Education Week: Educating Too Early

Look at promotional material for preschool and daycare in your area. Chances are, there’s an emphasis on math, pre-reading, and other academics. And why not? We’ve been told for years that our little ones should play with educational toys and attend enrichment programs designed to boost learning. Well-intentioned parents follow this advice. We do this because we believe that learning flows from instruction. Logically then, early instruction will help maximize a child’s potential.

But learning in young children (and perhaps at all ages) has much more to do with curiosity and exploration. Recent studies with four-year-olds showed, “Direct instruction really can limit young children’s learning.” It also limits a child’s creativity, problem solving, and openness to ideas beyond the situation at hand. This is true when the instruction comes from parents as well as teachers.

As Wendy S. Grolnick explains in The Psychology of Parental Control, research shows that rewards, praise, and evaluative comments actually undermine motivation and stifle learning in preschoolers as well as school-aged children. Again, true when it comes from parents as well as teachers.

Highly instructional preschool programs have been studied for years. Although they’re more popular than ever, the outcomes don’t hold up under scrutiny. Researchers followed children who attended different preschool environments.  Some children were enrolled in an academic setting, others in a child-initiated play setting, and a third group in a preschool that balanced both approaches. By the middle grades, children from the play-oriented preschool were receiving the highest grades. They also showed the most social and emotional maturity.  Those who had attended the academic preschool lagged behind in a significant way–poorer social skills. The differences became more apparent as these children got older. By age fifteen, students from the academic preschool program showed twice as much delinquent activity as the other two groups. And in adulthood, former students of the play preschool and balanced preschool showed higher levels of success across a whole spectrum of variables. The academic group did not attain the same level of education as the play group and required more years of treatment for emotional impairment. They also faced more felony arrests than the other two groups.

Susan K. Stewart notes in Preschool: At What Cost? it was common knowledge in our grandparents’ generation that children should be raised with an emphasis on compassion, self-control, and social skills along with plenty of opportunities for play. It may not be as easy as that, but it doesn’t have to be as complicated as lessons for toddlers.

Additional resources

“Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?” by Lyn Nell Hancock  Smithsonian Magazine September 2011

Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by  Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughan

Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Our Children Really Learn–and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less by Roberta Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and Diane Eyer

The Power of Play: Learning What Comes Naturally by David Elkind