Are Public Schools Pushing Our Little Kids Too Much?

I hung out with a few kids a couple weeks ago and was surprised that a four-year-old didn't know all her letters. This morning I was talking about this kid with my mom, who is a preschool teacher at the University of Louisville's preschool, as well as a reading education specialist. She said that kindergarten is when kids really need to start learning their letters and possibly start learning to read. I looked it up after we got done talking, and on WebMD, it says that ages 6-10 is when kids should start reading. 

My mom told me, however, that their school is getting a lot of pressure to teach more reading and pre-reading techniques because the state is redoing the kindergarten screening procedure. There is now concern that kids are going to start being turned away from kindergarten classes if they don't know the alphabet or know how to read before they are screened for kindergarten. Now, if a kid's brain isn't ready to learn the alphabet, the kid isn't going to learn it. What is it going to do to kids if they are put in remedial groups starting in kindergarten? This is going to completely kill their self-esteem. All kids learn at their own rate. If the official age to learn to read is 6-10, then that means that kids should be able to read by the end of third grade. Third grade. Not kindergarten, not first grade, not before kindergarten!

My sister didn't start reading until first grade. My parents knew that she would be put in Title 1 and dubbed a "slow kid." So, both my sister and I were home schooled for a couple years. My parents held me out because they didn't think it would be good for me to be in public school and my sister to be home schooled; my sister might develop an inferiority complex if that were the case. Mom taught us at home, and it was great for both of us. My sister learned how to read close to the end of her first grade year, and the next year we were both put in public school. She was always within the top 5% of her class for the next 10 years of her public education!

My sister (left) and me playing when we were kids.

If my sister had been put in public school and forced to learn to read before she was ready,  she never would have learned it well at all. She would have been put in Title 1 and always been around kids who weren't even close to her intelligence level. She never would have been integrated in reading class and once she "learned" that she was "slow," there is no way of telling if that mentality and that learned behavior of not understanding concepts would have spilled over into other subjects.

Let your kids play. If they start picking letters out when they're 18 months old, great. If they don't, it's okay. Kids are supposed to play when they're young. The brain at the preschool age is working on learning social behaviors and how to interact with other people. If you are inundating little kids with stuff their brain isn't capable of learning, they won't learn the way they're hardwired to learn. Let them go play. Playing is the whole point of being a little kid, and it really seems like we are trying so hard to make them "smart" that we're not letting them be kids. 

"Be the change you wish to see in the world." --Gandhi