The First Grader and the Rat Race

A new kind of hysteria has gripped both parents and school systems alike. Parents are finding that the modern world moves with a speed that is almost impossible to keep up with. They look at the changing hectic world and wonder how any child could hope to stay ahead. Concerned parents have started to believe that steps not taken by their child are steps further behind the rest. This fear and insecurity in the lives of parents is what is driving them to make dramatic demands on their young children. Parents now believe that learning early equals a competitive advantage. These new challenges and pressures have now filtered down to an age level that they were never meant to go. The first grades have now become a strict proving ground for children. If a child reads a little earlier the hope becomes that the child might escape the sensation of feeling perpetually behind. Parents driven by this mistaken view have pushed their children out of childhood and into the “rat race” with the rest of us. Now we are finding that those same children are struggling to stay afloat and learn to swim under the pressure.

The No Child Left Behind Act is leading the way in causes of pressure that is damaging the educational process of young children. A consensus of research has shown that spending time with children, reading to them, and introducing them to letters and numbers at an early age can be good for a child's further success. The problem is that our culture’s general reaction to just about everything is that if some is good then more is better. “More” is now the new standard by which we answer every achievement of our young children. Many school systems have come to believe that it is their role to produce as educated a first grader as possible. This view is bolstered by the demands and requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. This act requires that all children be able to read by the third grade. The goal is ambitious, but the federal mandate doesn't allow for the complicated diversity of school children. It also relies solely on intense standardized tests to measure educational success.

This fallacy drives both school systems and parents to push their young charges to the breaking point. The goal of all levels of education should be to produce well-rounded adult human beings. The best way to achieve those goals is to find what is developmentally appropriate for the specific child. More children are reaching a point of “burn out” by the time they leave the third grade. A five-year-old who can perform calculus equations becomes a pointless spectacle if it does not produce an adult who can perform calculus equations. Educating 5 year olds with stress filled curriculums becomes pointless if it doesn’t produce better-educated, well-rounded adults. A five-year-old that is frustrated and exhausted from the education process will loose precious opportunities to learn later in life.

The first years of education are analogist with the wading pool where we learn to swim. We don’t ask our children to swim or dive while putting their feet for the first time in the shallow waters. The purpose of the wading pool is to get comfortable with being in the water. It is a place for children to explore and play in comfort and safety. They can’t master the challenge of swimming until they know what the water feels like. If we teach our children so early that school is a place of stress, fear and insecurity: How long will it be until they start trying to avoid school and learning all together? We might succeed at teaching children to count or recite the ABC’s a few months early, but at what cost? It is possible that the pressures we are putting on these young people now are stealing the joy from the educational process. No Child Left Behind and the tests that accompany it have very specific demands, but as Albert Einstein once noted: “In science, more important than finding the right answers is to ask the right questions.”