Kindergarten Lost

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
--Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock"

I wasn't especially impressed with kindergarten while I was in it myself. To tell the truth, I complained to my parents that it was boring. But my memory of kindergarten has gained a certain luster over time, and now I feel nostalgic for those simple days.

When I was in kindergarten, there was no all-day option. Parents could choose between a morning and afternoon session. Or none at all -- kindergarten was purely optional. My next-younger brother didn't attend kindergarten; my mom essentially homeschooled him, though the term "homeschool" didn't exist yet.

Kindergarten functioned as School 101 in those days. It was a child's orientation to school behavior. We learned to stand in line, raise our hands before speaking, take turns, wash before eating -- all the good things Robert Fulghum mentions in his essay "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." Preschool and daycare were almost unheard of, so for most kids kindergarten was their first exposure to formal education, and first extended absence from their parents.

The only "academic" tasks were learning to write our names and memorizing our phone numbers. Mostly, we played. There was a play kitchen, there were colorful wooden blocks, and there were rubber animals and figures of people we might see around the neighborhood -- a postman and a policeman and a mom in an apron. We did fingerpainting and papier-mâché and made things out of clay. We sat in a circle with our legs crossed and listened quietly while the teacher read a story. We took a nap and ate a snack.

There weren't any grades, or tests, or parent-teacher conferences. We got a couple of progress reports during the year that noted how we were adjusting to school. Mine said I was too quiet, but I don't think my parents or I lay awake at night worrying about my kindergarten performance.

When we went to first grade, most of us were ready to spend a whole day in school. We sat at our desks and learned to read and write and do addition and subtraction. (We did arithmetic then, not mathematics.) That was what we did in first grade. It was pretty simple.

Why did this change? There has been concern that American high-schoolers are lagging behind students in other countries, particularly in math and science. Employers have complained that prospective employees lack both basic skills and technical knowledge. (I do not even want to get into No Child Left Behind right now. But you know I'm thinking about it.) Somehow the burden for this deficiency has been pushed back 12 years, so that now kindergarten is functioning as College Prep 101 instead of School 101. In fact, even kindergarten is getting pushed back, with many school districts offering both pre-K and kindergarten or two-year kindergarten 1 and 2 classes. And preschool is practically de rigueur.

But I do not see any evidence that children today are more mature academically or behaviorally than they were in the past. If 5-year-olds used to need a nap and a snack to get through a 4-hour class, why are they now expected to get through a 9-hour day with just a lunch break and recess? And these are kids who are used to the fast-changing, visually stimulating world of children's television. No wonder they're fidgety. I would be too.

When I was in kindergarten, I could read. My mom taught me. This doesn't sound noteworthy now, but back then it was huge. A big fuss was made. I was referred for testing. There were conferences. I suppose there may have been more to it than being able to read, but that's the only way I remember being different from other kids. At the beginning of the school year, I was taken out of first grade and placed directly into second grade.

This was absolutely the wrong placement for me for many reasons, none of them academic. But my point is that now kids are expected to read in kindergarten. An ability that used to be considered exceptional is now standard. Is there any evidence that kids are smarter or more intellectually mature today? Sure, they've watched Baby Einstein and Sesame Street, but there's some evidence to suggest that educational videos do more harm than good.

It's telling that more and more parents, especially parents of sons, are holding their children back a year before enrolling them in kindergarten because of concerns that they are too immature to deal with the greater academic demands. This is often called redshirting, after the collegiate practice of postponing a young athlete's participation on the team for a year to give him time to develop. As a result, a typical kindergarten class today may include a number of physically mature 6-year-olds. So instead of teaching reading to a group of 6-year-olds in first grade, we are teaching reading to ... a group of 6-year-olds in kindergarten. Does this sort of suggest that 6 is the age at which most children are ready to learn to read? So why push it?

It breaks my heart when I see that my little girl reads about as well as kids her age used to read when I was young, and yet she is considered to be behind enough to receive special services (and not just her, but a half-dozen other kids in her class as well). Yes, most of the kids in class are meeting the standards. Some of them probably would have done so anyway, as Bess and my brother and I did, because they really are interested in reading and enjoy academic challenges. Others just do the work because they are supposed to, though they don't especially enjoy it. Is this an effective way to create "lifelong learners," something many schools list among their goals? I guess we'll find out in a few years.

But it's not what's being taught in kindergarten that bothers me as much as what isn't being taught. That year we spent in kindergarten learning to follow rules and get along with others gave us a foundation that we could build on throughout our lives. Kids still need that kind of instruction -- maybe now more than ever. We may not have attended preschool, but we came to kindergarten having already learned to stay in our chair in a restaurant and sit quietly in a church pew and address adults in a respectful tone of voice. Kindergarten helped refine those skills.

For whatever reason, many kids today seem to have no concept of how to behave in school. I have been utterly shocked by the behavior I have seen in the classroom, and it has become markedly worse since Abbey was a child. I'm not talking about ADHD types of behaviors, though they have certainly affected the classroom environment. I'm referring to learned social skills. The idea of respect for authority is completely alien to many children. They will look at a teacher or parent who has just given them an instruction and either ignore them or openly defy them. "Please," "Thank you," and "Excuse me" are foreign words. They have no sense of when it's okay to talk out loud. They whine and interrupt and talk back while the teacher is giving a lesson. They have little sense of personal space, pushing and shoving to get what they want. Not all of them -- but enough of them to greatly disturb what should be a calm, peaceful learning environment. And because teachers must begin the kindergarten year administering assessments and implementing lesson plans, they have no time to handle these behavior problems except on the fly.

How odd this must seem to kindergarten teachers who have taught for several decades! Where once their biggest crisis was a bit of spilled milk, now they must try to impart sophisticated language arts and math concepts while keep children from assaulting one another (or the teacher). Ella's kindergarten teacher was a 30-year veteran; maybe she didn't dislike Ella so much as she was burned out and had no patience left anymore. Maybe it was teaching she disliked.

Kindergarten translates from German as "children's garden" -- a pleasant image that's a far cry from today's high-pressure learning labs. I fear we are doing our children a terrible disservice. They need to get back the year they have lost.

And that's not going to happen as long as standardized testing is the only yardstick we use to measure learning.