Lively Minds

Here are some excerpts from an excellent article, "Lively Minds: Distinctions between Academic versus Intellectual Goals for Young Children," that Lilian Katz wrote for Defending the Early Years:

"Academic goals are those concerned with the mastery of small discrete elements of embodied information, usually related to pre-literacy skills in the early years, and practiced in drills, worksheets, and other kinds of exercises designed to prepare children for the next levels of literacy and numeracy learning. The items learned and practiced have correct answers, rely heavily on memorization, the application of formulae versus understanding, and consists largely of giving the teacher the correct answers that the children know she awaits.... These bits of information are essential components of reading, writing, and other academic competencies useful in modern developed economies, and certainly in later school years. In other words, I suggest that the issue here is not whether academic skills matter; rather it is about both when they matter and what proportion of the curriculum they warrant, especially during the early years.

"Intellectual goals and their related activities, on the other hand, are those that address the life of the mind in its fullest sense... including a range of aesthetic and moral sensibilities. The formal definition of the concept of intellectual emphasizes reasoning, hypothesizing, posing questions, predicting answers to questions, predicting the findings produced by investigation, the development and analysis of ideas and the quest for understanding and so forth.

"An appropriate curriculum for young children is one that includes the focus on supporting children's inborn intellectual dispositions, their natural inclinations.  These would include, for example, the disposition to make the best sense they can of their own experiences and environments. An appropriate curriculum in the early years then is one that includes the encouragement and motivation of the children to seek mastery of basic academic skills, e.g. beginning writing skills, in the service of their intellectual pursuits."

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