we should look more closely at the kind of change that children need. Programs handed down from distant political establishments come with strings attached. Additional paperwork removes teachers from the children who need their care. Children are bewildered by tests and diagnostics at an age when they should be playing. Decision-makers, it seems, ignore the wisdom of the teachers who could – and do – tell them how children learn.
An example of this is a recent resignation letter from teacher Susan Sluyter, published in The Washington Post:
I am writing today to let you know that I am resigning my position as Pre-K and Kindergarten teacher in the Cambridge Public Schools. It is with deep sadness that I have reached this decision, as I have loved my job, my school community, and the families and amazing and dedicated faculty I have been connected with throughout the district for the past eighteen years.
In this disturbing era of testing and data collection in the public schools, I have seen my career transformed into a job that no longer fits my understanding of how children learn and what a teacher ought to do in the classroom to build a healthy, safe, developmentally appropriate environment for learning for each of our children.
I have experienced, over the past few years, the same mandates that all teachers in the district have experienced. I have watched as my job requirements swung away from a focus on the children, their individual learning styles, emotional needs, and their individual families, interests, and strengths to a focus on testing, assessing, and scoring young children, thereby ramping up the academic demands and pressures on them. Each year, I have been required to spend more time attending classes and workshops to learn about new academic demands that smack of first and second grade, instead of Kindergarten and Pre-K.
I have needed to schedule and attend more and more meetings about increasingly extreme behaviors and emotional needs of children in my classroom; I recognize many of these behaviors as children shouting out to the adults in their world, “I can’t do this! Look at me! Know me! Help me! See me!” I have changed my practice over the years to allow the necessary time and focus for all the demands coming down from above. Each year there are more. Each year I have had less and less time to teach the children I love in the way I know best – and in the way child development experts recommend. I reached the place last year where I began to feel I was part of a broken system that was causing damage to those very children I was there to serve.
I was trying to survive in a community of colleagues who were struggling to do the same: to adapt and survive, to continue to hold onto what we could, and to affirm what we believe to be quality teaching for an early childhood classroom. I began to feel a deep sense of loss of integrity. I felt my spirit, my passion as a teacher, slip away. I felt anger rise inside me. I felt I needed to survive by looking elsewhere and leaving the community I love so dearly. I did not feel I was leaving my job. I felt then and feel now that my job left me.3
Many other teachers feel the same. But public policy is against them, and they feel forced out of their field. Teaching requires great love, wisdom, and patience. It takes time to discover the best in each child, and then to draw it out. What happens when teachers are robbed of this precious time? When will they get the chance to build a relationship with each child through simple interaction and play, which is when the best teaching moments actually occur?
In Australia, educator Maggie Dent speaks out boldly in defense of play:
Unstructured, child-centered play has enormous benefits for young children, and those benefits cannot be tested by benchmark testing. Our capacity to be creative thinkers and innovative problem-solvers comes from using our own mental processing to explore the world. How much do we need to value creative thinking, given the speed of change sweeping our modern world? There are no answers in textbooks about how to manage unexpected change, and this is why we are disabling our children by stealing their capacity to use play to learn, to explore, to question, and to solve problems without an adult’s assistance. They are biologically wired to learn from their experiences, provided those experiences are engaging and interesting.4
Every year children are further pressured to do “too much, too soon.” But it’s inspiring to hear stories of educators who bend or even break the rules for the sake of children. Dr. Sherone Smith-Sanchez, an educational administrator in New York City, shares her story:
My husband and I flatly refused to let our son sit for the New York State tests. We chose to opt out when he was in third grade, and again this year for fourth grade. As educators, we’re convinced that he is too young to understand the concept of testing for what a child doesn’t know at the beginning of the year, then testing at the end to verify what he has or has not managed to memorize.
Testing at such a young age does not synchronize with our aims for our son to become a critical thinker and a life-long learner. We know that children learn by association and hands-on action. We also know that if the pinnacle of his third or fourth grade educational experience is a test, then our son will go through anxiety whenever he’s expected to share his knowledge in the future. We decided not to support this injustice to his age. We have shared our simple protest with others, and continue to encourage other parents and educators to speak up.
Madeleine, a mom from suburban Connecticut, tells of her search for a child-friendly alternative:
In the end, several of us young families banded together to create our own kindergarten, so we could postpone academics, at least until first grade, spending lots of time outdoors “learning with our hands.” The best part of our little school is its location in a senior care center, where our children interact daily with the elderly, hearing their fascinating stories, becoming reading and lunch buddies, playing bat-the-balloon with the residents in the Alzheimer’s wing.
Instead of learning their ABCs by memorizing a wall chart, they learn it by playing bingo with eighty-year-olds. They may not yet be as advanced in their studies as their public school counterparts, but we parents are not worried. The kids are bubbling with curiosity, excited to soak up new ideas, and ready to pick up “reading, writing, and arithmetic” as they apply to the experience at hand.
I watch my five-year-old daughter having a conversation with a grandmother who can now only speak with her eyes and her smiles. She’s bent and wrinkled, she needs a wheelchair, and she’s as full of life as the preschooler at her elbow. Across the room, there’s the grandpa who says anything that comes into his head. Not once have I heard a sentence that I can put into any context of sense. The little boy who’s chatting with him obviously has no such hang-up. They have been talking for ten minutes.
These children have been given a great gift. No longer afraid of age and disability, they receive as much as they give through these intergenerational interactions – and, without knowing it, are helping to mend the torn social fabric. For millennia, children have sat at the feet of the village elders to learn about life. Then, they would run off and play with whatever they could find to interest them. That, too, is learning.
In Finland and several other European countries, children only start academic instruction at age seven. These students have the lowest number of classroom hours in the developed world, yet they consistently score at the top of world education rankings by the end of their public school years. In these countries, it is simply understood that until age seven, children learn best when they’re playing; by the time they finally get to school, they are eager to learn in a more formal setting. There is also greater public respect for teachers than in the United States, and correspondingly higher pay.5
There is profound truth in Plato’s thought: “What is honored in a country is cultivated there.” What is really honored in our country? Is it the forming of children’s hearts and minds? Or is it career readiness?
In The Education of Man, Froebel writes:
Protect
