“There is a widely held belief … that if we start teaching children to read, write, and spell in preschool and kindergarten that they will be ahead of the game … that pushing our kids to start early will make them better and give them the edge. But it doesn’t work that way, in fact it can be detrimental.”*

And the sooner we stop this madness to measure every child … in this way and that … the better.

We have become unglued over statistics. The entire process of learning has been churned into some bee-line to over-night academic maturity.

And it’s crossed over into the absurd …and the unhealthy.

Schools are populated by brand new people who are just as easily measured by months as they can be measured by years. All sprouting at different speeds … and acquiring all sorts of skills and talents in terribly uneven spurts because … because that’s how Mother Nature does things.

More and more, we’re treating these little learners like programmable spud-people … GMOs … “genetically modified organisms” in lab-speak. And too many schools have become educational petri dishes … and the little ones …  the abused lab rats.

And where does this take us?

Will we ever bother to discover the magic of these children? Who can sing? Or strum a guitar? Who can dance? Tell stories?

Or run like the wind? And the kid who’s mad about science? Or the child who’s the unafraid performer?

Children don’t ripen on anyone’s schedule.

They sprout at different speeds … the way Mother Nature intended. Some rush straight to ripe in no time at all. Others take their time.

But they all catch up … and stand side by side … and few remember the early sprouters or the tardy bloomers.

So why this great worry?

Why all the upset?

For what?

Why all this dread for itty-bitty people who’ve just mastered looping their own belts … and only recently cured themselves of putting their underpants on backwards?

Ease up.

They’ll ripen well enough …

in spite of the neurotic insistence of learned idiots.

Denis Ian

*Reading Too Soon … CLICK HERE for full article

There are more reasons to eliminate Head Start — such as 50 years of data that indicate the program does not positively effect long-term academic learning, and preschool may even have negative effects on learning.