Early childhood education and inspirational immigrants<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A story in the high school district community education brochure that came today, similar to countless other stories you've surely read as well: \u00a0a\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/07\/early-childhood-education-and-inspirational-immigrants.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Early childhood education and inspirational immigrants\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A story in the high school district community education brochure that came today, similar to countless other stories you've surely read as well: \u00a0a\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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{"id":2443,"date":"2015-07-23T21:38:31","date_gmt":"2015-07-24T03:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=2443"},"modified":"2015-07-24T07:23:30","modified_gmt":"2015-07-24T13:23:30","slug":"early-childhood-education-and-inspirational-immigrants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/07\/early-childhood-education-and-inspirational-immigrants.html","title":{"rendered":"Early childhood education and inspirational immigrants"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

And this is something that I wonder about, and present to you for discussion:<\/p>\n

We hear repeatedly about how crucial early childhood education is, even to the point of the American Academy of Pediatricians telling us<\/a> that we should be reading to our infants daily, lest they grow up deficient.<\/p>\n

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: \u00a0perhaps they haven\u2019t really caught up. \u00a0Perhaps 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. \u00a0Or \u2014 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? \u00a0And, if that\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

What do you think?<\/p>\n

(Morning addition:)<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 that all this is not nearly as common outside the U.S. \u00a0Yet, of course, our kids aren\u2019t doing remarkably better than in other developed nations. \u00a0At best, our focus on these items perhaps remedies deficiencies elsewhere.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"