A story in the high school district community education brochure that came today, similar to countless other stories you’ve surely read as well: a college-bound student who, a mere X years ago, had just arrived here from [fill-in-the-blank 3rd world country], but inspired everyone by his/her ability to overcome adversity.
And this is something that I wonder about, and present to you for discussion:
We hear repeatedly about how crucial early childhood education is, even to the point of the American Academy of Pediatricians telling us that we should be reading to our infants daily, lest they grow up deficient.
At the same time, these stories, of immigrant kids who come from some African village, or Central America or wherever, unable to read or write, but then catch up with their peers: perhaps they haven’t really caught up. Perhaps they graduate high school based on 4 years of seat time, and enter college unprepared for college work, but get a pass due to their life story. Or — is it simply the case that the older you get, the faster you can learn new material, so that a catch-up to age-appropriate material in a moderate number of years is a reasonable expectation? And, if that’s the case, is there really a benefit to such things as pushing reading instruction from first grade to kindergarten, or moving algebra and other math topics to ever-earlier ages?
What do you think?
(Morning addition:)
It also seems to me that the determination to read to kids, starting at a young age, and the movement of formal education ever-younger, and our concern, even at home, for ensuring kids know their colors and numbers and alphabet well before school begins — that all this is not nearly as common outside the U.S. Yet, of course, our kids aren’t doing remarkably better than in other developed nations. At best, our focus on these items perhaps remedies deficiencies elsewhere.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In