The Building Blocks of a Good Education

Posted in Standards and EvaluationPhilosophy of EducationTeaching on Nov 18, 2009 - 02:02 PM

This week I'll be asking the question. Here it is:
What ever happened to Kindergarten?

This past weekend I found myself in Western Massachusetts for an old fashioned Timber House Raising. Now I have to be honest, before this weekend I had no idea what a Timber Hose Raising was. Living in Brooklyn it's not so often you come across someone who decides they're going to build their house and then invites the whole neighborhood over to help. It's even less often that you get to watch a house being build with no metal. But that was exactly what happened. Over the last two years pieces of tree were cut, shaved and carved into lumber, each piece measured and chiseled to fit exactly into the puzzle that was to, in one day of assembly, become the frame of a house.

It was an incredible sight to come upon in the middle of the woods: 20 guys carrying large pieces of lumber up to a platform, hoisting them up, sliding them into place and locking them together with wooden dowels. It reminded me of imaginings from my childhood playing with Legos and Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs. There is a picture of me at age 4 sitting in a model car that I built out of giant Tinker Toys. These guys, I thought, out here in the woods, must have had childhoods full of similar imaginings.

Then I had another thought, one that I haven't been able to shed all weekend. It came from a conversation I had last Friday night. I was out to dinner with some fellow educators and it somehow came up that in the elementary school that one of them works at, the kindergarten classrooms don't have blocks. I was absolutely shocked when I heard this. No blocks! What is kindergarten without blocks? Surely this was some kind of mistake. So I started going down the list of what a kindergarten should look like. Is there nap time? No. Dress up? No. A sand table? No. Legos? Surely there must be Legos. No. No Legos! What do the children do all day?

I suppose that's a rhetorical question. There is only one thing that they could be doing. I was just really hoping it wasn't true. But in fact kindergarteners today, instead of playing with blocks, or Legos, or dress up, are spending their days doing test prep. Test trep! Five-year-olds doing test prep! Sure, they get 30 minutes of recess to run around a fenced in piece of pavement, but then it's back to your desks and take out the pencil.

What kind of world are we preparing these children for? What message are we sending a 5-year-old when we tell her, no you cannot play with your toys anymore, play time is over, your life from this point on is about tests, and sitting still, and doing what you are told? What message are we sending to our children when we take away their childhood because we are afraid they won't be smart enough to compete in the workforce? What message are we sending our children when we show them that all we care about is how well they can fill out a bubble sheet?

What are we doing to our children when we show them that we do not trust them to have the childhood that we so took for granted? And even without thinking about what we are doing to the individual children we are depriving of a childhood, this destruction of kindergarten raises questions for society at large. Where are we going to get our creative thinkers from? Where are the innovators of the 21st century going to come from? Certainly not a kindergarten classroom dedicated to test prep.

Keep the questions coming,

Jonah

I'd rather know some of the questions than have all of the answers.

Tags for this entry:
creativity, play, standardized tests, kindergarten, childhood, questioning, recess

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