URBANA, Ill. –A University of Illinois professor is stirring havoc among early childhood education advocates with a new study that debunks the popular belief that earlier formal education is better.
Furthermore, the report maintains that a narrow academic curriculum does not recognize the innate inquisitiveness of young children and ultimately fails to address the way they learn.
The report, “Lively Minds: Distinctions between academic versus intellectual goals for young children,” was written by Lilian G. Katz and focuses on the need for intellectual education – which she found was best for preschoolers – versus academic education – what schools typically offer.
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Katz found that free play and basic activities encourage intellectual development while straight academics encourages better test scores, but not necessarily brighter and more curious adults.
While “formal instruction produces good test results in the short term,” she says, preschool curriculum and teaching methods that emphasize children’s interactive roles and initiative may be “not so impressive in the short run” but “yield better school achievement in the long term.”
Katz’ findings conflict with legislative efforts to require school attendance at younger and younger ages. Teachers unions have been successful over the past several years to lower compulsory attendance laws, requiring schools to hire more teachers and aides.
“Young children enter the classroom with lively minds–with innate intellectual dispositions toward making sense of their own experience, toward reasoning, predicting, analyzing, questioning and learning,” says Dr. Katz.
“But in our attempt to quantify and verify children’s learning, we impose premature formal instruction on kids at the expense of cultivating their true intellectual capabilities – and ultimately their optimal learning.”
The new findings conflict somewhat with early childhood education advocates that insist children’s brains are marred if they are not in structured schooling at ages as young as six weeks.
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The Illinois early childhood group The Ounce encourages children into schooling at early ages, especially if they are in poor family settings.
Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner’s wife Diana, who heads The Ounce, said during a 2013 lecture at the Family Action Network that preschoolers in poverty-stricken homes suffer brain damage if they are not in early childhood programs.
“Those children that are raised in environments that are not supportive, that are not responsive to their needs homes that are sometimes chaotic actually have biological changes in their brain…” Rauner said.
“But, in fact, what happens is children that live in highly stressful environments from the very, very first years of life, when their brains are being built from the bottom up, actually develop smaller pre-frontal cortexes. There’s actually less gray matter in those parts of their brain. And the problem is there are critical periods for brain development, and those children never catch up,” Rauner said.
She also referred to a study that showed middle school students that were poor during the first years of their life had suffered brain damage similar to that caused by a stroke.
In Katz’ new report, she says that “earlier is better” is not supported in neurological research, which “does not imply that formal academic instruction is the way to optimize early brain development.”
More play and less academics is the key. Katz’ research suggests that “preschool programs are best when they focus on social, emotional and intellectual goals rather than narrow academic goals” and provide “early experiences that provoke self-regulation, initiative and …sustained synchronous interaction in which the child is interactive with others in some continuous process, rather than a mere passive recipient of isolated bits of information for stimulation.”
More about Dr. Katz and the study in the Washington Post. The YouTube featuring Mrs. Rauner’s 15 minute speech in 2013 is HERE. Her quotes are from 4:30 on the video.
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