Last week our almost 5-year old daughter began Kindergarten at the public elementary school two blocks from our house. Such transitions are generally anxious times for both the child and therefore for the parents too.
Wednesday evening I attended the Back to School night and along with a dozen or more parents, overwhelmingly moms, I listened as the teacher explained her hopes for the children’s year within the school district’s mandated curriculum.
“Basically, Kindergarten is the new 1st Grade” explained the teacher, a 30-year veteran of the Oakland School District. She went on to explain how the school is required to have every 5-year old be able to read by the end of the year. “We teach reading 90 minutes each day. We have 2 science classes a week and math for a minimum of one hour a day” she explained. The school day for the four and five-year olds is 7 hours long. There are 3 recesses, including lunch and no music or art to speak of.
As I left, I thought: OMG, our daughter’s childhood is over. The rat race begins here. Get up, go to school, suffer, come home tired, go to bed, get up, go to school. While children don’t have to work in factories in this country, nor are parents forced to sell their children, the earlier and earlier start of the drudgery of work is no sign of social progress.
Additionally, on the day the country of Georgia was rewarded with $1 billion from the US government for doing the oil business’ dirty work in the Caucuses, we were asked to donate toilet paper, hand sanitizer, paper, children’s snacks and other necessities on a long list the teacher gave out.
When picking up Havana the next day I chatted with the teacher. She had implied in her talk the night before that the curriculum was too much for the kids and not necessarily the best for their general development, adding, “the children start raising their hands right after lunch to ask if it’s time to go home yet. They are tired.” She explained that her hands were tied with the high-performance pressure of the curriculum. I responded that the politicians play football with our kids to try to prove, through testing, that they’re strong on Education. She smiled and nodded.
The testing-driven style of education is a retreat to pre-civil rights era education. In Charles Dicken’s critique of Victorian Schools, Hard Times, the main character is a Member of Parliament and the owner of a local school. His railroad-method of education has no room for exploration, imagination or dissent. The children are seen as ‘little vessels’ to be filled to the brim with facts. The two strains of education were taught as one: for the children expected to become managers, they learned how the teacher taught; for the children of the workers, their education was essentially about obedience and tipping your cap to the bosses’ “fact.”
Meanwhile there is the additional factor at our local school. It is considered an under-performing school. All schools with lower income children are this way. So, the school is under even more pressure than many schools to raise test results,
Our Kindergarten teacher does a great job. The mandated pressures on her to teach strictly by the book and timetable makes her job more difficult.
She alsohe mentioned that our daughter is running around, chasing the boys in the playground and generally happy.Havana confided to me that she already has two boyfriends.
On picking her up one afternoon, I noticed from a distance that while in line a boy pushed by her, she turned and jabbed the kid to get his attention. These apparently small skills, of learning how and when to stand up for yourself and how to enjoy the people around you are among the most important skills we learn as kids.
With both McCain and Obama committed to variations of No Child Left Behind, our kids will be forced to continue the monotony of fact-driven education. Working class kids are more likely to survive because they are more likely to see through the system’s veneer.
