The Preschool Paradox

Erika Christakis' new book, The Importance of Being Little, is an impassioned plea for educators and parents to put down the worksheets and flashcards, ditch the tired craft projects and exotic vocabulary lessons, and double-down on one, simple word: Play.  In an NPR interview Christakis was asked, what is this phenomenon that you call "the preschool paradox"?  Her response:

"It is the reality that science is confirming on a daily basis: that children are hardwired to learn in many settings and are really very capable, very strong, very intelligent on the one hand.  On the other hand, the paradox is that many young children are doing poorly in our early education settings.  We've got a growing problem of preschool expulsions, a growing problem of children being medicated off-label for attention problems.  We have a lot of anecdotal evidence that parents are frustrated and feeling overburdened....

"We have very crammed [preschool] schedules with rapid transitions.  We have tons of clutter on classroom walls.  We have kids moving quickly from one activity to another.  We ask them to sit in long and often boring meetings.  Logistically and practically, lives are quite taxing for little kids because they're actually living in an adult-sized world.

"On the other hand, curriculum is often very boring.  A staple of early childhood curriculum is the daily tracking of the calendar.  And this is one of those absolute classic mismatches, because one study showed that, after a whole year of this calendar work where kids sit in a circle and talk about what day they're on, half the kids still didn't know what day they were on.  It's a mismatch because it's both really hard and frankly very stupid.

"We're underestimating kids in terms of their enormous capacity to be thoughtful and reflective, and, I would argue, that's because we're not giving them enough time to play and to be in relationships with others."

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