painstakingly hauling large tires across the park. The child placed them in three sets of four tires to match each landing of a three-sided slide. She understood immediately that this intense process of hauling heavy, unwieldy tires could not have been random, and within a few minutes her grandson had enlisted the help of another little boy with whom he chatted easily in Spanish, his second language. The children came up with a new configuration of tires under a different slide on the other side of the park, with two sets of four tires and an extra tire paired to each of the four remaining landings of the slide. Carlsson-Paige explains the learning that was unfolding:
They’re actually expressing concepts in action. Classification. Seriation. Ordering things. One-to-one correspondence. Matching them up. . . . Why is it that children everywhere do these same kinds of activities? It’s because these activities lead them to understand number. Now, we can say to a child, “What is this?” And she can say “four.” Well, that’s the name of it. But it’s not the concept of it. You can have four tires, four pennies, four elephants. And those groups of four things all look incredibly different. In order to understand that they’re all “four,” we have to abstract the idea of four out of the groups of things and think about the “fourness” of them all that they have in common. That’s a very complicated idea to think about, the “fourness” of the number, and it takes a child many years to figure it out.
Carlsson-Paige explains the dire long-term implications of ignoring this difference between the idea of a number and its name. “You can direct-teach children the name of the number easily,” she notes:
You can sit kids down and teach them “That’s four. That’s five.” It’s simple. You just show them the symbol and teach them the name. It’s not really difficult. But for them to understand the concept of “four”—that’s something they have to build over time in their own mind. It’s a kind of understanding that has to develop in the mind as a result of experience, and activity and interaction. It’s not something that can be directly taught.
The innovative math educator Maria Droujkova tries to reveal more of this kind of intuitive mathematical thinking in her advocacy for what she calls “natural math.” Droujkova understands that mismatched educational expectations make us over- and underestimate children’s mathematical reasoning abilities: “You can take any branch of mathematics and find things that are both complex and easy in it,” she says. “Unfortunately a lot of what little children are offered is simple but hard—primitive ideas that are hard for humans to implement.”15
When we talk about children’s mathematical reasoning, there are several things going on. First, children can be taught the symbol and the word for “four,” which doesn’t come so naturally. Second, they can come to know the concept of “four,” which, actually, can be quite natural indeed. And third, the children can be taught that “four” is an abstract concept itself, which typically comes later. Babies and children have a sense of numeracy, even algebra, and they can be taught to say “algebra,” but, really, we should focus on the former.
Indeed, Droujkova is one of a growing number of mathematicians who think calculus concepts could be taught in kindergarten. She offers the radical suggestion that we should try the reverse of simple but hard, offering young children instead complex ideas that are quite simple to implement. Building a Lego structure is a classic example of such a complex yet doable math problem for young children. Unfortunately, as Droujkova explains, the “calculations kids are forced to do are often so developmentally inappropriate, it amounts to torture.”16
If you’ve ever watched a four-year-old sweating over the mechanics of forming a number on a page without breaking a pencil tip, or trying to draw a diagonal line connecting a pile of pennies on one side of a work sheet with the matching number on the opposite side of the page, you can appreciate that her assertion is only a mild exaggeration. The truth is that much of what passes for mathematics instruction in the early years actually has absolutely nothing to do with mathematics. This is an educational stance that frustrated me enormously in my teacher training, when I was obliged to find evidence of children’s mathematical reasoning in their ability to represent and communicate their calculations through pictures of graphs or drawings of milk cartons. What about kids who aren’t especially verbal? I would ask. What about kids who have poor fine motor skills or just don’t feel like drawing a milk carton when asked?
How can we be sure what kind of mathematical thinking is going on? We run into a lot of difficulty with standards because they are too often written so as to discourage the incredibly complex, often intuitive, thinking that educators like Carlsson-Paige and Droujkova describe so well. The problem is compounded by the requirement in most public pre-Ks and kindergartens that a teacher post the decontextualized individual standards being taught on a given day up on a bulletin board for all to see and track. Couched in the language of accountability, the practice of posting discrete learning goals independent of bigger learning objectives encourages the same static and inflexible learning environment we saw with the preschoolers who were denied blocks and given dramatic play as a reward for work. If it’s Tuesday, we must be “working with numbers 11–19 to gain foundations for place value.” We can forget about grappling with the vastly more mysterious “fourness” of things, or with contemplating—like the famous mathematician Georg Cantor, who invented our modern concepts of infinity—whether there are infinitely many numbers in between pairs of other numbers, something I have seen many young children do.
It’s astounding, really, how often well-meaning adults cite naming things—numbers and shapes, colors, and days of the week—as a central learning task for young children. But naming things and understanding them are two different phenomena: “The truth is that only the most superficial and the most mechanical aspects of learning can be reduced to [educational mandates],” Carlsson-Paige argues.17 There was a time when I would have found such a view a bit naïve. But, like a number of educators, including historian Diane Ravitch, who famously made a 180-degree turn from No Child Left Behind acolyte to fierce school-reform critic, I have changed my mind. The real naïveté comes, I believe, from thinking we can short-circuit tens of thousands of years of human evolution and common sense to ram number sense down children’s throats before they are ready, and call it learning.
The shallow achievement of the sort we see in so many classrooms helps explain in part the huge disconnection between what educators claim they are doing in early education, which often sounds pretty terrific, and what they are actually doing when you step in the door and observe teaching up close. We need to look at superficially appealing curricula with a lot more discernment: Does a child really understand what four means from the activity she has performed? Or has he been trained to answer “Four” when the teacher asks, “What is three plus one?” Oftentimes the developmental philosophy behind a given curriculum is appropriate and even inspiring. But the good intentions get lost in translation because the curricular philosophy doesn’t translate easily to actual learning benchmarks.
It’s possible to teach more organically and still hit all the standards. The really high-quality preschool programs do it all the time. But it requires teacher competence and preparedness as well as a commitment to give children open stretches of time to work on activities that combine learning standards—math and language simultaneously, for example. That approach is a poor fit with the parts-to-whole framing of most early learning standards, and so, as they are written, lends credence to the misconception that the skills as practiced in the classroom must be taught in isolation. It’s a translation problem of bringing theory to practice.
Let’s take a look at this translation problem with actual early learning standards from the Common Core State Standards for kindergarten in the English Language Arts:18
Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three phoneme (consonant-vowel-consonant, or CVC) words. (ccss.ela-literacy.rf.k.2d.)
Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing. (ccss.ela-literacy.l.k.2)
Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about kindergarten topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups. (ccss.ela-literacy.sl.k.1)
With prompting and support, identify basic similarities and differences between two texts on the same topic (e.g. in illustrations, descriptions, or procedures). (ccss.ela-literacy.ri.k.9)
With prompting and support, describe the connection between two individuals, events, ideas, or pieces of information in a text. (ccss.ela-literacy.ri.k.3)
With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the text in which they appear (e.g., what person, place, thing, or idea in the text an illustration depicts). (ccss.ela-literacy.ri.k.7)
Add drawings or other visual displays to descriptions as desired to provide additional detail. (ccss.ela-literacy.sl.k.5)
So, unlike the overwhelming majority of adults in the United States, kindergartners are now expected to have a command of the conventions of English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing. Talk about hubris! And note the inflated word choices: “texts,” “descriptions and procedures,” “visual displays,” “collaborative conversations.” There’s a phony gravitas to the way these standards are written that might impress the adults while actually harming their own children. “Prompting and support” becomes code for: “Ask numbingly specific questions that can be answered in rote fashion.” If you think I am exaggerating, reconsider our vignette about Mrs. L. and her enunciated question marks in her reading of Polar Bear, Polar Bear. This sort of teaching happens all the time, by teachers desperately trying to conform to a changed early learning landscape they often can’t comprehend.
To add insult to injury, teachers are inviting five-year-olds to participate in their own cognitive swindle by “engaging” them and making them responsible for their learning. We see this in the presence of “I can do X, Y, Z . . .” testimonials found on bulletin boards that transform the Core Curriculum standards into perky testaments to self-improvement cast in a child’s first-person voice. I don’t know at whom those declarations are aimed, but the chicanery foists an adult-centric sense of personal agency on kindergartners who really couldn’t care less if they can “use and understand verbs and adjectives by knowing their opposites” so long as they can accurately describe a visit to a local farm where they saw and touched a family of, let’s say “little, downy” lambs and “large, rough” sheep.
Expecting five-year-olds to care about achieving single-objective standards feels like a subtle form of the old “hot potato” game, where the adults are constantly pushing responsibility to someone else, and it reminds me of the increasingly self-exculpatory practice of doctors and nurses who, in lieu of owning their own medical errors, have in the name of empowerment entrusted patients to be proactive and knowledgeable about their “personalized treatment plans.” Translation? If you’re the sort of feckless chump on a gurney who didn’t answer the right questions about your meds when you emerged from your anesthetic fog, you can just shut up about that overdose, thank you very much.19 (You probably deserved it and, anyway, we’re all doing our best.)
Some of the standards do reflect developmentally appropriate practice and I believe it is helpful to have a thoughtful template for teaching and learning. I even accept the necessity of a uniform pedagogic architecture if—and only if—teachers have the flexibility to adapt it to their own circumstances. Preschools are always claiming they allow teachers to be flexible, but it so rarely happens in practice! In any case, it’s the extreme partitioning of these standards that leaves a child stuck, like our Martian learning how to drive, without a road map for being a whole person.
Let’s entertain ourselves for a moment by imagining what it would be like for an adult to buy a self-help book on sexual intimacy with the same kind of off-putting and decontextualized language we might find in the Common Core:
Initiate collaborative discourse on diverse and pertinent topics, with blend of “I” and “you” statements, e.g., “I don’t usually meet nice people in bars. What about you?” (Language arts strand 1.7b, pronoun use; personal responsibility 14.c, turn-taking)
Join mouth to partner’s mouth. (Personal hygiene 1.a; human physiology 2.g, sensory awareness)
Establish consent for sexual contact, using combination of gestures (hands, head movements, other) and oral language, e.g., interrogatory statements. (Cognitive development 8.d, ability to distinguish fantasy from reality)
Run hands through partner’s hair, e.g., flick hair strands to opposite side of partner’s scalp/head. (Cognition 4.1, reinforce left/right awareness, handedness)
Remove own articles of clothing and/or request partner assistance as needed, remove shoes first, where applicable (if wearing shoes). (Physical conditioning 3.a, gross motor skills 4.b, sequencing events. See also: birth control use, if applicable.)
Stroke partner’s extremities, if present, starting at calf (or foot). Optional: pause to count toes, fingers. (Number sense 2.f; geometry 6.b, symmetry; physical conditioning 5.a, cross-referenced with cognition strand 6.i, crossing midline)
Check for signs of physical satisfaction (e.g., face flushing). (Self regulation 3.d, “theory of mind,” perspective taking)
Hold hands and/or rest head on partner’s upper body before toileting/snack break or departure from premises. (Self-regulation 6.c, impulse control, consideration for self/others)
Not exactly conducive to meaningful human connection, right?
More seriously, consider one of the drama standards in the Creative Arts strand of the Early Learning and Development standards for the state of Connecticut:
Use multiple dance concepts as a way to communicate meaning, ideas and feelings (e.g., use movement to represent leaves falling off trees—sway arms, wiggle fingers, stretch, fall to ground).
That sounds fine. Children enjoy using dance concepts to imitate animals and falling leaves and whatnot. (I know they like to dance.) And it’s helpful for teachers to have examples. Connecticut should also be credited with valuing the creative arts enough to make standards about them, although, as we’ve seen, “valuing” children’s creative arts can result in an awful lot of Thanksgiving-turkey hand tracings. But what’s the real downside of breaking down something as fundamental as movement into an individual learning concept?
To begin with, there’s money to be had from this standards business and it isn’t adding value to children. Here’s how it works: An early learning company (the kind that produces the toys, props, furniture, and class decor we see in preschools) will task an employee with pawing through the standards, one by one, to create curriculum products aligned with the state’s teaching and learning goals. This means that the company will start producing a set of fake leaves for children to paste on a fake log for the “Leaf Unit,” which will naturally be linked to the drama standard about pretending to be falling leaves. And because there are so many of these standards, companies will start producing gadgetry to contain, display, and document the standards, too.
Lakeshore Learning, one of the biggest education supply outfits in the United States, sells a “Complete Common Core State Standards Kit” for each grade, containing “everything you need to display the standards and ‘I can’ statements for Language Arts and Math!” There’s a nice little pocket chart retailing for $10.99 to hold all the standards. (Otherwise how could you possibly track them all?) According to the Web site, the five transparent pockets “perfectly fit our ‘I Can’” Common Core cards (sold separately for $19.99 and designed in a “kid-friendly format that motivates and empowers students!”).
The standards mania has infiltrated children’s toys, too. I recently came across a felt sandwich-making set for use in a pretend kitchen with a proviso on the cover of the box that it “helps develop sorting, memory, fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.” Yes, yes, we know that’s what pretend play does. But in case it isn’t clear, there’s a handy a list of “extension activities” on the package, including the suggestion to “place all the felt food pieces in a row. Count the number of pieces. Repeat until the child is able to count them independently.” And if that’s not fun enough, we can “extend” further by asking the child “to identify each food item (other than condiments) and to categorize it by basic food group, meat, dairy, grain, fruit or vegetables.” For the love of God, can’t children be allowed to play with condiments if they want to?
I’m not saying I wouldn’t be tempted by these items myself if I were a classroom teacher today. (An apple made of felt won’t rot when forgotten at the bottom of a basket.) But preschools worried about not meeting expectations—typically the lower-performing programs and those serving disadvantaged students—embrace these products and comprehensive curriculum packages in the vain hope that they’ve landed on the magic bullet that will cover the standards and lift achievement scores without any guesswork. Some of these curricula are marketed as so foolproof that a teacher can map her lesson plans down to a sixty-second block of transition time to take children from the bathroom area to the rug for Circle Time.
Since preschools are required to document that the standards are being met, there’s a huge incentive for preschool directors to take the confusion and inconsistency out of curriculum development. And there are plenty of teachers who like this level of specificity. But the more experienced and skilled ones tend to hate it because following somebody else’s script takes them away from their relationships with children, in the same way that doctors hate spending 30 percent of their clinical practice dealing with insurance companies and hospital bureaucrats.
We shouldn’t forget that the falling leaves in the Creative Arts standard are only meant to be an example of a curriculum activity, and not the curriculum itself, but the way the standard is written, as an isolated and ultraspecific task (“wiggle fingers,” “fall to ground”), invites a piddling kind of segmentation that seems more often to benefit the producers of approved curricula and state standards than the children they are meant to support. Once a school has bought the “Leaf Unit,” it becomes challenging (not to mention unaffordable) to try new ways of encouraging children to express their feelings through dance concepts. Do we really want the companies selling fake foliage to be designing the curriculum for our children? Even a reasonable objective such as our dance concepts becomes problematic when disaggregated to such a degree that sensible teachers struggle to recognize what it would look like if it were reassembled back into a coherent whole that represents actual learning.
One popular curriculum even includes special preprinted sticky notes with specific language teachers can use to pose questions during story time, or what is euphemistically called “dialogic reading.”20 For example, the prompt on pages 26–27 cues the reader to ask, “Why are the buses sleeping?” when the teacher comes to the words “. . . are asleep.” It’s almost impossible to go off track in such a scenario, but isn’t this a sign that the teacher doesn’t seem to be on the right track in the first place? What a dreary, unprofessional experience for the teacher! It’s a far cry from what Carlsson-Paige calls the “great craft of teaching [involving] knowing how to harness those amazing capabilities for the purpose of helping them learn in school.”21
Buying a dialogic reading tool kit makes sense for teachers who don’t know how to read stories in an engaging, thought-provoking way. But make no mistake: the problem here is not that teachers lack dialogic reading tool kits. We have to be very cautious about embracing small fixes that place the burden of achievement on the young child and not on the adults, where it belongs. There’s a truth few policy makers will admit: the standards are designed not only for the benefit of children but to mask the ugliness of a status quo of low-paid and poorly qualified early childhood teachers.
If large numbers of American early childhood teachers really aren’t able to manage their classrooms without being spoon-fed curricula in kibble-sized increments, we have a serious problem that needs addressing through better education, better training and apprenticeship, and much better pay to attract and retain higher-quality teachers. Turning a workforce problem into a pedagogic one, and dumping it on young kids, is as unfair as it is foolish.
What would happen if we rewrote the kindergarten Common Core standards more holistically? Actually, we don’t have to wonder too much because it has already been done. Those standards might look something like the curriculum guidelines for early childhood education and care in Finland, whose three educational goals are stunningly fundamental:
Finland ranks at the very top of international comparisons of high school performance. But it is also a tiny, centralized country with a homogeneous and relatively prosperous population, so it’s awfully tempting to dismiss its success as a one-off experience bearing no relevance to our diverse, geographically and culturally complex early learning landscape in the United States. In fact, there’s a growing backlash to the flood of cheery “What Can We Learn from Finland?” testimonials that have saturated our news cycle in recent years, and it’s true that some of the analysis has been overly sanguine and idealizing. After all, surely they must have at least a few crummy teachers and apathetic students. But it would be a terrible mistake to ignore the essential features of the Finnish early education and care system on the grounds that they are somehow irrelevant or tiresome.
Let’s concede for a moment that Finland’s culture is vastly different from our own. I would argue vigorously that the nature of young children differs little across political or other boundaries. (I’ve been to Finland, and the preschoolers I observed there were behaving just like their American counterparts.) But even allowing for Finland’s unique circumstances, we can look at the improvement within Finland over time, and also compare Finland to similar countries (such as Norway) to see how changes in teaching philosophy and greater investments in the quality of the teaching workforce result in measurable academic success. We might even compare Finland—though it requires more of a stretch—to a demographically similar American state such as Minnesota; we have fifty separate public education systems, after all. The main point to understand at the outset is that Finland’s baseline academic performance was low to mediocre compared to Europe; it is now at the very top of the distribution.22 A few critics have begun to question whether the country’s reforms have served all students (the policy of nontracking may be bringing down higher-performing high school students), but none of these recent minor grumblings have undermined Finland’s success story as a powerhouse in early childhood education and care.
Because Finland begins formal academic teaching quite late (at age seven), and yet performs at the very top of international academic assessments in adolescence, some people have used its experience as evidence that there is no benefit to investments in early education and care.23 Why pay for preschool education if you don’t need it? But this mentality betrays a misunderstanding of what exactly goes on in Finnish preschools, which is learning. Consider a cooking analogy. Rich, intentional learning is happening in Finland in the same way that a delicious beef stew can be prepared without slavishly following the recipe for boeuf bourguignon in the 1975 edition of Joy of Cooking.
To further the analogy, no one is suggesting the cook throw a bunch of random ingredients carelessly into a pot and declare it dinner, but there is more than one template for making a great Sunday meal; moreover, a lot of terrific home cooks don’t need to follow a recipe at all because they grew up experimenting with food under the expert tutelage of their mothers or grandmothers. With a flexible template for cooking, a whole variety of meals can be adapted for any setting.
The same is true for early learning. The ingredients of good teaching and coaching are learning processes, not facts. Young children in Finland are not formally taught and tested, as they are in the Common Core, on their ability to “isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three phoneme (consonant-vowel-consonant, or CVC) words” (ccss.ela-literacy.rf.k.2d). But to suggest that these children don’t therefore know how, in whatever the Finnish equivalent, to isolate and pronounce the letters in the word (d-o-g) is clearly absurd.
The distinction is fantastic news for parents who are worried that their children are stuck in a dreary educational environment. It couldn’t possibly matter less that you or your child can’t explain what a phoneme is if your child has opportunities outside school to use phonemes, and, more generally, to be an active person in the world. In fact, one of the most encouraging pieces of news I’ve read in a long time was a study showing that when mothers of low socioeconomic status learn to converse with their children in developmentally appropriate ways, the effect of their poverty on language development largely disappears.24 You don’t have to be a wealthy or privileged person to support your child’s development.
Finland’s guiding principles for early childhood education and care (ECEC) offer a template for what this kind of active participation in the world might look like for a child:
In ECEC, it is important to underline the intrinsic value of childhood, to foster childhood, to help the child develop as a human being. ECEC activities are guided by broad educational goals that go beyond any specific and curricular targets.25
The idea of a curriculum that goes beyond specific targets seems almost revolutionary in the context of today’s standards-obsessed culture. And there are other extraordinary features, too. The Finnish curriculum is organized around the “playing, movement, exploration, and self-expression through different forms of art” that are “ways of acting and thinking peculiar to children” and that “enhance their well-being and perception of themselves.” Specific content areas such as mathematics and natural sciences are described as “orientations” about which the “educational community” is reminded:
The child does not study or assimilate the content of the different orientations or different subjects, and there is no expectation of performance requirements. The orientations provide educators with a framework that tells them what kinds of experiences, situations, and environments they should look for, give shape to, and offer in order to ensure children’s balanced growth and development.26
It’s worth rereading that paragraph: There is no specific content that the child must study and there are no performance requirements for the child. The Finnish orientations, each of which has its own “specific way of critical thinking and expressing creativity, practicing imagination, refining feelings, and directing activity,” are there to guide the teacher to create the right kind of supportive environment for learning. The performance expectations place the evaluative focus on the teacher, not on the child.
Contrast this with the bogus “I” statements we saw accompanying the kindergarten Common Core standards, which task the five-year-old child with creating her own motivation and opportunities for discovery. The enlightened Finnish approach to the classroom learning environment makes a mockery of American calls for teacher accountability, where salary is pegged to students’ performance on narrowly crafted test outcomes that can be gamed, and, in fact, are almost designed to be gamed.27
Alas, some of our teaching approaches are themselves driven by social objectives that transcend our schools. A lot of well-meaning adults have been sold a bill of goods about quality early education that is deeply problematic, especially for the disadvantaged children whom reformers are trying to help. Historically, well-off kids have found ways to engage with the world on better terms outside school. This becomes more difficult as children have less free time outside school, of course, but it’s still possible in families with emotional and material resources. But disadvantaged children—the ones whose gaps in ability with their more fortunate peers widen with every passing month of childhood—are the ones suffering the most from an approach that is simultaneously draconian and insipid.
Hence, our concerns about socioeconomic inequality and teacher competence have leaked into the classroom, producing dubious magic bullets that we hope will reduce these ability gaps and raise the bar of teaching quality. If parents can’t be their child’s first and best teacher—as evinced by the glaring gaps in general knowledge and self-regulation we see between well-off and disadvantaged kids by the time they come to kindergarten—we need to do it for them, so the argument goes. At best, this is wishful thinking, and at worst, we’ve got it all wrong. The research base on which preschool’s promise hinges doesn’t support many of the current practices so prevalent in early learning classrooms today.
It’s a special characteristic of the American psyche that we always seem to turn to teachers to solve social problems we can’t find better ways to address. If the United States has four or five times the rate of child poverty of other industrialized nations, that can hardly be the responsibility of the average preschool teacher to remedy—a teacher who is likely to be in the same low socioeconomic rung as her own students! Yet again and again we ask teachers to close the ability gaps that stem from income inequality or other major social forces that our society has shown a lack of commitment or competence to address.
Reformers tout the no-excuses culture in which a good teacher can cure what a century of economic and social policy has been unable to correct. This strikes me, and many others, as disingenuous, if not magical, thinking. What’s more, for the children who don’t need the foundational skills on offer (because they are getting them from their everyday life outside of school), it’s a raw deal. And for those who do need the foundational skills, the unidimensional approach offers only a very temporary salve.
What’s a parent to do? The happy news is that we can bypass a lot of this insanity entirely. What children really need rather than tests is challenges. In Chapter Two, we learned the importance of better calibrating our expectations of young children through close observation of what they can and cannot do, and we’ve seen the importance of teacher scaffolding to help children find their learning zone. How might this work for parents?
Every year around October, it’s Get Rid of Monkey Bars season. For a long time, mastering monkey bars was a physical and psychological rite of passage to which children could direct sustained focus. There’s almost nothing better than monkey bars for building upper-body strength and confidence in a young child. Still, I can’t deny the hazards. “They broke my daughter’s arm,” one critic noted.28 “Why are they still around?” Adults work themselves in knots over monkey bars: They’re so dangerous! Why not just stick a dry-cleaning bag on your kid’s head? Consequently, a lot of playgrounds have dismantled their monkey bars, or they stand unused. The liability is too high.
Children get a lot of fractures (close to 50 percent of boys will have one before they turn sixteen; in girls, it’s a little less),29 but we don’t know exactly what percentage of fractures is attributed to falling off preschool monkey bars. Some people question whether it’s really such a catastrophe to have a childhood fracture, many of which are of the supple, “greenstick” variety that heal easily, if the alternative implies less healthy exercise and measured risk taking, not to mention less fun. My son once sustained a fracture while playing indoors at a bar mitzvah party, so I suppose we could also ban conga lines.
But I’m going to stake out a middle ground here. What happened to spotting kids who do scary things? This would of course require better coaching and calibration: Who seems ready to try the monkey bars, and what level of support do they need? In the early education biz, as we’ve seen, we call it scaffolding, offering little children the appropriate level of teacher support to meet their goals. Why, then, is the more typical response either to let kids hurt themselves or to whisk the monkey bars away? It’s the failure to see a middle ground again, as we saw in Chapter One. There is a lot of room between “risk-free” and “lethal,” and monkey bars can fall very safely within it with the right adult support and supervision.
But it’s not so easy. One study published in the journal Pediatrics found that adult supervision of playground equipment didn’t actually reduce the number of fractures, perhaps because many kindergartens and publicly funded pre-K programs delegate playground supervision to “para-professionals.”30 And teachers have little incentive to help kids try challenging activities because they aren’t getting the message that outdoor play is important. There’s a widespread belief that children are merely releasing their energy, like an explosive device, when they play outdoors, not gaining any rewarding benefits from playground play.31 Teaching is often a lonely affair, too, with little chance to interact with other adults during the day, so it’s hard to blame teachers for chatting on the playground, especially when they are sometimes talking about substantive educational matters. School administrators are of course only too thrilled to take the monkey bars away because of the litigation risk.
Parents need to think about how to prepare the environment for children in order to take full advantage of children’s natural learning power. Parents need to think of themselves as solar panels or wind farms, pieces of passive but highly effective infrastructure standing at the ready for those sunny or windy days when natural energy can be channeled. It’s a different kind of scaffolding than driving a child to a piano lesson every Monday afternoon because, by definition, this kind of practice has to be opportunistic. But chance favors the prepared mind.
Parents can cultivate what Maria Droujkova calls a “community of practice”: the learner is a part of a group of people actively using the skill all the time. Family members can model the skills of observing, questioning, and problem solving naturally through the way they spend their free time; the way they respond to their children’s curiosity; the people they choose to socialize with; and the recreational activities they enjoy. Active learning doesn’t have to be highbrow either: it’s an approach that works in any setting.
And, as we’ve seen, parents can coach children in whole skills that are meaningful to their own family context and individual circumstances—activities like cooking, reading, gardening, and playing catch—rather than isolated, decontextualized skills that might be advertised on television or that represent the latest educational fad. Indeed, playing games and laughing together are far more educational than drilling kids on their ABCs on the way to daycare.
Finally, we can model our appreciation for the intrinsic value of being a young child, even when it makes us anxious that our child might fall behind. Do we listen to children’s ideas and give them the space and time to enact their plans? Do we truly value mind over matter, or are we still stuck in the matter-over-mind paradigm? Do we want children to have pride of ownership and mastery of a complex skill, or do we want them to make something pretty to turn into a refrigerator magnet?