Much Too Early, by Dr. David Elkind
David Elkind is a professor of child development at Tufts University and the author of Reinventing Childhood and The Hurried Child. This article solidifies much of what we practice in our early education program. This article is reprinted with his permission.
The Interval Concept of Numbers
The interval concept of numbers is an intellectual construction. It builds on children’s practice in classifying things (attending to their sameness) and in seriating them (attending to their difference). At a certain point, and with the aid of concrete operations, children are able to bring these two concepts, of sameness and difference, together into the higher-order concept of a unit, which brings together the ideas of sameness and difference. It is only when children understand that something can be the same and different that they have a true understanding of quantity. Learning the names of numbers and rote counting are less important in this attainment than is practice in classifying and seriating many different materials.
A similar hierarchy of understanding is involved in learning to read. In fact, in some respects reading is a more complex process than arithmetic, in that it involves auditory and visual discrimination as well as cognitive construction. Nonetheless, the principle is the same.
The earliest level of reading is the recognition of words by sight. At ages two or three, a child may learn “stop” and “go” in part by the perceptual configuration and in part by the colors associated with these words. Sight words are like nominal numbers; they reflect a very early level of reading achievement. A second level of reading is phonetic; this concept corresponds roughly to ordinal numbers. Children at four or five can learn the sounds for single letters and are able to read words like “hat,” “cat,” “sat,” and so on.
“Learning about the world of things, and their various properties, is a time-consuming and intense process that cannot be hurried.”
The same child who can read phonetically, however, may not be able to read phonemically. To read phonemically, a child must be able to recognize that a letter can be pronounced differently depending on the context. A child who can read “hat,” “cat,” and “sat” may have trouble with “ate,” “gate,” and “late.” Likewise, a child who knows “pin” may have trouble with “spin” because it involves a blend of consonants that may throw kids off. In Piaget’s terminology, “concrete” operations are required for this highest level of reading.
Those calling for academic instruction of the young don’t seem to appreciate that math and reading are complex skills acquired in stages related to age. Children will acquire these skills more easily and more soundly if their lessons accord with the developmental sequence that parallels their cognitive development.
A Developing Knowledge Base
From the outset, let’s acknowledge that hard data on the comparative benefits of one or another type of early-childhood educational program are hard to come by. The difficulty stems from the fact that education is a chaotic process. Each time children and their teacher come together they are different, thanks to the intervening experiences each has had. In other words, every classroom meeting is a non-replicable experiment. Our research tools, however, are borrowed from the physical sciences, where regularity, rather than chaos, reigns. In physics and chemistry it is possible to control most, if not all, of the variables in play. This is almost impossible in education.
For example, classrooms that follow different educational philosophies will vary in many other ways as well. The teachers may vary in skill and experience as well as in personality. In addition, it is almost impossible to match two groups of children. A reliable match would require comparable families, a condition that is difficult, if not impossible, to satisfy. Moreover, the instruments used for assessment, whether observations or tests, are less reliable and less valid at the early level than they are at later ages. This does not mean that meaningful research cannot or has not been done. It just means that we may have to be more innovative in designing studies of educational methods than we have been in the past. The physical-science paradigm, which presupposes regularity and replicability, is simply not appropriate to the study of classrooms.
Longitudinal studies can overcome some of these difficulties, thereby providing meaningful evidence comparing one method with another. Long-term observation and measurement reduce the chance that random factors, such as a teacher’s bad week, are corrupting the data. In an analysis of ten independently conducted, and variously sponsored, longitudinal studies of the effects of early-childhood education for poor and at-risk children, High Scope Educational Research Foundation scholar Lawrence J. Schweinhart and his colleagues found that children who attended preschool performed significantly better intellectually, at least during the program and shortly thereafter. In some but not all of the studies, significantly fewer of the children who attended preschool were classified as disabled and placed in special-education classes. Likewise, in some but not all of the studies, children who attended preschool had higher rates of high-school completion.
These investigations of early-intervention programs provide clear evidence that early-childhood education, in most cases of the developmentally appropriate kind, had lasting effects on the lives of participating children. It is not clear, however, whether the results would be the same if advantaged children were the subjects. Consider an analogy. If you take children who are significantly below the norm and feed them a full-calorie, nutritious diet, they will make remarkable progress until they reach the norm. But if you put well-nourished children on a similar regimen, there will be few if any effects. If you start at a low level, you have more room for improvement than if you start at the norm.
Studies of children in different types of preschools are merely suggestive. One study by Leslie Recorla, Marion C. Hyson, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek compared children who had attended an academic preschool with those who had attended a developmentally appropriate program. Although there were no academic differences between the two groups, the children attending the academic program were more anxious and had lower self-esteem. These results diminished after the children began to attend public school.
An older study was carried out by Carleton Washburn, the famed Evanston, Illinois, educator. He introduced children to formal instruction in reading at different grade levels from kindergarten to 2nd grade. The children who were introduced to reading at these three levels were then retested in junior high school. The assessors didn’t know the grade at which each child had learned to read. Washburn found little difference in reading achievement among the groups. The children who had been introduced to formal instruction in reading later than the others, however, were more motivated and spontaneous readers than those who had begun early. Similar findings were reported in the Plowden Report in England, which compared children from the informal schools of rural areas with children who attended the more formal schools of urban centers.
Studies of early readers, those who are able to read phonemically on entering kindergarten, have found similar results. In both the United States and Canada, only about 3 to 5 percent of children read early. In such studies, most children had IQs of 120 or higher and were at Piaget’s stage of concrete operations. In addition, almost all of them had a parent or relative who took special interest in them. These adults did not engage in formal instruction; they read to their children, took them to the library, and talked about books with them. In order to learn to read early in life, children need the requisite mental abilities, but they also benefit from the motivation that develops from rich exposure to language and books and the special attention of a warm and caring adult.
The movement toward academic training of the young is about parents anxious to give their children an edge in an increasingly competitive economy.
Evidence attesting to the importance of developmentally appropriate education in the early years comes from cross-cultural studies. Jerome Bruner reports that in French-speaking parts of Switzerland, where reading instruction is begun at the preschool level, a large percentage of children have reading problems. In German-speaking parts of Switzerland, where reading is not taught until age six or seven, there are few reading problems. In Denmark, where reading is taught late, there is almost no illiteracy. Likewise in Russia, where the literacy rate is quite high, reading is not taught until the age of six or seven.
Current Practice
Why, when we know what is good for young children, do we persist in mis-educating them, in putting them at risk for no purpose? The short answer is that the movement toward academic training of the young is not about education. It is about parents anxious to give their children an edge in what they regard as an increasingly competitive and global economy. It is about the simplistic notion that giving disadvantaged young children academic training will provide them with the skills and motivation to continue their education and break the cycle of poverty. It is about politicians who push accountability, standards, and testing in order to win votes as much as or more than to improve the schools.
The deployment of unsupported, potentially harmful pedagogies is particularly pernicious at the early-childhood level. It is during the early years, ages four to seven, when children’s basic attitudes toward themselves as students and toward learning and school are established. Children who come through this period feeling good about themselves, who enjoy learning and who like school, will have a lasting appetite for the acquisition of skills and knowledge. Children whose academic self-esteem is all but destroyed during these formative years, who develop an antipathy toward learning, and a dislike of school, will never fully realize their latent abilities and talents.
If we want all of our children to be the best that they can be, we must recognize that education is about them, not us. If we do what is best for children, we will give them and their parents the developmentally appropriate, high-quality, affordable, and accessible early-childhood education they both need and deserve.
